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Add to FavoritesIf there is a way for people to get what they want for free or cheaply they will find it. Even before the internet put a wealth of movies and music up for download, there was always that shady guy selling bootlegs from the trunk of his car. Just like technology made bootlegging music and movies easier, the internet has made a do-it-yourself education substantially easier.
Two months ago Union Square Ventures hosted an event highlighting the way technology and the internet impacts education. The event entitled Hacking Education brought together academics, entrepreneurs, educators, and administrators. The consensus; though outside the classroom learning has always been possible it has never been easier. How does the internet do this? David Wiley explains.
from Union Square Ventures:
David Wiley broke education into these components, 1) content provisioning, 2) research - conducted, archived, and disseminated, 3) help provided to a student with a question on the content, 4) a social life, and 5) issuing credentials.
Historically all of these components were bundled together in the experience of on-site education in a K-12 or University context. Already today, it is possible for a student to get many of these services outside the walls of a traditional educational institution.
One of the most interesting stories from the conference comes from a discussion of the need for an accredited education, or really the shrinking importance of.
from Union Square Ventures:
Rob Kalin kicked the discussion on the separation of learning and credentialing into high gear with this story.
I graduated high school with a D minus average. ...My guidance counselor said "drop out of high school, you'll have an easier time getting into college if you just get a GED." I [decided] to graduate with this D minus and see what it does for me. I didn't get into any accredited school . I got into a diploma program in an art school in Boston, and it was near MIT. ... I used the art school to make a fake ID to go to MIT. Someone said [college is] expensive. I said no, it's free, you just won't get credit for it.
Today, no one is going to ask Rob for his college transcript. His credentials are the companies he has created. Not every student can be so cavalier about the lack of a diploma, but the web is having an interesting impact on the value of credentials. In an earlier era, it was very difficult to evaluate a student's work directly, so a grade from an accredited institution served as a proxy. Now, if an employer wants to hire a video editor, Geppeto's work is on the web readily accessible. Students in the future will be as likely to be evaluated on their portfolio of work, as they are on their grades. That's lucky for Geppeto because, as his story makes clear, there is no way his school was capable of evaluating his work.
Now not every student has the drive, or frankly the balls, to pull off a stunt like this. How much more meaningful was Kalin's education because of how he got it? While I don't applaud breaking the law (is what he did against the law?) I applaud this ingenuity. Kalin worked for his education. He thought outside the box to get it. This is the kind of three dimensional thinking and problem solving we should be encouraging in students. Kalin will also retain what he learned better than someone who simply paid to sit there. Kalin wasn't in class because he felt entitled to be there. Kalin wanted knowledge and so he reached out and grabbed it.
Kalin's approach radically challenges how we teach students and the value of college. A diploma is irrelevant to Kalin. The end result College has devolved. College is no longer about gaining knowledge. It is about that piece of paper that "proves" to an employer that you know something. The internet is turning that idea on its head. As the article states employers no longer need diplomas as the sole evaluation of a students work. Now an employer can potentially view the entire body of work online. The employer can evaluate the work themselves.
Kalin's story also points to a need I have addressed on several occasions. I have talked about how we teach and test students at length. Kalin only reinforces my positions. The way we currently teach and test does not promote true problem solving. This is the problem. This is the answer. This is how you get there. No wonder kid's get bored. That method of learning shows no true understanding of a topic. It fosters no self discovery, no life long thirst for learning.
No matter how much information we throw at students we will never maintain any sort of competitive innovation if we don't get away from this factory style learning. Children need to know that 2+2=4, but we can't shy away from getting children to discover why.
Learn more about this author, Derek Viger.
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No
While it is certainly true that the Internet contains a great deal more information than that which can be found inside the walls of our places of higher learning, there is no doubt that you cannot learn more from the Internet than you can at college.
College is not solely about teaching students raw facts and figures, filling them up with data and then turning them loose after four years. To attempt to claim that college contains more of this than the Internet is foolish; so many colleges nowadays utilize the Internet for learning and publish research there that the Internet encompasses all the hard data contained within colleges. Instead, the key to this debate is that college teaches something that every website in the world cannot: the right way to approach all this data.
Essentially, college is arming students with the tools they can use to learn further. It is about building the right mindsets and strategies by which students may approach facts, figures, events, pieces of literature, etc., so that they may critically evaluate them for worth.
Each discipline that is taught at college has a number of different theoretical approaches that students may take in examining what is laid out in front of them. In English, which is the example I am most familiar with, there is the New Criticism school of approach, the Post-Colonial school, the historical approach, each of which is used to take the contents of a piece of literature and dissect for meaning. Each of these approaches is unique, and there are many more which share in this uniqueness. The usefulness of having each theory is that students can be asked to write in a specific way about the text at hand, which serves as a way to have students think creatively about the text and differently than they might have otherwise. New Criticism, for example, requires that the critic take into account only what is in the text, not the context it was written in or by whom. Historical asks that the critics examine how the text reflects the period of history in which it was written.
And while one may reach these conclusions about how to approach texts on their own, or read about them on Wikipedia, the most effective way to learn them is to have professors who are already familiar with these processes drill students in how to effectively use them to prove a point about the text at hand. Writing essays, for example. The Internet will not drill you on anything. Moreover, it will not correct you in your mistakes.
College also allows a greater depth of understanding of subjects too. Because professors are living, breathing human beings, they can be asked questions, and more often than not, answer them. They are also used to teaching, and by that I mean that they are prepared to deal with a group of people who have no prior knowledge of the subject they are being taught. The Internet contains a great deal of information, but much of it is inaccessible to the unfamiliar because much of it is written using the jargon of the subject it is about. You cannot (generally) ask a website what it means when it says something that seems obscure or makes a highly nuanced argument. In fact, a user who is entirely self-taught on the Internet may miss nuanced points simply because they do not have the foundation of knowledge that the website assumes them to.
Being taught by the Internet is akin to learning how to swim by being tossed into the deep end and hoping that you pick it up as you go. There are many cases where this does occur, but this is not the majority of cases. College is about teaching you how to swim by first getting you wet, then wading into the shallow end, then learning some basic strokes and so on and so forth. Eventually, you can take those early steps and build upon them so that you can do some really fantastic things, like swimming the English Channel. Can you go on to great things without college? Yes. Does that happen to most people? No. Human beings need guidance. The Internet is a complex series of connected computers displaying a tremendous amount of data. Saying that it alone can teach someone is akin to saying that teachers really are not needed at all in schools; that all that is really required to teach someone is a textbook. If that were true we would have long ago abolished college. But we did not, because it is not true. You can read a lot of stuff on the Internet, more than you can find in a college. But you cannot learn more of it than you can in college.
Learn more about this author, Alexander Howard.
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