Paul Duguid
Geoffrey Nunberg
GUESTS
John Lamping
Peter Lyman
Clifford Lynch
Steve Weber
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Previous week
October 27
Education
Paul's class
slides
Assignment
For the class of Oct 27th, we have another assignment in place of reading (though we'll suggest some secondary reading).
Your sister/brother/cousin/mother or someone else close to you now has the time to get a higher/another degree or some useful/employable qualifications. He/she has recently moved to rural America/overseas, but remembering the buzz in the 1990s about digital Us, believes that all he or she wants can be achieved online. He/she then turns to you as someone still in the world of education and knowledgeable about matters digital with the following list (some of which are no more than vague memories from before the crash) and asks you to take a first cut at the list, recommending or discounting one or two (or preferring one not on the list) on grounds of the quality of education and qualifications. (You don't know how much they can afford, so money is an object, but how much of an object you are not sure.)
Berkeley
Boxmind
Cardean
Concord
DeVry
Fathom
Hewlett-Packard
Jones
MIT Open Courseware
Open University
Phoenix
Saylor U
SUNY
Western Governors
[For this assignment, you must fill in the variables imaginatively--who it is that is asking, what it is they want to do, and why. Try to do this first, then chose a couple from this list for comparative purposes and see what sorts of assessment you can make given the criteria you start with. You can add others to the list, if you chose, but they should be online--which will exclude Hamburger U. You may also find that some of these no longer exist. Disappearance may, however, provide (perhaps with the help of the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine) help in assessing the presentations, claims, and likely survival of those that still do.
As with the search project, you can work in pairs if you like. Bring your results to class on October 27 and be prepared to present your case. We'll provide an I/internet connection for you to explore the online presence of these various institutions.]
Secondary Reading
Brown, John Seely and Paul Duguid. 2000. Re-education. Chapter 8 in The Social Life of Information. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Kirp, David L. 2003. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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