Friday, September 04, 2009

Think "Favela-Chic Education" Not "Disrupting Class"

Bruce Sterling:

*I’m kind of taking this guy’s point about the crushing economic factors here, but I don’t understand why these online educationaly enterprises even need to *pretend* to be a “college.” If we’re really looking at Clayton Christensen style “disruption,” we ought to be abandoning the whole idea of “education,” of degrees, schooling, grades, papers, publishing, theses, doctorates, any of that.

*You just get on line and you start messing with stuff. At some point, the other practitioners notice you and start linking to you. And they buy stuff from you, or they praise you for what you are doing. And then you know that you know it. And that’s an end to it.

*Maybe somebody could invent some formal tests for you, if they were all worried about it. Otherwise, what the heck: bring on the rocket-science and the brain surgery! Got all the instructables you can eat!

*Of course we’re not “formally educated,” but given that we’re living in a re-purposed car showroom in some wildfire-flaming barrio in East Los Angeles, who cares about that? You can’t *make us* care. You are Main Stream Education and you are so over.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_for_99_a_month.php

Perhaps today I'll finish my stalled post on The Caryatids.

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