Coetail

blog writing has become a basic requirement in everything from M.B.A. to literature courses. On its face, who could disagree with the transformation? Why not replace a staid writing exercise with a medium that gives the writer the immediacy of an audience, a feeling of relevancy, instant feedback from classmates or readers, and a practical connection to contemporary communications? Pointedly, why punish with a paper when a blog is, relatively, fun?

Because, say defenders of rigorous writing, the brief, sometimes personally expressive blog post fails sorely to teach key aspects of thinking and writing. They argue that the old format was less about how Sherman got to the sea and more about how the writer organized the points, fashioned an argument, showed grasp of substance and proof of its origin. Its rigidity wasn’t punishment but pedagogy.

increasingly digital literacy is vital for learning itself.

It goes beyond IT skills, a complete culture change is required to live fully within the modern digital society, from understanding how to communicate ideas effectively in a range of media to managing digital reputation and history.

it's easy to overstate the digital competence of today's undergraduate students and even postgraduate researchers.

Present Tense and Future Tensions"

 The third digital divide is about education.  It is about those students who are using technology to connect and communicate with others to tackle meaningful problems and those students for whom technology still means making, saving and accessing documents.

Yet undergraduate education changes remarkably little over time.

Education will be more about how to process and use information and less about imparting it.

An inevitable consequence of the knowledge explosion is that tasks will be carried out with far more collaboration.

I never learned anything I was tested on. After I was forced to memorize and regurgitate onto the paper, the uninteresting, disconnected facts, stayed on the test. 

I don’t blame myself though. I did as I was told and I excelled in the game of school.

The reality for me is that I would have been much better off without the teachers in my life weighing me down and wasting my time.

I ask you to consider the possibility that the kid is learning more valuable lessons at the computer than at school, in part because the computer activity is self-chosen and the school activity is not.

But I think there are two important things that online universities bring to the table: (1) Broadening access to higher education, and (2) Leveraging technology to explore new approaches to learning.

For this reason I think that replacing live courses with videotaped lectures is not going far enough (and may in fact be detrimental).

Education should give everyone the opportunity to succeed, but the ultimate responsibility (and raw ability) comes down to the student.