YouthNet blog

Tuesday Jul 29, 2008

School's Out

This summer you could imagine students meeting up and talking about their studies during the year: "I've just done a physics course at MIT, checked out an 'Introduction to Psych' at Yale and followed up with a well established course in non-violence at UC Berkeley".

All these courses are online and freely available in exploratory developments by US universities in the last two years to open up the content of their academic offerings. MIT, then Berkeley and then Yale. In the UK we've had the less impressive, but totally worthy Open Learn - an initiative from the Open University.

Taken together the depth of this content offers a glimpse into a more open and free learning world. This is ace and my only question really is why have we had to wait until 2008 for these kind of open learning initiatives to ripple outwards online? When you think about it, the academic world doesn't have the same excuses most of have had.

• They have had loads of warning: many academics have been using internet-like tools since the 1980's.
• They have had the resources: many academics have had access to the technical equipment, infrastructure and know-how for many, many years
• They have had the motivation: many academics will do anything for an opportunity to share their passion and knowledge for their own area of interest and expertise

Why then haven't academics been in the vanguard of this transformation in the use of communication technology to broaden learning opportunities? It's a puzzle and the truth is I have no idea why not. 40 years ago in 1968, universities and educational establishments became a hotbed for new ideas and social change. In 2008, it's seems to be venture capitalists with fuzzy business models spearheading social change through developments in today's technology.

My personal theory for why educational establishments have been left behind by the communication and information revolution is the following:

It's all about how learning has traditionally been conceived by the educational institutions: education is something 'they' do to 'us'. As a result this makes the institutions' model of learning incompatible with the free and open platform offered by emerging technology. Hence the near absence of formal academic-led developments in free and open learning resources on the internet. It's corporates that are making a running with things like: Authors@Google, Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope and Ted Talks. But if educational institutions wanted to play the game, they could knock these out of the park, couldn't they. Couldn't they?

One sticking point seems to be that institutions and establishments need and want rights protection and the ability to monetize learning aka the education industry. It's no coincidence that the big US universities have financed their initiatives thanks to donations from wealthy foundations rather than using money from the central pot. Impressive as the above resources are that are currently available, surely we're only just scratching the surface of what's possible.

We don't need no edukashun. We want, what I think humans have always cherished: a free and open space to learn and share that learning (long before Pink Floyd made the point).

As for the future, the internet will be full of bolder and more mature free and open opportunities to learn and share knowledge, previously the domain of education institutions. The only question is who's going to lead the way and how we all access and benefit from this new meta learning environment.