Via John Poelstra, a link to a great Fast Company article titled "How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education."
Now that I'm done flinching from the use of the term "education 2.0" and fighting the temptation to launch into a long spiel on what I know about the history of education and how it's led to our current systems's designs... (I need to learn more about that history - there's so much of it and it is fascinating!)
For me, the biggest difference is not that the string quartet becomes faster or more efficient (there is a limit to how fast people can learn, though it's super high and most folks never come close to hitting it). We've had rich, immersive, satisfying learning experiences for years - I'll call those string quartets and recognize that they're ideals that we usually don't 100% reach.
The big difference for me is that now you can choose, at any given time, which of many string quartets is best for you to listen to - instead of maybe not having quartets available at all, or being forced to choose between a quartet that's not right for you and a wider range of crappy tin-whistle recordings.
</awkwardly explained analogy!> <other notes I took!>
Wiley's quote sums most of it up. "The challenge is not to bring technology into the classroom, he points out. The millennials, with their Facebook and their cell phones, have done that. The challenge is to capture the potential of technology to lower costs and improve learning for all."
I last saw the peer2peer uni folks... was it 2 years ago now? It was still a "we're all sitting here talking about stuff" pie in the sky dream last time I saw them; if they've gotten it off the ground, I'm glad! I'll have to check back in.
The way WGU designed its competency-based curriculum assessments - with employers as the spec providers - assumes that all students go to university so they can be employed by those employers. It's great for the use case it was designed for. At the same time, I think we should also recognize other use cases, like students who want to go to grad school, or students who care more about learning something they're interested in for however many years and aren't actually worried quite yet about where they'll go after that.
Same comment for Neeru Paharia's quote, which is one (of many possible) cool deconstruction(s) of the features of a university: "It provides you a clear path from A to B, provides social infrastructure of teachers and other students, and accreditation so you actually get credit for what you do."
Thanks for pointing out the article, John - I hadn't seen it before, and it is indeed awesometastic. At 4:53am, I write disjointed paragraphs rather than coherent sentences with tons of context, but I wanted to get this out there so I could give myself permission to pause for a while and sleep on this (and many other things, like the last day of POSSE APAC).