Rethinking Education

This video was produced as a contribution to the EDUCAUSE book, The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing, edited by Richard Katz and available as an e-Book at http://www.educause.edu/thetowerandth... or commercially at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0967... Produced in 2007 as a conversation starter in small groups. Released in 2011 as a conversation starter online.

• Category

  Education

[popkocher]

I love your inspiring videos! But those 25.000.000 songs for instance, some of them have copyright, I wish you'd adress the questions and implications of such free access more clearly. It is trivial but: sometimes I can't watch an interesting youtube video simply because of that. On the other hand: what about those people, who have no backup profession to support their creative output, giving away their new and fought for thoughts for free?

Furthermore: sometimes Wikipedia can be pretty lame....

[mwesch]

Good point. I should have thrown in something from Larry Lessig on this matter.

[Vanessa Blackburn]

Mwesch, why are all the voices on this video male? Is it one speaker or multiple speakers who all happen to by male? Why no women's voices?

[neverstoptrying0108]

popo

[Gold Bullion]

Thanks

[Eric Schiltz]

How are you ill serving your students when the information on the internet is mostly bogus?

I think you ought to rethink the internet.

[Eric Schiltz]

IT doubles its bandwidth every year. This is nowhere near fast enough. Any system will tend to grow and fill the void. That is, like a gas tends to fill the container, a system will grow to fill all available bandwidth. Web pages have gotten longer and more code, and more of them too. There will come a time when we reach a tipping point—a point of diminishing returns and eventually will run out of bandwidth and everyone’s searches will become slower and slower.

[Eric Schiltz]

So, we have personal opinions, sales/marketing and research in areas that very few understand out there on the internet. These are good reasons to train anyone by using it?

The Internet distribution of information. So, rats distributed the Black Plague.

What is need for software on the internet, for what purposes? Software in and of itself is not good. There is plenty of software that is bad and useless.

[Eric Schiltz]

It is over-hyped but not because of the dot com bust although that is part of it. It is over-hyped because it is mostly a lot of hot air packaged up with bells and whistles and it fools people into thinking it should be use to train our future leaders (and even our elementary school children.)

Collective intelligence? Collective personal opinions you mean. Most of the truly important research findings are such that very people can understand them, such as, in genetics, etc.

[Eric Schiltz]

80,000 new blogs a day, again a cancerous growth. Growth in and of itself is not good. This is an appeal to numbers logical fallacy (error), as is the above statements about Wikipedia numbers.

Very little on the net is vetted. It is full of personal opinion and sales pitches.

Books in the library, at least, are edited by the publisher or by the organization responsible for the publication.

The quality of the knowledge is exactly what I am questioning (discussing).

[Eric Schiltz]

The Internet was supposed to be for the free exchange of research among the many universities/colleges of the world. Its growth, like that of a cancer, has been mainly because of sales/marketing and personal opinion. Social networking sites are just glorified e-mail.

It is the openness of the internet that can cause problems.

Same can be said for all of those blogs.

[Eric Schiltz]

I question the whole premise or question. Rebuild education – what for?

The internet is a tool, and not a very good one at that. Would you use a cannon to swat a fly?

There is no such thing as a global culture. Just look at all of the differing cultures in the US not to mention around the world. I would think that a cultural anthropologist/archeologist would want to see differences and not the same thing all of the time.