Something to ponder: if there is a problem with making money from the site now, are you confident that loans or gov grants to expand capacity will help? These sources of cash (as well as investors / acquirers) represent a only part of making an online business work.
Hopefully this will keep the "extension course" and its cousin the "seminar" cash machines as bay. If anything, it will put pressure on other universisites to open up.
If this project works, it could be a big countermeasure to the widespread commercialization of learning that we've seen. Maybe we really don't have to pay $100,000 to get a good education (or $1,000 for a crappy seminar)!
From the MediaLab to the sponsorship of the W3C, MIT has taken the lead in education. Public universities should learn from them and have a more open attitude about sharing coueseware and other resources with the public who help fund them.
Where would computer hardware be today if it weren't for Apple's risky popularization of new technology? I am glad that the "NIH" era is over at Apple (as are Intel and Lucent).
Conversation is inevitably moderated, otherwise it isn't a conversation. Senatorial debate is self-governed by rules of order, as is behavior in a mosh pit or at a stock exchange.
The Internet makes it trivial to use rules of interaction to create new kinds conversational architecture. In what social situation can you easily filter and order the most interesting comments?
The Internet has liberated the conversation and is an opportunity to forge new forms of Democracy.
You make a great point. I agree with the other repose to this thread which indicates that automation is an accompanying threat to the larger corporate threat which you illustrate.
People do not realize how thing the walls of civility are and how we all have to stridently work to strengthen the protections of the individual (while at the same time keeping the state from getting too powerful). As it has been said before, we are in a race between eduation and catastrophe.
I should have posted my comment as a reponse to what you wrote, but I didn't see it in time.
A revolution in thought or in process is more about change than about freedom. I am not convinced that freedom was inherently part of the the widespread acceptance of the Internet.
Revolutionaries, whether academic, scientific, or even political, have high hopes that the outcome will make them "free" from the "old way", and mistakenly associate this feeling with freedom. This definitely happened with the Internet movement, accompanied by lots of silly advertising. However, just because the "old way" is being replaced does not mean that its replacement will bring along more freedom for the ride. The French found that out 200 years ago. Everyone found that out 60 years ago.
Thomas Kuhn created a very sound working theory about scientific revolutions; he proposed the term "paradign shift", and this methodology can be used to understand our little Internet revolution. For example, he illustrated how the keepers of the "old way" naturally attempt to counter the paradigm of the "new way". Sound familiar? At the end of a revolutionary cycle, a new paradign is accepted as people begin to see its benefits and integrate it into their thinking.
Positing that the revolution is stalled is to miss the point. The internet is being integrated into the process across the board and in depth; the paradigm has shifted.
The question that is important to me is: do we collectively now have more freedom? The internet brought with it more options, and maybe less freedom. We all have to continue fighting for the freedom that many of us assumed would be installed right next to the ethernet card.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.equalfooting.com/
http://www.sba.gov/financing/
Something to ponder: if there is a problem with making money from the site now, are you confident that loans or gov grants to expand capacity will help? These sources of cash (as well as investors / acquirers) represent a only part of making an online business work.
If this project works, it could be a big countermeasure to the widespread commercialization of learning that we've seen. Maybe we really don't have to pay $100,000 to get a good education (or $1,000 for a crappy seminar)!
From the MediaLab to the sponsorship of the W3C, MIT has taken the lead in education. Public universities should learn from them and have a more open attitude about sharing coueseware and other resources with the public who help fund them.
Where would computer hardware be today if it weren't for Apple's risky popularization of new technology? I am glad that the "NIH" era is over at Apple (as are Intel and Lucent).
The Internet makes it trivial to use rules of interaction to create new kinds conversational architecture. In what social situation can you easily filter and order the most interesting comments?
The Internet has liberated the conversation and is an opportunity to forge new forms of Democracy.
People do not realize how thing the walls of civility are and how we all have to stridently work to strengthen the protections of the individual (while at the same time keeping the state from getting too powerful). As it has been said before, we are in a race between eduation and catastrophe.
I should have posted my comment as a reponse to what you wrote, but I didn't see it in time.
- James
Revolutionaries, whether academic, scientific, or even political, have high hopes that the outcome will make them "free" from the "old way", and mistakenly associate this feeling with freedom. This definitely happened with the Internet movement, accompanied by lots of silly advertising. However, just because the "old way" is being replaced does not mean that its replacement will bring along more freedom for the ride. The French found that out 200 years ago. Everyone found that out 60 years ago.
Thomas Kuhn created a very sound working theory about scientific revolutions; he proposed the term "paradign shift", and this methodology can be used to understand our little Internet revolution. For example, he illustrated how the keepers of the "old way" naturally attempt to counter the paradigm of the "new way". Sound familiar? At the end of a revolutionary cycle, a new paradign is accepted as people begin to see its benefits and integrate it into their thinking.
Positing that the revolution is stalled is to miss the point. The internet is being integrated into the process across the board and in depth; the paradigm has shifted.
The question that is important to me is: do we collectively now have more freedom? The internet brought with it more options, and maybe less freedom. We all have to continue fighting for the freedom that many of us assumed would be installed right next to the ethernet card.