The University as Co-op

Comes a report on Mondragon University, in the Basque...

Nor is the cooperative university model a solution to all education’s ills. It’s private and charges tuition (a little more than $7,000 a year),

Hey, those are exactly the figures I show in the biz plan for Seattle Teacher's College!

What is being done now is to collapse education into vocational training, teaching into a fee-for-service form of employment, and research only as a profit generator. The faculty are being put on term contracts and administration is now a career with big salaries and great distance from the places where value is actually being produced. The overall result is the consolidation of a two class system: elite education for economic and political elites and vocational education for the masses.

So when will this take off?  Who knows....

MOOCs In Retreat

Comes an article in slate that covers what we covered a few months ago...

As of this month, that prediction is looking overblown. After a year in which almost every big-name university in the United States rushed to get in on massive open online courses, or MOOCs, the backlash is in full force. And no wonder: The idea of free online video lectures replacing traditional classrooms not only offends many educators’ core values, but it threatens their jobs. Worse, the early evidence suggests the model may not work very well: A partnership between San Jose State and Udacity this spring ended with more than half the students failing. In the same spaces where advocates not long ago trumpeted the MOOC revolution, critics now warn of the “MOOC delusion.”

The idea that MOOCs would replace anything was absurd,  the medieval model of sage on the stage will live on like the Pub and the Trade Show Booth.

The MOOC will never be anything more than a study group, and will not come into its own until is figures out how to take the top 5% (one in twenty) and let them lead the other 19 in studying the material.

People keep trying to ascribe to the web powers just not there.

Counterintuitive and Bifurcation

There is something counterintuitive about these articles...  one the one hand we have witness that traffic does not matter on websites.  I've been saying that for a while...

Capital New York is small in traffic. Is there a mandate to boost those numbers?High traffic is way overrated.  It works if you are truly a traffic hose, like BuzzFeed. But, for speciality sites, it is all about the right readers. The advertisers we want are the knowing ones seeking to influence a very attractive and hard-to-reach set of readers. If we deliver those readers, the traffic numbers will mean little.

And then comes this, in media it is the conference, not the magazine that matters.

“From my experience, I knew conferences and live events were a big revenue generator,” Waxler, who had previously co-founded the Glasshouse NY and Glasshouse SF events, said. “There’s something special about live events and the FABB conference immediately became the big, shiny, attractive thing to sell to advertisers. It pushed a lot of revenue to the magazine.”

 So we have these business realities based on human imperatives.  The web was supposed to be a mass communicator, when in fact it is a mass customizer.  The web was supposed to connect people, when in fact it isolates them.

When you market right and get an audience in the cold online world, you then invite them to meet-up at conferences.

People don't change.

Bernstein on Teaching

Leonard Bernstein considered teaching and working as integral, and upward spiral.  When you have a topic you love as much as Bernstein loved his, you love working and teaching as much as he loved his.

We may not be as great, or even as sensitive and intuitive in ours as he as in his, but we can certainly enjoy to our full capacity, as his does in his...