DIY U

In the past week I have discovered a new mode of communication: the video blog. (My friend, sex educator Jamye Waxman is a mistress of the form).

Here’s 2 minutes from a Q&A I did with George Haines, an educational tech consultant who I met over Twitter. Ironically, it’s about the pros and cons of distance learning, and it is demonstrating a “con”–technical difficulty of the Skype video not being lined up with the audio, so it’s better to listen to than to watch it.

And here’s a 3-minute video I shot through my webcam for the folks at SxGenY, giving some thoughts off the top of my head about Gen Y in the workforce.

I’ll be doing a webinar next month and then later hopefully a whole web video series so I’m trying to build up my skills a bit so I don’t flick my eyes around or flip my hair or do other stuff that’s so distracting on a small screen.

Thanks to educational futurists Norm Friesen and Stephen Downes for responding so thoughtfully to DIY U on their blogs. (I spoke to Downes for the book, as he notes, and saw Friesen at the OpenEd conference in Vancouver last August.)

I was amused to read that the picture I’m painting of the future of higher ed strikes them as “moderate.” I’m preparing for the opposite reaction from the public at large, and in my mind, it’s pretty radical. It’s just that I think change can be absolutely profound without being total. You don’t have to institute a 10-day week to mark the fact that you’re doing business differently.

ps: an article I wrote for Fast Company that is partly drawn from the book won second place in a contest.

I sent out an email this week to all 3700 people in my Google contacts, letting them know that they could pre-order DIY U. from Amazon. I got amazing messages back from long-lost friends, relatives, and this note from Richard Stallman, who I interviewed once for a story, which I am sharing with you in the name of free software:

It is not good to buy books from Amazon, because that means Big
Brother knows what books you bought.  Likewise, it is not good to
recommend that people buy anything from Amazon: some people might DO
it (although I never would).

(You can also pre-order directly from the publisher, or from your local independent bookstore.)

That aside, I really, really appreciate everyone’s feedback and encouragement. People say writing is solitary work but the support you get from a community of readers and family and friends at a moment like this is truly tremendous. Two of my best friends are a public school principal and a family court lawyer, and I wish I had more opportunities to publicly cheer them on the way people have been doing for me.

So….Thank You!

Online learning has been growing much faster than traditional enrollment for at least six years, and almost one in four college students now takes at least one class online. This can be great news for students, but only if institutions take advantage of the latest research in designing online courses, and — a bigger if — if they pass the savings on to students.

Read the rest at the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog, and let me know what you think!

Chronicle of Higher Ed

One in three students drop out of high school. America’s Promise, the campaign that hosted Obama today, says just 12 percent of the nation’s high schools generate half of the nation’s dropouts.

Obama proposals such as early-college high school and dual enrollment are based on evidence that high school students will be more motivated to stay in school and finish if they see that their classes are related to a valuable credential and to jobs. The more straitened circumstances that students are in, the more important the economic motive for further education.

I’m a bigger fan of dual enrollment and career academies than early college, because I like the idea of students having a right to free public education that connects them to jobs.

However, if we don’t stop underfunding our community colleges, creating new programs isn’t going to get any more students through them. California’s community college enrollment dropped by 1 percent this year thanks to budget cuts.

I’ll be talking about the new CARD Act:  which has special provisions to protect college students ,
among other rules designed to halt abusive practices of credit card companies:

*retroactive rate increases *late-fee traps (like moving the due date around from month to month) *some hidden fees, *double-cycle billing (calculating interest based on last month’s balance), and *new disclosure and accountability requirements.

Shoutout goes to the PIRGs for tirelessly pursuing this important bill among a variety of other issues affecting both college affordability and Americans’ precarious financial security.

From the NYT:

According to the study, “Squeeze Play 2010: Continued Public Anxiety on Cost, Harsher Judgments on How Colleges are Run,” a growing share of Americans believes that college is essential to success — 55 percent, compared with 31 percent in 2000. But at the same time, a dwindling share — 28 percent, compared with 45 percent a decade earlier — thinks college is available to the vast majority of qualified, motivated students.

Americans believe colleges could accept more students and charge less tuition without compromising educational quality. They’re also increasingly dissatisfied with college leadership that claims it’s impossible.

The public is right. DIY U explains exactly how this can be done.

Chelsea Green has posted some preview video:

We also posted an excerpt to Scribd.com, which currently has almost 3,000 reads!

I’m Anya.

This is my site about the future of education. In the spirit of DIY U, I made it myself–with help from friends, colleagues, and Twitterfolks.

You might also be interested in my new free ebook and website The Edupunks’ Guide full of resources for independent learners, my Fast Company column Life In Beta, my Tribune Media column The Savings Game, my Book DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of  Higher Education, my Twitter feed@Anya1anya, or in having me come speak at a campus or gathering near you.