Openess
via Maria H. Andersen at educause.edu CC
hacking education
my daily finds on the evolution of education reform
The Digital Printing Press
"It's no less legal than a photocopier or VCR."
Anything whose tag line starts with "It's no less legal than..." you know has the DNA to start a revolution.
And with a name like "BookLiberator" they might as well have called it "The really super duper, no its not illegal, guns don't kill people people kill people, and no you cannot call us Blackbeard or Calico Jack, book ripper."
Ah... we can only hope the printing industry deals with it better than the music industry has.
via @opencontent and Forbes
Chegg gets Some Competition
Barnes and Noble has launched its new and used textbook marketplace, featuring 1.4 Million titles and advertisings savings of up to 90%.
via TechCrunch
Slow Death of Tenure
Tenure is financially unsustainable and intellectually indefensible. The fundamental problem is liquidity – both financial and intellectual.
If you take the current average salary of an associate professor and assume this tenured faculty member remains an associate professor for five years and then becomes a full professor for 30 years, the total cost of salary and benefits alone is $12,198,578 at a private institution and $9,992,888 at a public institution. To fund these expenses would require a current endowment of $3,959,743 and $3,524,426 respectively and $28,721,197 and $23,583,423 at the end of the person’s career. Tenure decisions render illiquid a significant percentage of endowments at the precise moment more flexibility is required.
Capital is not only financial but is also intellectual and here too liquidity is an issue. In today’s fast changing world, it is impossible to know whether a person’s research is going to be relevant in five years let alone 35 years.
via NYTimes
There are several other great arguments, both for and against, in the NYTime's "Room for Debate" piece. Worth a read.
Young Teachers NOT Hip to Tech
Contrary to popular opinion, newer teachers aren’t any more likely to use technology in their lessons than veteran teachers, and a lack of access to technology does not appear to be the main reason why teachers do not use it: These are among the common perceptions about education technology that new research from Walden University’s Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership appears to dispel.
via eSchool News
Mr Roboto
The New York Times reports that The University of California is testing the use of robots in the classroom for simple, and increasingly not so simple, teaching tasks.
My guess is that this isn't where technology in the classroom is taking us in the next 30 years, but I won't fight it.
Big Media + For Profits + Non Profits
I just discovered NBC's educational video portal. Some great content pooled together by an impressive list of partners including MIT, University of Phoenix, Hulu, and the NYTimes (that is an interesting list in its own right).
The University of Tomorrow
via The Chronicle of Higher Education
"When asked to predict what the university of tomorrow will look like, Mr. Duderstadt [president emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor] suggested two ideas: the global institution and the "meta" institution.
"On the first point, he said, higher education has always been international, but in the future, there will be a growing number of universities or consortia of universities that compete on a worldwide level for students and faculty. They will also define their missions as trying to solve large issues, like climate change or global societal inequities.
"The so-called meta university will be built on rapidly advancing information technology and such applications as OpenCourseWare, digital libraries, and social-networking programs that facilitate peer learning."
motivation
shared by @wfarren
Learning Management + Social Networking
Schoology (a Moodle competitor):
<embed src="http://www.schoology.com/sgy-player.swf" flashvars="file=schoology_promo.mov" width="400" height="276" />
