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This made Stanford the latest of a handful of elite American universities to pull back the curtain on their vaunted courses, joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project, Yale University’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast.Berkeley, among others. The difference with the Stanford experiment is that students are not only able to view the course materials and tune into recorded lectures for CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; they are also invited to take in-class quizzes, submit homework assignments, and gather for virtual office hours with the course’s two rock star instructors — Peter Norvig, a research executive at Google who used to build robots for NASA, and Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford who also works for Google, designing cars that drive themselves. (M.I.T., Yale and Berkeley simply make the course materials freely available, without offering the opportunity to interact with the professors or submit assignments to be graded.)

MOOCs question the value of teaching as an economic value point.”

Yesterday I talked about the seeding, feeding, and weeding necessary to develop a self-sustaining network

Choose: we are self-service learners.  We follow what interests us, what is meaningful to us, what we know is important. Commit: we take ownership for the outcomes.  We work until we’ve gotten out of it what we need. Crash: our commitment means we make mistakes, and learn from them. Create: we design, we build, we are active in our learning. Copy: we mimic others, looking to their performances for guidance. Converse: we talk with others. We ask questions, offer opinions, debate positions. Collaborate: we work together. We build together, evaluate what we’re doing, and take turns adding value.

With this list of things we do, we need to find ways to support them, across both formal and informal learning. 

Nicholas Carr's (2008) article ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ struck a chord with many people. Carr's (2010) argument, which he fleshes out in his book The Shallows, is that our continual use of the net induces a superficiality to our behaviour. He says this is felt particularly when trying to read a complex piece:

The issue of quality is perhaps more keenly felt when we consider teaching. I raised the idea of pedagogy of abundance in Chapter 8, and in such a pedagogy the content will vary greatly in terms of quality.

the question is not whether some people produce poor quality content, obviously they do and the majority in fact, but whether as a whole this system can produce high-quality content.

learning by doing is really key

Millenials, as good as they are at social technology, still do need training. The training they will need is different from what late adopters need. They don’t need to be sold on importance of conversation or possibilities of viral content and serendipitous discovery. What they do need is to understand is how Yammer is different from Facebook — from differences in content and audience, to the techniques, such as using groups to get work done.

“You need to help your users create a what / when / where decision chart,” she advised. Oftentimes people don’t know what message should be posted to what medium and they end up getting nervous and not posting, or wreaking havoc on the natural “flow” of the community

One of the areas ripest for innovation is alternative certification of informal learning. Hence, the recent excitement about badges. Badges have incredible potential for providing a viable alternative to the traditional system of credits most universities are tied to by accreditors. It seems to me that there is a critical need for someone to demonstrate that badges are a viable alternative to the traditional accreditation process.

However, because the gold standard for learning credentials is acceptability by employers, any meaningful badges demonstration project will have to operate in this space.

We want to create a collection of badges that a top employer, like Google, will publicly recognize as “equivalent experience.” This goes straight for the jugular, demonstrating that badges are a viable alternative to formal university education.