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Today, these tools still provide middle school teachers with vehicles to enlarge their students' learning. Math and science problem sets are embedded in authentic stories that students understand because the stories reflect their everyday experiences. These authentic problem-solving exercises not only engage students in their learning but also stimulate them to want to learn more.

From the beginning, however, a problem arose in that those middle school students went on to high schools and later to colleges that did not (and do not) provide this type of rich learning experience—a learning experience that can best be achieved when technology is used in the service of learning.

Students need mastery in areas that include knowledge of human imagination and expression, global and cross-cultural communities, and modeling the natural world.

The assignment could take on a deeper dimension by using videoconferencing and e-mail to link teams to students living in the countries of origin of the groups being studied. Integrating real-time global experiences into the classroom can provide a new, first-person information source and engender debate about the validity of various sources of information used in conducting research.

So Professor Shankar has begun inserting links to specific portions of Professor Lewin’s course, and, “since any mistake would affect larger numbers of students listening online,” he says, he thinks harder about every topic he teaches in the classroom.

His intense, animated ruminations — the title of his course is “Death” — have brought fan mail from Mexico, Iraq, Korea and China. Several months ago, he got a response from somebody suffering from a brain injury and who was using the lectures to exercise his mind. “I don’t think anyone knows what this will do to education 15 years from now,” Professor Kagan says. “But even if it does nothing more than that, that’s enough.”

The backers of free courseware acknowledge the benefit of self-enrichment. Still, they say they expect open education not only to expand access to information but also to lead to success in higher education, particularly among low-income students and those who are first in their family to go to college.

Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative is working with teams of faculty members, researchers on learning and software engineers to develop e-courses designed to improve the educational experience.

Carnegie Mellon is working with community colleges to build four more courses, with the three-year goal of 25 percent more students passing when the class is bolstered by the online instruction.

The intended user is the beginning college student, whom Dr. Smith describes as “someone with limited prior knowledge in a college subject and with little or no experience in successfully directing his or her own learning.”

. “We now have the technology that enables us to go back to what we all know is the best educational experience: personalized, interactive engagement,” Dr. Smith says.

That won’t happen, and in the terms-of-use section of Open Yale Courses, the university makes that clear. Besides not granting degrees or certificates, open courses do not offer direct access to faculty. They, in other words, are strictly “for those who wish to learn,” as the Web site says. “Its purpose is not to duplicate a Yale education.”

Open courseware is a classic example of disruptive technology, which, loosely defined, is an innovation that comes along one day to change a product or service, often standing an industry on its head. Craigslist did this to newspapers by posting classified ads for free. And the music industry got blindsided when iTunes started unbundling songs from albums and selling them for 99 cents apiece.

Mr. Schonfeld sees still more potential in “unbundling” the four elements of educating: design of a course, delivery of that course, delivery of credit and delivery of a degree. “Traditionally, they’ve all lived in the same institutional setting.” Must all four continue to live together, or can one or more be outsourced?

P2PU’s mission isn’t to develop a model and stick with it. It is to “experiment and iterate,” says Ms. Paharia, the former executive director of Creative Commons. She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio.

David Wiley, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, is an adviser to P2PU. For the past several years, he has been referring to “the disaggregation of higher education,” the breaking apart of university functions. Dr. Wiley says that models like P2PU address an important component missing from open courseware: human support. That is, when you have a question, whom can you ask? “No one gets all the way through a textbook without a dozen questions,” he says. “Who’s the T.A.? Where’s your study group?” “If you go to M.I.T. OpenCourseWare, there’s no way to find out who else is studying the same material and ask them for help,” he says. At P2PU, a “course organizer” leads the discussion but “you are working together with others, so when you have a question you can ask any of your peers. The core idea of P2PU is putting people together around these open courses.”

Mr. Reshef’s plan is to “take anyone, anyone whatsoever,” as long as they can pass an English orientation course and a course in basic computer skills, and have a high school diploma or equivalent. The nonprofit venture has accepted, and enrolled, 380 of 3,000 applicants, and is trying to raise funds through microphilanthropy — “$80 will send one student to UoPeople for a term” — through social networking.

Mr. Reshef has used $1 million of his own money to start the University of the People, which taps open courses that other universities have put online and relies on student interaction to guide learning; students even grade one another’s papers.

According to Duncan, the great sin these colleges have committed in the past few decades is that they have focused too much on theory and not enough on clinical practice; and by theory he means critical pedagogy, or those theories that enable prospective teachers to situate school knowledges, practices and modes of governance within wider critical, historical, social, cultural, economic and political contexts. Duncan wants such colleges to focus on practical methods in order to prepare teachers for an outcome-based education system, which is code for pedagogical methods that are as anti-intellectual as they are politically conservative.

Rather than provide the best means for confronting "difficult truths about the inequality of America's political economy," such a pedagogy produces the swindle of "blaming inequalities on individuals and groups with low test scores."[7] This is a pedagogy that sabotages any attempt at self-reflection and quality education, all the while providing an excuse for producing moral comas and a flight from responsibility.

Duncan's insistence on banishing theory from teacher education programs in favor of promoting narrowly defined skills and practices foreshadows the preparation of teachers as a subaltern class who believe that the purpose of education is only to train students to compete successfully in a global economy. This model of teaching being celebrated here is one in which teachers are constructed as clerks and technicians who have no need for a public vision in which to imagine the democratic role and social responsibility that schools, teachers or pedagogy might assume for the world and future they offer to young people.

Duncan then goes on to praise Louisiana as a model for building longitudinal data systems that track the impact of new teachers on student achievement. For Duncan, Louisiana represents a beacon for how schools should be redefined, largely as sites of management and data collection, and advances the notion that teachers should be trained to operate proficiently in such sites.

the overuse of harsh discipline disproportionately affects some Louisiana school children over others. African American students make up 44% of the statewide public school population, but 68% of suspensions and 72.5% of expulsions. And in school districts with a larger percentage of African American and low-income students, there are higher rates of suspension and expulsion. These districts tend to have fewer resources for positive interventions.

Duncan's collusion with the growing corporatization and militarizing of public schools, along with the increased use of harsh disciplinary modes of punishment, surveillance, control and containment, especially in schools inhabited largely by poor minorities of color, reveals his unwillingness to address the degree to which many schools are dominated by a politics of fear, containment and authoritarianism, even as he advances reform as a civil rights issue.[12] Schools are not merely places where potential workers learn the marketable skills and abilities necessary to secure a decent job, they are also, as Martha C. Nussbaum pointed out, key institutions of the public good and are "crucial to both the health of democracy and to the creation of a decent world culture and a robust type of global citizenship."[13]

The diverse range of political, economic, racial and social forces that influence all aspects of schooling need to be critically engaged and rearticulated in the interest of justice, human development, freedom and equal opportunity. These are not merely political issues, they are also pedagogical concerns and the former cannot be separated from the latter, just as equity cannot be separated from matters of excellence. Defining schools exclusively in terms of mathematical coordinates and statistical formulas suggests that Duncan has no language for addressing schools as sites or teachers as engaged intellectuals that mediate, accommodate, reproduce and sometimes challenge the diverse and often anti-democratic forces that bear down on them.

What does it mean to ignore the increasing corporatization, privatization and militarization of schools at a time when all aspects of public life are under siege by corporate and market-driven forces? How can schools fulfill their democratic mission when they are shaped by a social order characterized by massive inequalities in wealth and power?

“If we can solve this,” he said, “I think it will disrupt all of higher education.”

John Hennessy, Stanford’s president, gave the university’s blessing to Thrun’s experiment, which he calls “an initial demonstration,” but he is cautious about the grander dream of a digitized university. He can imagine a virtual campus for some specialized programs and continuing education, and thinks the power of distributed learning can be incorporated in undergraduate education — for example, supplanting the large lecture that is often filled with students paying more attention to their laptops. He endorses online teaching as a way to educate students, in the developing world or our own, who cannot hope for the full campus experience.

As The Times’s Matt Richtel recently reported, there is remarkably little data showing that technology-centric schooling improves basic learning. It is quite possible that the infatuation with technology has diverted money from things known to work — training better teachers, giving kids more time in school.

“When is the infrastructure of the university particularly valuable — as it is, I believe, for an undergraduate residential experience — and when is it secondary to the learning process?”

To Orange, I will show an actual example of a map in my next full post and explain more about the parameters that are given and what the students fill in themselves. You raise a much more important question though, about the necessity of simplifying in order for the simulation to work. This aspect of the simulation almost led me to abandon the whole thing as I started to think it through and plan for it. Instead I found two ways to deal with it: 1. I challenge my students to tell me where the simulation is oversimplified and make their own case for how the simulation should change for the next time it is performed. This way they are not simply accepting our imaginary world “as is” and are instead actively thinking about how the real world works and how we may have misrepresented it in our simulation. (Even if the simulation fails miserably, it has succeeded in getting students to think about how the world works!) 2. I encourage the students to use the simplification as a canvas on which they can build and/or interpret complexity. In a lecture format I only have so much time to cover the effects of colonization – perhaps 50 minutes – not enough to really explore all of the different facets. In the World Simulation I can encourage each student to think about how colonization would affect their culture in multiple ways and at multiple levels (e.g. infrastructure, social structure, superstructure). Sometimes this is to complex to be incorporated into the simulation, but they are asked to do a reflection paper immediately following the simulation in which they write their own “cultural history.” This written format allows them to explore some complexities they might not have had the time or means to express in the simulation.