Contributors
jonathan woahn
david blake
Still waiting for the Wikipedia University
“I’m just waiting for a Wikipedia University, with high-quality, online, open-source courses provided by a variety of different people. Or the moment when someone like Bill Gates creates Superstar University, finding the best professors for the 200 courses that a good liberal arts college offers, and paying them $25,000 each to put their classes online.”
- Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
via NYTimes.com
Mozilla badges reminiscent of Boy Scouts
How do you incentivize a bunch of young boys to pursue learning about their "civic duties" or "CPR"? Provide them with visible, tangible representations of their individuals merits - a Merit Badge. Mozilla is pushing to develop a more visible badge system to represent knowledge and skills in a similar way, but for tangible, personal skills. Stay tuned for further developments.
For decades badges have represented achievement in children’s and youth associations and in some professions. Religious pilgrims receive badges for their journeys.
Becket-pilgrim-badge open licensed by Wikipedia
Recently computer games have awarded badges for skill and success. Judd Antin and Elizabeth Churchill examine the psychology of the use of badges to encourage interaction in social media in this well-researched and well-written paper: Badges in Social Media: A Social Psychological Perspective.
Badges reward the knowledge and skill required to demonstrate achievement.
The Mozilla Foundation badge program seeks to open education by replacing the current system of limited admissions, high costs, and sometimes artificial demonstrations of learning with recognition of evidence-based learning open to all learners. The issuing of badges will also be open to organizations of many types. Rigorous criteria and solid evidence will be encouraged. Ultimately employers and established educational institutions will recognize those badges and badge-holders that demonstrate value. The Mozilla Foundation will provide the infrastructure to automate issuing and earning badges. The initial pilot of Mozilla Badges is now in operation with the Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU) School of Webcraft. Additional pilots will occur this Fall and the system will go live in 2012.
Chegg finds a competitor for the "whole education lifecycle"
About the "Baked In" series: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes to say that social dynamics are going to work their way into every industry, and the companies of the future will be the ones that bake them in from the beginning, rather than slapping them on as an afterthought. This series takes a look at companies that are discovering new opportunities by using social components in the foundations of their businesses. Remember studying for the GMATs? Or AP Biology? Or even English 101 your freshman year? How about poring through those old textbooks and every now and then wishing you had a buddy close by you could ask for help on the parts that befuddled you? BenchPrep is making that happen. The Chicago-based startup, backed by Lightbank (whose founders bankrolled Groupon), has been digitizing test prep materials for the last two years. But it’s not just making your SAT or MCAT textbooks more portable. It’s also adding social features that act as a real-time virtual study groups to get you the help you need when you need it. “We take the flat content and enhance it by adding interaction and social conversations,” cofounder Ashish Rangenkar tells Fast Company. Also in the works: leaderboards for practice tests. The materials BenchPrep provides--which they get from established content providers like McGraw Hill and Wiley--already include interactive quizes that users can take to test their knowledge. Ultimately, BenchPrep plans to make it possible to form groups--whether of your own friends, for example, or everyone at your university--so you can see how you’re doing relative to others. “You might get a 7 out of 10 on a test. But is that good? Or is it bad?” Rangenkar says. “You don’t know unless you know how everyone else is doing.”
Among the features: The ability to ask questions of other people studying the same textbook as you--whether they’re in the library next door or halfway around the world. You can also add notes or even append YouTube videos to various parts of the texts and share your additions with other learners.
via Fast Company
The future of education... 100 years ago
In an article from Ladies Home Journal circa. 1900, headlined, “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years” author, one John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., lays out his predictions for the American life in the early 21st century.
Here’s what he says on education:
A university education will be free to every man and woman. Several great national universities will have been established. Children will study a simple English grammar adapted to simplified English, and not copied after the Latin. Time will be saved by grouping like studies. Poor students will be given free board, free clothing and free books if ambitious and actually unable to meet their school and college expenses. Medical inspectors regularly visiting the public schools will furnish poor children with free eyeglasses, free dentistry, and free medical attention of every kind. The very poor will, when necessary, get free rides to and from school and free lunches between sessions. In vacation time, poor children will be taken on trips to various parts of the world. Etiquette and housekeeping will be important studies in the public schools.
