DIY U

In the past week or so DIY U has become the subject of a lot of really interesting conversations in various online media. There’s a conversation ongoing at the Twitter hashtag #DIYU. I particularly liked this exchange (from the bottom):

1. xolotl @BryanAlexander I like it. Is the territory metaphor based on Deleuzian deterritorialization? http://bit.ly/cv8Buj #DiYU
2. GardnerCampbell @BryanAlexander Great quote. Classic “administered intellectuality” move. Cf. Yeats, “The Scholars.” Cough in ink indeed. #DIYU
3. BryanAlexander Neat formula: “The university continuously expands its territory by adapting and assimilating the empirical into the scholastic” p. 7, #DiYU

There’s also a series of blog posts by different authors responding to specific chapters of the book, and there’s even an attempt at a crowd-curated review (3 authors so far).

When I was in the creative writing program at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in high school, there was an ironclad rule that the author had to remain silent while her precious work was being workshopped. The piece belongs to the readers now and anything that’s not on the page, you have no right to make excuses about. Also, I have plenty of room to expand on my ideas on this blog and elsewhere. If anyone has specific questions or critiques that you think I should respond to, you can direct them here or to me on Twitter at anya1anya.

All I really want to say is way to go edupunks, and thanks for being so passionate and creative and generous and engaged with these ideas.

Oh, and one more thing. I think Gardner Campbell’s being generous, but he’s also right. GardnerCampbell The book is journalism, for better or worse. Much of the time, a helpful document of an important moment in this conversation. #DIYU

That is pretty much exactly what I set out to do, for better or worse. And what I’m trying to do now is widen out the conversation beyond existing networks of people who are already professionally involved with education, as awesome as you all are, to the millions of young people and their parents who have such a crying need for access to high quality education. It’s. About. The. Students. That’s why, for example, I needed to take so much and space explaining what is wrong with what we have now–if it is so obvious to everyone that the system is broken, then why do colleges get record numbers of applicants year after year?

Forty people showed up to my talk at the public library in Las Vegas yesterday, including  a bunch of real live college-aged students, and they collectively bought 20 books, which shows that they found some value in this conversation, enough to want to take it home with them. That’s my inspiration to keep going.