We are in the midst of a sea change in the way instruction is delivered. As an online student myself I am participating in a model of education that I feel is the tip of the iceberg in how the delivery of education is changing. I’m typing this on Google Docs, this allows me access to word processing, presentation and spreadsheet applications that have moved from my hard drive to the Cloud, in the process it has enabled me to share these presentations with anyone I choose. I can allow them to view them or I can allow them to actually edit and modify them, in short production apps have joined social networking. The potential for collaboration is immense. But as I said before this is the tip of the iceberg, change is coming and educational institutions are going to have to change to take of advantage of this change.
2¢ Worth has a link to an article in Deseret News about David Wiley a professor at Brigham Young University who is convinced that traditional Universities and Colleges will be irrelevant because of rapid technological advances.
“Higher education doesn’t reflect the life that students are living, he says. In that life, information is available on demand, files are shared, and the world is mobile and connected. Today’s colleges, on the other hand, are typically “tethered, isolated, generic, and closed,” he says.
To those who would argue that today’s students are spoiled — the “by gum, I wrote my dissertation on a manual typewriter” argument — Wiley points to a YouTube video called “What if.” The video quotes educators from years gone by who were alarmed that chalk, pencils, ballpoint pens and calculators would make students lazy and stupid.
Read the article here.
