CTLT and Friends

"This free, web-based message board allows you to set up a web-based discussion board for your class where your students can post messages to one another, to students in another class, or to a parent "expert." These message areas are closed to outside users because they are set up by invitation."

"Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of beard, coined the term "edupunk" to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. "Edupunk," he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, "is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."

One vision for the school of the future comes from the United Nations. Founded this year by the UN’s Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People is a not-for-profit institution that aims to offer higher education opportunities to people who generally couldn’t afford it by leveraging social media technologies and ideas. The school is a one hundred percent online institution, and utilizes open source courseware and peer-to-peer learning to deliver information to students without charging tuition. There are some costs, however. Students must pay an application fee (though the idea is to accept everyone who applies that has a high school diploma and speaks English), and when they’re ready, students must pay to take tests, which they are required to pass in order to continue their education. All fees are set on a sliding scale based on the student’s country of origin, and never exceed $100.

Below is a random sample we assembled of 520 of the 5,800 stimulus-funded transportation projects nationwide, showing how much money to date the federal Department of Transportation has disbursed to individual transportation projects nationwide. We're asking you to help us figure out the status of these projects — whether the project has been started or has been completed, what company got the contract, and how many jobs the company says it retained or created for its stimulus contract.

For me, the biggest challenge in teaching a course like this is getting students engaged in the difficult task of analyzing the exercises

The deeper institutional issue is granting credit to graduate students for such a course

grades have little correlation with adult life achievement, or accomplishment, with postgraduate earnings (at least for the first three years), with actual learning, even with future employment in many fields. In the latter case, they are used mostly as a screening device rather than as an indicator of merit. The screen has expanded for the same reasons that professional sports have expanded their pools of playoff teams (think major league baseball "wild cards", or soccer teams that finish 3rd and 4th place in their national leagues qualifying for (and recently winning) the UEFA Champions League). Grades are also in their present state because their original purposes are no longer valid (assuming that they ever were, which is in itself dubious). The need is no longer to extract the cream and exclude the rest; it is to figure out how to effectively educate as many learners as possible.

My colleagues and I at the University of Maine have pursued a similar course with The Pool, an online environment for sharing art and code that invites students to evaluate each other at various stages of their projects, from intent to approach to release.

Like Slashdot's karma system, The Pool entrusts students who have contributed good work in the past with greater power to rate other students. In general students at U-Me have responded responsibly to this ethic; it may help that students are sometimes asked to evaluate students in other classes,