Irrelevancy--coming to a campus near you--and soon!

In a speech covered by the Deseret News, David Wiley predicts that colleges and universities will be irrelevant by 2020.  

This goes a step farther than a paper I wrote for my MS in which I argued the reasons why online learning would radically change education, in short: digital natives for students, tax repulsion, incessant upgrading of job skills, and the destruction of informational hierarchy.  Wiley uses the sames premises to arrive at the conclusion that universities are becoming dinosaurs.  Why would a student go to a class on a campus, ivy-covered or not, to sit still in a lecture room with 30 or 300 others and listen to one person speak for an hour or more?  As a person who LIKES a good lecture, even I am beginning to find myself itching for connectivity during such events.

Wiley notes that the one thing that campuses still have a monopoly on is their degrees.  I'm predicting that won't last for long.  Look for Google to cobble together a degree program based on online classes from around the world.  A BA from the U of Google, anyone?

Enlivening Online Courses

In recreating my online courses, I'm looking for more interactive, more graphically and media rich sources for exploration.  Two that are taking up too, too much time are YouTube EDU and LearningOutLoud.  As I'm looking into future studies for the next cycle of ENGL 1, it was really great to find the Great Valley Center video "Why the Central Valley Matters."   This is just one of some really great lectures--the kind you wish we'd get at COS, alas!  But collected here, it's an arguably even better resource.

Learning Out Loud is a collection of podcasts slanted toward more academic subjects, but infused with enough pop culture to be entertaining.  Again, easily searchable and a strong resource for finding rich media to add to curriculum.

So here I am in Santa Fe and...

...my biggest worry is how good the internet connection will be.  Forget the number of bugs in the bed (former phobia), the nature of the discoloration of the towels, the possibility of being mugged in the alley.  The stress that balls my stomach is all about connectivity.  After a 10 hour drive envying my fully-connected and online niece whose smartphone can effortlessly tell us intricate details about desert flora and fauna and more about local history than any E Clampus Vitus marker, all I want to do when I check in is get wired and find out what's going on in my internet world.  Salon ran this piece last week about the Freedom program that shuts off all internet access in some bizarre attempt to help people be more productive.  Oh, please!  Let me have my addiction.  It's nothing a two-day drive across the desert won't fix if needs be....