I've seen educators struggle to herd their faculty cats, hire staff under industrial-era rules, and strive to accommodate students that know more than their professors about anything outside the "teach to test" topic. This is one of three books that I have digested these past ten days, along with
Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education and (in galley form)
Reflexive Practice: Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World. All three are 6 STAR books, and since I have only given this grade to 99 books out of the 1636, so at 6% of the total, this is saying a lot IMHO. These three books together, along with
Don't Bother Me Mom--I'm Learning!,
The Emerging Worldwide Electronic University: Information Age Global Higher Education (Praeger Studi) and my favorite deep books,
Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition and
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, comprise a basic library for anyone wishing to develop global strategies for taking any university into the future. Of course there are other great books, but in my limited experience, these are a foundation.
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK without first looking at the web site WorldIsOpen.com, and more specifically, the only part of the website that I found to be essential, the sixteen pages of links to every online resource mentioned in the book. Had I done this first, I could have cut my note-taking time in half. As it is, I have created a sixteen page alphabetized list of all the references, and include that in my more robust review of this book at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, where I can do things (such as link to my other 80+ education book reviews and include non-Amazon links) that Amazon simply will not allow.
BUY THIS BOOK. It is in my view an essential foundation for any university as well as any lower school or continuing education and training program that desires to increase its effectiveness by a thousand fold while also increasing its global reach by a million fold.
The basic premise up front: anyone can learn anything from anyone at anytime. The author charms me early on with his recognition of how broken our existing educational delivery system is, and his passion for how information and communication technologies (ICT) can empower all (at the end of the book he specifically focuses on the five billion poor and how they can learn via mobile learning) and create an "egalitarian learning frenzy." He considers education to be a human right--I agree and would add that it is also the only way we will achieve
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by harnessing
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.
In his critique of existing education the author excels at pointing out all that is not included in the narrow educational curriculums constrained by cultural bias and the physics of a 24-hour day, budgets, and so on. In his view textbooks and classrooms are on the way down, and oral and visual digital and especially mobile learning is on the way up.
I am immediately--and then continuously--impressed by the very deep and broad homework the author has done, integrating into every chapter so many actual resources (all with links at the book's website, soon books like this will come with embedded QR Code to make the analog to digital connection simple). The book is a tour of the horizon and a triumph of logic and presentation.
The ten key trends for those who read this review at Phi Beta Iota are:
01 Web-Searching
02 Blended Learning
03 Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS)
04 OpenCourseWare
05 Learning Portals
06 Learners as Teachers
07 Electronic Collaboration
08 Alternative Reality including Serious Games
09 Mobile Real-Time Learning
10 Networks of Personalized Learning
As my oldest son prepares to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the only school he was willing to apply to because of its new media program, I am totally pumped by the author's emphasis on education rather than any of the more obvious global threats (see
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, and on his emphasis on how visualization and new media will be the lever that will move education. Poverty is the number one high-level threat to humanity, and later on in the book my esteem for Nicholas Negroponte goes up as I digest a quote that connects low-cost laptops to education to the eradication to poverty to creating a prosperous world at peace. These guys get it, and virtually all our legislative and executive "leaders," at both the state and national levels, do not get it because they are not being "incentivized" to get it.
The author has a gift for summative categorization and draws ably and with full attribution on many other minds throughout this book. I like:
Globalization 1.0: Nations
Globalization 2.0: Multinational Corporations (MNC)
Globalization 3.0: Singular Individuals
Globalization 4.0: "We"
He points out that online learning favors collaborative work and team learning; problem-based learning (rather than applying canned "solutions"); generative (incremental modification); exploratory; and interactive learning. In short, rote learning in the classroom is constraining while online learning is liberating and empowering.
Most of my notes are obviated by the author's superb resource section (WorldIsOpen.com/resources.php). Here are the highlights outside of my listing all of the leads I want to follow up, related to the section of the book.
01 Web-Searching. Faster is not better, still missing a great deal of structure and substance on the Internet. Open everything is here to stay--open content, open office, open library, open document. See my briefing on "Open Everything" at oss.net/GNOME.
02 Blended Learning. We must stop holding students back! Online pushes reading and writing skills as well as presentation skills and technology skills. We must rapidly accelerate means of recognizing learning accomplished online (e.g. challenge tests). Learning must be offered "on demand" and across every device imaginable (the MP3 player shines in this book). However, blended means just that--online is not a substitute for face to face and team interaction.
03 Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS). I am the primary proponent for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and now public intelligence, and as an honorary hacker have long understood and admired the F/OSS movement started by Richard Stallman. Along with OSINT and F/OSS, Open Spectrum completes the Tri-Fecta. It is essential, if we are to rapidly achieve all we are capable of, that we leverage F/OSS across all university functionalities. This is also how we enable the eight tribes of intelligence (academia, civil society, commercial, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental) to do multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making (M4IS2, a Swedish military concept I have adopted).
04 OpenCourseWare. MIT, which is also the birthplace of modern hacking as recounted in
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, gets full credit all it has done in this area, and the author provides a very rich discussion of many other similar initiatives including the Peer to Peer University (P2PU).
05 Learning Portals. These are in their infancy. The author cites a number of important ones, and the availability of platforms to create more learning portals, but he does not address the abject fragmentation of knowledge and the urgency of creating an overall architecture so that we can restore the links between disciplines and domains and do "Whole Learning."
06 Learners as Teachers. Here again the author is phenomenal at reviewing some of the most important initiatives in this area, and my notes are irrelevant in the face of his superb listing of electronic links, chapter by chapter, at his WorldIsOpen.com. He does observe that quality control and sufficiency of funding are issues, and I certainly agree, with the observation that there is plenty of money for education, we just have to eliminate corruption in government....
07 Electronic Collaboration. This is a section I want to come back to, after I have checked out 1kg, TwinBooks, ePals, iLearn, and others. We still do not have the basics that Alta Vista offered before Hewlett Packard lost its mind and let them all go--the eight functions of shared directories, access and competency directories, budgets, maps, libraries, calendars, and forums are still scattered with no back office that cuts across disciplines.
08 Alternative Reality including Serious Games.
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