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In my last post, I introduced Helsper and Enyon’s (2009) idea that exposure to, and experience using, various digital technologies can have more of an influence that generation age on determining whether a person has the characteristics of a digital immigrant or a digital native. Of course, nothing is ever so clear cut. In his blog, Wesley Fryer discusses this, and expands the immigrant vs native classification into four categories, as shown below.

Goodyear, Carvalho and Dohn (2014, p 140) state that networked learning “ is no longer exotic”, however, I would argue that this very much depends on on one’s own perspective, which in turn would be shaped by personal experience and knowledge (aka the whole digital landscape debate).

(see Koutropoulis, 2011) Prensky’s division

about herself in the capacity of being a student,

smiss this message

is links to the point made by Goodyear et al (2014) Unless learning is very closely supervised and directed (which it rarely is), there will usually be some slippage between task and activity, for good and bad reasons. This is important to acknowledge, when designing, because what people learn is a consequence of their actual activity, and therefore only indirectly a result of the task set for them. Tasks are designable, activities are not – they are emergent. (p. 1

Goodyear et al (2014) pick up on the term affordance as both important, but also as “a term that is also very widely critiqued and contested” (p. 137). The idea is that particular technologies afford different possibilities dependent on people’s perceptions of a technology. But an affordance isn’t a single set of possibilities seen by every person. Taking what Goodyear et al (2014) describe as a “relational-materialist” the idea of affordance becomes much more complex and emergent.

Micro-Colleges are any form of concentrated post-secondary education oriented around the minimum entry point into a particular profession. With literally millions of people needing to shift careers every year, and the long drawn out cycles of traditional colleges being a poor solution for time-crunched rank-and-file displaced workers, we are seeing a massive new opportunity arising for short-term, pre-apprenticeship training.  Many Micro-Colleges will fall into the category we often refer to as vocational training, a term poorly suited for the professional craftsmen, artisans, and technicians they will be producing. Since status and credentialing are critical elements of every career choice, any training producing specialized experts will need to come with industry-recognized certifications and titles.

The Micro-College approach to training brewmasters would be an intense 2-4 month training program with a designated apprenticeship period learning on the job.

Since my coursework happened in the pre-computer era, most of the skills I needed after computers were introduced were primarily self-taught.

Perhaps the most valuable courses with long-term relevance were classes in writing, English, speech, art, design, and the special research projects that forced me to find my own answers and write a final report. The art helped me understand that engineering was a form of creative expression.

If the school were tied to an industry-specific apprenticeship program with a near-perfect handoff between academia and real-world work happening inside the industry, what would a super-lean engineering program like this look like?

It’s easy to imagine that as traditional colleges see their student base decline, many will begin to partner, merge, and purchase fledgling Micro-Colleges and begin incorporating these new areas of study into their own catalog of course offerings. 

Since existing colleges bring with them credit-granting accreditation, along with status, credibility, and the ability to offer student loans, in-house Micro-Colleges will likely become a rapidly growing part of campus life. Many colleges will find the Micro-College niche they take on to be the key differentiator between them and other schools.  Using the school-within-a-school approach, core Micro-College programs will become feeder mechanisms for additional types of credentialing.