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About 16 mins in to this mostly political conversation about economic pressures and the political changes expected this fall, Matt Miller calls out higher education as a place likely to see major disruption in coming years, saying that like the medical establishment, it's a sector "where the costs of delivering services are much higher in the US than anywhere else in the world, [which has] been able...essentially through interest group politics...to keep the income flowing to their sector at the expense of the average consumer... You've got all these new...small firms...that will deliver, like, freshman year for a thousand dollars...and they're being blocked by the...status quo establishment that likes to keep the cost of higher education at 15, 20, 35 thousand dollars a year. If you've got this kind of economic pressure across the board, I think it's only a matter of time before the boom really falls on these sectors."

If you haven't yet seen it, there is a fascinating video of Sal Khan speaking at the Gel 2010 conference. For those who haven't been following, Khan is the creator of the Khan Academy-a non-profit that has over 1,800 videos for free on the Web that teach topics in Math, Science, the Humanities, and so forth-and have attracted such an impressive following that they have more viewers than even MIT's open courses on YouTube. The Khan Academy reaches people all over the world with these videos, and recently Google awarded it $2 million to create more videos and translate them into additional languages.

Check out the video at http://vimeo.com/11731351 (It's the same info Cameron posted a while ago but this time it's made the widely read Huffington Post ... and I think it's a good repeat post since I, for one, didn't pay enough attention to this the first time I heard about it.)

Another fun RSA Animate video -- this one about Steven Johnson's "Where Good Idea From." Possible relevance for thinking not only about tech's role for students, but also how collaboration enabled by technology can yield big -- possibly disruptive? -- ideas among innovators in education.

I have experienced this first hand. Adults find it cute to watch their young children staring deeply into their cell phones (iphones) as they pop digital balloons, etc. Disruptive? Def. if you are sitting next to this family at a restaurant.

"Legacy costs, ideas and infrastructure have set the table for creative disruption, with technology now offering alternative ways to acquire skills, knowledge, and accolades." This not only talks about transformation among teachers lives (and consequently those of the children thru what the empowered teachers provide) but makes you feel that the way in which teachers are evaluated are taking a whole new stage. More open, more emphasis on its impact and connected. 

Sacramento, CA, November 26, 2012- They had a simple idea: Find a brilliant mix of innovative people from different professions. Get them together in one space for a day. Invite teachers, EdTech visionaries, hackers and entrepreneurs and encourage them to work on ideas, partnerships, networks, even businesses with the goal of jump starting the economy and revolutionizing education. This should be an interesting conference to monitor - maybe a new educational disruptive design will emerge!

"The revolution in education is not something that's going to happen tomorrow. It's starting to happen quite a while ago, when in Nigeria and Kenya kids in schools would use their mobile phones to subscribe to information," says Alina Vandenberghe, head of mobile and gaming at Pearson.

A leading game maker is, among other things, dedicating resources toward education games. It's also worth noting, I think, that a company that rejects typical corporate structure might be a good one for disrupting typical education structures.

"We need high-quality education for the fraction of the cost and to give anyone a chance to learn throughout their lifetime."

This article shows how Louisiana is trying to adapt "modular" courses to complement or replace instruction in certain subjects, largely mitigated by the Common Core.

In Disrupting Class, one of the predictions that Clay Christenson makes is that classroom content in the future will not come from traditional textbooks, but from students and teachers who contribute user-generated content for learning. Here is an example of a site that allows users to download free textbooks. This is further proof that once the information is out there for all to see, it is going to be more and more difficult to prevent people from spreading ideas and circumventing the charge-for-information model that is currently out there.

Here is a highly populated list of open course offerings at various universities on the internet. This is certainly going to be disruptive to the pay-for-learning model of higher education. Some issues: does it make sense to attach some sort of certification of completion? Is it feasible or desirable to offer complete open courses, or would it be better to make the offerings more granular in nature? Should users be able to remix offerings from various courses to create custom courses?

This is fantastic! Thank, Steve.

This article makes interesting references not only to our resistance to change (disruption), but also our inability to control media and not the other way around. "Human beings are creatures of habit and the introduction of anything new typically raises an eyebrow (at least) or pitchforks (more often). It's a somewhat common theme that is tiresome to me, but one that provokes debate throughout the times." And "There's a macro lesson here: If you think your kid is spending too much time on their iPad and not enough time outside getting some exercise, don't blame the iPad."

Minimally Invasive Education is defined as a pedagogic method that uses the learning environment to generate an adequate level of motivation to induce learning in groups of children, with minimal, or no, intervention by a teacher. (Disruptive Tech?)

How will the Cloud Disrupt Education?

The further along I go, the more I am realizing that we have fully arrived in the information age. For our nation to compete globally - we must get out of the trap of growing media consumers, technology consumers, and information consumers. We must grow a generation of students who not only use technology, but understand technology so that they can become active technology producers, so that they can create, innovate, imagine, and disrupt. Possibly, understanding computer science will be as important as learning to read and write - the new literacy.