e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • DIY U: Is There a Bubble in the Higher Education Market?

    Update: Coincidentally, Anya Kamenetz just posted an interview in which she briefly compares the student loan situation with the real estate bubble here.

    When I opened my email the other day, I was greeted by the following blurb from Today’s Campus:

    The U.S. college-buying public numbers in the tens of millions.  Many of them are first-time purchasers.  Most of them are not.   Among a marketplace of that size, one ‘buying cluster’ could supply enough students to fill several campuses.  One very interesting cluster we’ve identified is husbands purchasing higher education for their wives.  Click here to order a free sample report with our compliments.

    We don’t often hear higher education talked about in such baldly commercial terms. Most faculty and campus administrators have visceral negative reactions to this kind of language. But that doesn’t mean that colleges—even not-for-profit colleges—aren’t essentially run as businesses. It just means that (a) they’re often run as businesses badly because it is considered distasteful to draw on the lessons and vocabulary of the business world, and (b) educators often fail to identify the tensions between their school’s mission and its operating model, thus making it less likely that they will be able to confront some of the system’s ethical challenges successfully. But since the heart of DIY U is an economic argument, it is worthwhile to try framing issues in the language of economics. As the title of this post suggests, the specific question I want to address is whether there is a bubble in the college education market.

    (more…)

  • Some Strengths of Sakai 2: Part II

    Here’s the second installment in the great video series from the University of North Carolina’s Sakai Pilot Blog about the strengths of Sakai 2:

  • Update to the Sakai 3 Timeline

    Sakai Foundation Interim Executive Director Lois Brooks just posted a brief update to the Sakai 3 development plans. The detail that stood out to me is this:

    The new project brings together the existing body of work, and the existing teams, into a single, coordinated effort, and aims for a completed version that is feature-equivalent to Sakai 2 in mid-2011. [Emphasis added.]

    This represents a change from the earlier road map that didn’t anticipate having a full Sakai 2 replacement until 2012.

    A couple of caveats are in order. First, nobody really knows what it means for Sakai 3 to be “feature-equivalent” to Sakai 2. Whenever you move to a new system design, some features that made sense in the old world just don’t make sense in the new one. That’s particularly true in this case, Since Sakai 3 is very different from Sakai 2 in both functional design philosophy and underlying architecture. For schools currently on other platforms, this doesn’t matter much. The “feature-equivalent” tag simply conveys the Sakai 3 project team’s confidence that they are releasing a competitive product. For current Sakai schools, the issue is more complicated. They will have to look whether anything that matters to them will get lost in translation.

    Second, people on the project team tell me that, at this point, 2011 should be considered to be something closer to an aspirational goal than a due date derived from a detailed project plan. In June, there will be development planning sessions both immediately before and immediately after the Sakai conference. A lot of work gets done at these sessions. Over the month or so following, more gels as attendees go home and rally their troops and as tentative decisions are finalized through communications with stakeholders who may not have been able to attend the conference. We’ll know a lot more by mid-July.

    For now, the main take-away here is that the Sakai 3 development team is expressing an increasing sense of confidence in the project’s resourcing.

    Update: After rereading some emails, I’d like to slightly downgrade my adjective from “confidence” to “optimism.” One early test will be to see whether schools step forward with additional resources once the project plan is fleshed out. Again, much of this will happen in roughly the Sakai conference time frame. There is a lot of interest in participation being expressed within the Sakai community, but we don’t know yet whether that interest will translate into resource commitments in sufficiently large numbers to ensure delivery on this more aggressive schedule.

    Stay tuned.

  • Some Strengths of Sakai 2

    Image: University of North Carolina

    I write a fair bit about Sakai 3 because I am excited about the possibilities for change that it represents. That said, there are a couple of points worth emphasizing. First, Sakai 3 doesn’t exist yet and won’t be adoptable as a full LMS for a while. (See Sakai 3: What It Is and When To Move To It for details.) Second, Sakai 2 is a very good current-generation LMS that is meeting the needs of many schools today.

    University of North Carolina, which has been piloting Sakai 2, has been putting out some excellent evaluation materials on it. (See UNC’s Sakai Evaluation Results, for example.) Their Sakai pilot blog also contains some gems. For example, they have identified five “big ideas” that they believe represent some of Sakai’s strengths—particularly in comparison to Blackboard, their current LMS. Here is a video describing the first of those ideas:

    In addition to the school-wide evaluation, the UNC medical school has been looking at Sakai to meet their more specialized needs. (See Academic Study of Blackboard vs. Sakai at UNC School of Medicine.) They have some niche requirements which are critical for them, foremost of which is a good calendaring system. Here’s a video of medical school faculty talking about how Sakai works for them:

  • Why OER Advocates Should Be Happy About the iPad

    I got some comments on my Blackboard iPad post specifically regarding the push toward native—and therefore proprietary—apps and away from standards-based web apps. This concern is just one example of a constellation of complaints about how Apple is too closed. I understand those complaints and am not going to argue with them here. But whether you love Apple or hate them, whether you will buy an iPad or not, I think it’s clearly the case that the iPad’s success will increase adoption of Open Educational Resources.

    (more…)

  • Should Pandora Have Opened the Box?

    A few days ago, I had the following Twitter exchange with Anya Kamenetz:

    Me: @opencontent @anya1anya Here’s why I fear the university system may be unable to adapt to open education: http://bit.ly/cF0Hby

    Anya: @mfeldstein67 as a system, probably not. Legacy assets/components? Yes. Roman Empire falls. Rome (city) thrives to this day.

    Me: @anya1anya Easier to be blithe about the fall of the Roman Empire given that the Romans who suffered through it are all dead.

    Anya: @mfeldstein67 I’m not blithe about any of this. I think the times we live in are utterly terrifying.

    Me: @anya1anya Terrifying is the right word. The question we face is, what was Pandora’s moral obligation *after* she opened the box?

    Anya: @mfeldstein67 Pandora or Cassandra? tbc on http://diyubook.com/

    Me: @anya1anya Depends. Are we agents or witnesses? Maybe both. But I think it’s easier to be Cassandra than Pandora. No responsibility.

    Anya: @mfeldstein67 Actually, I’m just the kid in The Emperor’s New Clothes.

    Me: @anya1anya I don’t buy that. If you believe it, then why bother writing the book? You are only Cassandra if you choose to be.

    I was surprised (but probably shouldn’t have been) to then see her reflect on this exchange thusly:

    We just need to start being very creative about how we deal with the acceleration. I want to be a friend of change. I think there’s been a little bit of a debate already about the book coming out. I get asked, Are you a Pandora opening up Pandora’s Box, or are you a Cassandra, declaiming that things are doomed and that other things are coming up in their place? I kind of don’t want to take responsibility for either of these [viewpoints]. I think we are all imagining a different kind of future and I want to be on the side of the future and not on the side of the past.

    It certainly wasn’t my intention to imply that Anya personally is releasing all the horrors from the box. Nor, I see now, was the idea I have in my head regarding Pandora (and Cassandra, for that matter) what came through in my tweets. Apparently, Twitter is not a good medium for midrash. I have also struggled to communicate the same feelings in conversations with folks like Jim Groom and Stephen Downes. So I’m going to try something a little different here and take an uncharacteristic flight of literary fancy. I hope you will indulge me.

    The question I want to address is this: Should Pandora have opened the box?

    (more…)

  • Please Welcome Guest Blogger Laura Czerniewicz

    With all the blogging I’ve been doing about mLearning apps the past couple of weeks, it has bothered me that the focus in the industry right now has been on the high-end devices. How many people in the entire world own an iPad right now? Maybe 300,000? I really wanted to learn more about how we can use the least-common-denominator cell phones that six out of every ten people own worldwide. I wanted to learn more about how mobile learning works in places where everyone doesn’t have an iPhone.

    I am pleased to announce that Laura Czerniewicz, Director of the Centre for Educational Technology (CET) at the University of Cape Town, will be writing a series of guest posts to educate us in this area. I have been a fan of Laura’s on Twitter and, more recently, her blog. You may also be interested in her bio and her research.