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June 15, 2009
Auld Lang Syne
Let me zoom out for a minute: I believe strongly in the future of universities as global education brands rather than physical campuses, towns, communities or facilities. Although we like to think we're the vanguard of technology and innovation, in a lot of ways we lag behind even the retail industry. Relying on the "one-to-many" pattern in the lecture hall is going to get us in trouble. Web culture has taught us that openness is more effective, practical, and even monetizable in many cases than old-fashioned models.
There are a couple conclusions here. First, it's our responsibility to be one hundred percent transparent with our research projects, our technological developments, and our culture in order to effectively sell the brand globally. The benefit of this is saturating underserved markets, instilling love - not respect or envy - of the institutional brand into the genius kid with an OLPC in Ghana, who will remember that relationship and then want to become part of the brand in the future.
Second, to bring this back around to something vaguely related to the project at hand - we should take every opportunity to make projects like this revolve around teaching and learning. Today's student isn't served as well in a lecture hall as she is by being part of a team whose product (even if it iterates in a year's time and looks nothing like the interface she worked on) is public and creating actual value; we could accomplish this by approaching our educational mission more like entrepreneurship than like content distribution.
Posted by dchase at June 15, 2009 09:48 PM