Comments on: Salon Interview is Up http://diyubook.com/2010/03/salon-interview-is-up/ Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the coming transformation of higher education Thu, 18 Jul 2013 18:44:23 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Frank Hecker http://diyubook.com/2010/03/salon-interview-is-up/comment-page-1/#comment-75 Frank Hecker Sat, 03 Apr 2010 05:27:14 +0000 http://diyubook.com/?p=123#comment-75 "I actually spend very little space in DIY U talking about anything to do with the Ivy League or traditional measures of prestige, .... Yet Harvard, Yale, et. al. come up several times in this interview." Probably because Ivy League graduates are significantly over-represented among Salon.com's readers and (more importantly) writers. In any case I agree that by and large the elite institutions are not where the action is in terms of educational transformation; indeed we'd expect them to be the very last to be affected, because they have no real motivation to change. Innovation will occur first on the margins and spread from there. For example, in an area I have some knowledge of, teaching open source software development practices to undergraduate programming students, a provincial college in Toronto, Seneca College, is way out ahead of any elite university computer science program in terms of preparing students for the future globalized world of distributed software development. “I actually spend very little space in DIY U talking about anything to do with the Ivy League or traditional measures of prestige, …. Yet Harvard, Yale, et. al. come up several times in this interview.”

Probably because Ivy League graduates are significantly over-represented among Salon.com’s readers and (more importantly) writers. In any case I agree that by and large the elite institutions are not where the action is in terms of educational transformation; indeed we’d expect them to be the very last to be affected, because they have no real motivation to change.

Innovation will occur first on the margins and spread from there. For example, in an area I have some knowledge of, teaching open source software development practices to undergraduate programming students, a provincial college in Toronto, Seneca College, is way out ahead of any elite university computer science program in terms of preparing students for the future globalized world of distributed software development.

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