[iDC] iCollege

[Trebor Scholz]

Education, caught up in a cost spiral, is in crisis. Tuition is on the 
rise and in the foreseeable future, higher education will be as 
unaffordable as a Prada bag. Anya Kamenetz' DIY U frames that well.

The future lies neither solely in distance education nor in informal 
personal learning networks but rather in hybrid approaches. What we are 
witnessing now are dress rehearsals where "e.learning" is trying on the 
role of the cash cow that can deliver it all and DIY universities 
sometimes make it sound as if they are the panacea. The reality is 
somewhere in between. In the years to come, the university will lose 
some of its centrality to informal learning projects (1) and variants of 
profit-driven courseware. Let's stop pretending that this is not 
happening. To succeed, however, the university will need to up its game 
and make its boundaries more porous by meaningfully integrating emerging 
ways of knowing and new social media (2).

(1) Please send more examples of informal learning projects.
The Public School (http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/)
University of the People (http://www.uopeople.org/)
University of Openess (http://uo.twenteenthcentury.com/)
Copenhagen Free University 
(http://www.copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk/index.html)
Manoa Free University (http://manoafreeuniversity.org/)
EduFactory (http://www.edu-factory.org/)
Radical Education Collective (http://radical.temp.si/)
Free Slow University of Warsaw (http://www.wuw2009.pl/index.php?lang=eng)
Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (http://www.tsci.ca/)

(2) I suggest some implementations of social media in the classroom in 
this slideshow: http://tinyurl.com/c2l6wy