Re: [xmca] The business of education

[Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>]

We already have young people who only know how to talk to people over their
social media and not those next to them. Now we don't have the teachers
mediating ethics and values in their relationships with their learners.
Perhaps the new generation will only be able to mediate their relationships
of every kind through machines - are those relationships with people going
to survive this assault.

(The epistemology of learning as linear is a huge problem, but its effects
on relationships that are more dangerous.)

Carol

On 30 July 2013 15:26, Wagner Luiz Schmit <wagner.schmit@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> This just came out:
>
>
> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-big-data-taking-teachers-out-lecturing-business
>
>
> Wagner
>
> On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 10:30 AM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
> > And lots of people marvel at the progress, Helena.
> > bait and switch.... and pay taxes like Apple!
> > :-)
> > mike
> >
> > On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Helena Worthen <
> helenaworthen@gmail.com>wrote:
> >
> >> Hello -- the letter from Meister is really worth reading. It explains
> why
> >> MOOCs need the CSU system (and other public higher education
> connections)
> >> more than CSU needs MOOCs.
> >>
> >> Although short-term, the linkup with Coursera to offer MOOCs in various
> >> disciplines appears to solve the immediate problem of how to expand
> access
> >> to already crowded, booked-up, high-tuition face to face classrooms, it
> >> solves a different problem for Coursera and other big MOOC companies.
> >>
> >> That problem is, long-term ‹ and this is an important problem, since
> >> Coursera, like the other MOOC companies, is a private company, like
> >> Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo,  Amazon, etc. -- how to make money. Right now
> >> MOOCs are free, or at least some are free. How can they figure out how
> >> much to charge? How much are they "worth" --?
> >>
> >> The  simplest way to figure that out would be to hook up with a state
> >> university and say, "Our class is worth three credits at San Jose State,
> >> and tuition at San Jose State for three credits is $2,400, so our class
> >> should cost $2,400."  But it can get much, much  more fine-grained than
> >> that, since all kinds of personal information gets collected when
> someone
> >> enrolls in a class.
> >>
> >> Bottom line- without the hookup to established institutions, all the
> MOOCs
> >> offer is celebrity teachers doing what are essentially TV shows or
> >> audiotape classes (you may have noticed that the price on Great
> >> Teacher-type audio tapes have crashed from $299 to less than $100
> >> recently). So no matter how celebrated a professor is, it's the hookup
> to
> >> an institution that makes it possible to establish market value. And
> make
> >> huge money in the long run.
> >>
> >> Which is basically gutting the public education system and transferring
> >> its authority to  exchange credits for tuition to a private company.
> >>
> >> Another argument for free public higher education -- the only way that
> >> public education can compete against a for-profit system.
> >>
> >>
> >> Helena
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On 5/11/13 1:30 PM, "mike cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> >The following letter from the UC faculty association president seems
> worth
> >> >distributing. Fraught futures.
> >> >mike
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >CUCFA President Meister's Open Letter to Coursera Founder Daphne Koller
> >> > http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.php
> >> >
> >> >......
> >>
> >>
> >> >http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.ph<
> http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.php>
> >> >__________________________________________
> >>
> >>
> >>
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
>


-- 
Carol A  Macdonald Ph D (Edin)
Developmental psycholinguist
Academic, Researcher,  and Editor  *EditLab.net*
Honorary Research Fellow: Department of Linguistics, Unisa