On a Friday morning in April, I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel to the future of higher education.
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The system had bugs—it crashed once, and some of the video lagged—but overall it worked well, and felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag or I could doodle in a notebook undetected. Instead, my focus was directed relentlessly by the platform, and because it looked like my professor and fellow edu-nauts were staring at me, I was reluctant to ever let my gaze stray from the screen. Even in moments when I wanted to think about aspects of the material that weren’t currently under discussion—to me these seemed like moments of creative space, but perhaps they were just daydreams—I felt my attention snapped back to the narrow issue at hand, because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn. If this was the education of the future, it seemed vaguely fascistic. Good, but fascistic.
Graeme Wood writing in the Atlantic
Tag: education
Is Coding the New Literacy?
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In the winter of 2011, a handful of software engineers landed in Boston just ahead of a crippling snowstorm. They were there as part of Code for America, a program that places idealistic young coders and designers in city halls across the country for a year. ~ Read the full version
the usefulness of a college degree
We’re seeing paradigms change as fast as at the start of the railway and the telephony revolutions and in both of those there was more work based education and training, apprenticeships, and far fewer degrees.
I’m not an elitist about education, merely someone who feels that we have prized getting a large number of people to hold degrees over the usefullness to them and society of attaining them.
I have read a few articles over the last few years suggesting that the higher education system in the USA needs some realignment. I’m uncertain about how to advise my own kids. My wife and I both attended college on scholarship. I had a full scholarship but incurred some graduate school debt. I certainly don’t want my kids to end up slaves to student loans. Some tough decision for us in the very near future. My son is a freshman in high school.
