Owen, and all,
For me, the value of higher education is the bringing together of large numbers of people who are in transition in their lives and exposing them to a smaller number of people who have thought hard about important things. It has never been clear to me how MOOC;s meet that goal. It is also not particularly clear to me how administrators serve it. Another important goal of University life is the pursuit of unfettered curiosity. More and more, money has tainted research and University researchers have become more like industrial project directors. They have failed to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity offered them to find out how the world really is. Everybody on the faculty wants to be rich and powerful; nobody wants to be a dedicated egghead anymore. They have sold their souls and gotten damned little for them in return. This one reason why I think it is so important to support St. Johns College in this time of impersonal education. Whatever else they do, they still embody the ideal of face to face conversation on important matters. Nick From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Monday, June 24, 2013 12:37 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Forget MOOCs--Let's Use MOOA If this had been circulated on April 1, I would have suspected it of being a spoof, challenging the college administrators with the same kind of job-performance/security threat that professors have been given by MOOCs. While I think this might be as inevitable as MOOCs, I think we will find we enjoy the fruits of MOOCs and MOOAs in the same way we enjoy the fruits of WalMart, Home Depot, Best Buy and other BigBoxia. We will badmouth them in public but sneak into them in private to get the economies of scale, all the while whining about the loss of a rich and diverse ecosystem provided by the thing these behemoths replace. - Steve Your children's and grandchildren's college tuition is going up much faster than inflation. One reason--not the only one, but one big one--is the burgeoning class of administrators. The vice-presidents proliferate like those of banks, and if you add in compliance officers of one kind and another, the growth is phenomenal. Joe tells me of sitting through a mandatory sexual harassment tutorial, whose content could have been covered in ten minutes, but which took two "harassment officers" an hour to state the obvious. What particularly offended him was their clear contempt for the professoriate. WE run the university dudes, was their attitude, and you're just the pesky people we have to endure. This is an Ivy League university, Columbia. God only knows what it's like in the state schools. FWIW, I sent this on to a couple of other members of the professoriate, who laughed like hell. On Jun 23, 2013, at 9:40 PM, Tom Johnson wrote: Well, for me at least, we had a near maximum amount of independence without a lot of interference from administrators. I'm sure that varies widely, but I enjoyed it. You can have the time or the money, and I've always taken the time. -tj On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 9:03 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: It was always supposed MOOA would be a huge part of MOOC success, if indeed it did succeed. Thanks for the pointer, very interesting indeed. For example, Udacity and Coursera (and MITx) all agree that administration cost reduction is a huge step towards the solution of cost of education. I wish I *did* have a better understand the ins/outs of Education .. whenever I hear Ed and others talk about the arcane aspects of University Life .. I realize that I just don't Get It. And don't want to! -- Owen On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 7:41 PM, Tom Johnson <[email protected]> wrote: For those of us who have hung around universities for a while..... (Tkx to Joe Traub) http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/06/forget_moocslets_use_mooa. html --tj ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com -- ========================================== J. T. Johnson Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA 505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h) Twitter: jtjohnson http://www.jtjohnson.com <http://www.jtjohnson.com/> [email protected] ========================================== ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com "Bounded Rationality," by Pamela McCorduck, the second novel in the series, Santa Fe Stories, Sunstone Press, is now available both as ink-on-paper and as an e-book. "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." ― Jane Austen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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