Arthur C. Clarke on Learning from Childhood's End

"Whatever problems the future might bring, time did not yet hang heavy on humanity's hands. Education was now much more thorough and much more protracted. Few people left college before twenty-and that was merely the first stage, since they normally returned again at twenty-five for at least three more years, after travel and experience had broadened their minds. Even then, they would probably take refresher courses at intervals for the remainder of their lives in the subjects that particularly interested them."

The way Clarke describes the idea of lifelong learning for the sake of learning is of special interest to me, since I have long since abandoned the idea that I need to learn to achieve any external success, when the act of learning itself is the greatest success. 

MOOC Limitations

We should champion and study our innovations while at the same time drawing clear lines around the space where they’re useful and being honest about the space where they’re not.

While I like to imagine a future in which students do not come to the school, the school comes to the student, I also see that there is a reasonable limitation to what can be done with the new learning format. On one hand, content can be provided by fewer instructors to a greater audience than ever, but the instruction is somewhat one-way, as smaller groups lend themselves more to peer and instructor interaction, and younger learners need more direct involvement in the beginning. As they grow, independence wins out and learners that have mastered the communication methods have much more chance of teaching themselves what they seek to learn.

We are, after all, self-taught in what we learn from day one.

When Public Mission Meets Private Opportunity

The intersection between public mission and private opportunity continues to get busier as schools search for better ways to educate students, and entrepreneurs work to create products and services to help educators achieve their goals. This special report—a follow-up to our 2012 report “Accelerating Innovation” and produced with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York—examines the complex relationship between the private and public sectors in K-12. The report is part of Education Week's commitment to following the education industry and new approaches to schooling on a special Industry & Innovation channel.

More: Education Week: When Public Mission Meets Private Opportunity

Challenging Traditional Education

MOOCs represent the latest stage in the evolution of open educational resources. First was open access to course content, and then access to free online courses. Accredited institutions are now accepting MOOCs as well as free courses and experiential learning as partial credittoward a degree. The next disruptor will likely mark a tipping point: an entirely free online curriculum leading to a degree from an accredited institution. With this new business model, students might still have to pay to certify their credentials, but not for the process leading to their acquisition. If free access to a degree-granting curriculum were to occur, the business model of higher education would dramatically and irreversibly change. As Nathan Harden ominously noted, "recent history shows us that the internet is a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of information."¹

More: The MOOC Model: Challenging Traditional Education (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu

Will MOOC Technology Break the Education Cartel?

It happened to the record industry first. While popular music had long been available on radio, it could be argued that a true music industry as we know it today didn’t arise until the 50‘s and 60‘s when distributable media and players became widely available. 

But that’s where technology turned. CD drives in computers plus early sharing software like Napster meant that instead of getting good at mashing the pause button on your stereo so recording to cassette stopped before the adds kicked in, you could rip a whole CD to MP3 in minutes and upload it for anyone who was also connected to the net. You could also bypass the record stores entirely by downloading songs, for free. It meant you didn’t have to buy your music a fourth time in some other format – you now controlled the file. No it wasn’t legal, but it was what the people wanted. 

Fast forward to 2013 and we can choose to buy tracks one at time instead of ten at a time. NOW we have Pandora, and Spotify and Rdio et al. Now Music gets pushed to me. Now I tap a thumbs up button and more great tunes keep rolling in, for free if I put up with the Pandora Ads like four times an hour.

Given the resistance to positive change within the public education sector, change may be slow. What I am optimistic about, though, is that resistance can not last forever, and eventually individual choice will prevail, giving parents the ability to either send their kids to proper academies that take advantage of the technology, or even use the technology at home rather than send their kids off to school for most of the day. I can imagine a future in which companies such as Coursera, edX or the Khan Academy offer full curriculums for children starting in early primary education, supporting their education throughout their lives, and at prices that are affordable for even those at the lowest end of the income scale. Back before socialized healthcare, the poor were afforded care through charity, and I can imagine a future in which plunder is not the method through which education is provided, but through charity from private enterprise.

So what about the education system? I mean its truly one of the only things that everybody has in common. In many countries its 5 days a week for up to 12-18 years!  Its a system where what you will learn (the content) and how you will learn it (the curriculum) is highly regulated and centrally controlled, with the user/learner having very little say in either. Its also traditionally been an industry slow to adopt new technology. The US Department of Commerce found in 2003 that Education was actually the least IT intensive of 55 major industries (Dumagan, Gill, Ingram 2003). This may be due to an in-built caution when it comes to something as important as education, or it could be a lack of funding or access, particularly in the developing world.

The medium also brings with it an efficiency that public and many private institutions fail to put into practice, that could effectively cut the time spent studying in half, giving children the opportunity to focus on being children while also being students, rather than spending every waking hour dedicated to their studies.

Once flexible and even user-generated learning content embedded in MOOC’s trickles down to a primary school level, and super-capable mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are deployed widely enough to provide ubiquitous access, its really only the process we use to harness them (especially how to keep some strategic face to face time in the mix) that remains to be solved.

When these aspects are satisfactorily solved then, we are left to ask – Can we actually trust people to choose their own education like they choose toothbrushes, or say, tracks on Pandora? Sugatra Mitra who just won the $1 million dollar TED prize for his ‘school in a wall’ work would say yes. Do yourself a favour and ponder all these questions while watching his presentation here. Does it make you want to tap ‘thumbs up’ to add more like it to your stream of learning content?

If kids in poverty can learn programming at a walk-up kiosk when they have never set foot in a classroom, I think that the eventual progression wil definitely be toward something decidedly less centralized, toward a more individual learning experience.

Full article: Will MOOC Technology Break the Education Cartel? « Educational Technology Debate

Ron Paul launches his own home-school curriculum

Former Republican congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul has launched his own K-12 home-school curriculum to provide an “education in liberty like no other.” 

The curriculum, which includes courses on “the economics of the Austrian school,” provides its K-5 program for free, meaning that students and families will be able to learn under Ron Paul for six years “without spending a dime,” according to one of the curriculum’s high school teachers, Ludwig von Mises Institute senior fellow Tom Woods.

Ron Paul launches his own home-school curriculum | The Daily Caller

Write Drunk

Taxation is Theft

Taxation, by any measure or method, is theft. Debating this with a statist can be an exercise in frustration, but can be a learning experience (for the statist) if they have an open mind and the ability to reason.

Anyone care to begin?

Quote from The Case for Discrimination

From Walter Block's book, the Case for Discrimination:

In the previous census, the female-male income ratio for 30-and-over never-marrieds was 99.2 percent; and in that year, the ratio rose to 109.8 percent for those with a university degree who were never married. That is, the average salary of females was 9.8 percentage points more than that of males.

Wait, what? Women with comparable education and experience earned more than men? If sexual "discrimination" exists, why do the statistics tell the opposite story? What does this tell us about the motives of policymakers and groups working to change what statistically appears to be a lack of "discrimination" through public policy?

The second nail emerges when we consider the exotic implications of the employer discrimination hypothesis of the pay gap. If this analysis were true, one would expect to find a systematic and positive relationship between profit levels and the number of women in the firm or industry.

Full book available free in electronic formats:

http://mises.org/document/6078

Coursera starts to turn a profit

The Silicon Valley-based company brought in $220,000 in the first quarter after it started charging for verified completion certificates, its co-founders said. The company also receives revenue from an Amazon.com affiliates program if users buy books suggested by professors.

People tend to treat things they pay for differently than things they receive for free, a common observation in economics. By encouraging students to take advantage of low-cost courses, they might see more students complete the courses rather than simply casually observing. The low costs for MOOCs and similar platforms help to make education more accessible and affordable. With just an Internet connection and a computer, companies like Coursera might well change the nature of education in the near future, leaving traditional institutions to fade into the past.

The vast majority of users are just dropping in to take free courses, but the company introduced a “Signature Track” to try to put more weight behind the end-of-course awards issued by universities that offer courses through its platform. Users who pay for this have to submit a photo ID of themselves to the company and are also tracked based on their “unique typing pattern” to ensure that people who take tests or turn in assignments are who they say they are. Prices are set around $50 so far.

Free to consumers does not mean free to produce, so profits are necessary to keep the company, and the idea, moving forward into the future. 

The company remains interested in keeping courses free, Koller said. That’s how the company took off in the first place, as one of the top providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. But a free course does not mean a free end product, so the company is looking at commercializing its certificates. It suggests users can put Signature Track certificates on their resumes as "professional development" or "additional coursework." Coursera is committed to only offering courses from elite universities.

More:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/08/coursera-begins-make-money

Statism and Student Debt

What most folks fail to umderstand is that government guarantees and student loan subsidization is a part of the cause of this constant increase in higher education costs, and is its greatest weakness since these increases are unsustainable and the bubble that this public policy creates also leads to its collapse. As Margaret Thatcher said, "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Statists tend to disregard this reality and favor violece (forced redistribution of wealth and resources), but theft is theft regardless of the cooorful language used.

Anti-tax Day in Auburn

For anyone lucky enough to be near Auburn, Alabama, the Mises Institute is holding an anti-tax day event. Should be both educational and enlightening.

"As Murray Rothbard pointed out, taxation is the worst method of looting us. Inflation, for example, is destructive, of course, and it might make a loaf of bread cost $10. But at least you get a loaf of bread. With taxation, you get nothing."

http://www.mises.org/WorkInProgress/MisesCirclePostcards/Apr2013HS.html