I was turned on to this post by venture capitalist Fred Wilson on hacking education. It's interesting to me to hear the views of smart people who are largely outside the education bubble. Wilson's role as a venture capitalist has me thinking of my recent post on David Puttnam's talk. Puttnam emphasized the importance of working with technology companies in working out how to address the challenges of networked media for education. I agree. This is not the kind of challenge that can be addressed by individual teachers in individual classrooms. That's not to say that individuals can't come up with great ideas and put them to work. Instead, it is a recognition that the scale of this problem requires the application of resources that go beyond individual teachers. Just like we don't ask faculty to write all the texts they use in their classes, we can't expect them to develop their own technological solutions.
I can agree with a lot of what Wilson says, but I do think he is seeing only part of the issue. He makes three main points as I can see. First is that we ought to be using social media "to start participating and engaging in educating each other." I fully support that idea. But when you are talking about your average college student, I think we need to recognize that we can't expect those students to put together their own curriculum. If you don't know what you need to know then it is hard to figure out how to educate yourself. Clearly there is a fair amount of disagreement over what should constitute a higher education. These disagreements occur between higher education and the general culture, across campuses, within disciplines, and so on. Indeed the disagreements are part of what students probably need to learn about. Arguably our task as educators at the undergraduate level is to help students get in a position where they have enough cultural-disciplinary-professional context and critical-analytic skills to be able to participate in the kind of open source education Wilson is describing. It will be necessary for them as they face the demands of ongoing education throughout their careers.
Wilson does recognize this to some degree. He notes that "You can commoditize curriculum but you cannot do that to teachers." Wilson reflects on some of the great teachers he's had. Those are common stories. However his idea is to get these star teachers out to a larger number of students through video lectures. Some students, like Wilson, do respond well to lectures, but I don't think that's the pedagogic direction we need to follow. In a sense, doing this would contradict his own position by making lectures into a kind of commodity. A video lecture is functionally much like a textbook, so I think you could certainly make use of such material. Obviously many of us already do.
