This post began as an assignment for an online english composition course at the University of South Florida. The class was entirely online and required class members to use online tools (SoundCloud, YouTube, etc.) to create different types of media.

I have become so convinced that the online presentation of content is the new paradigm in education that I have decided to experiment with this blog as a curation tool for lifelong learners, independent scholars and anyone who wants to learn. My intention is to spotlight material that is available for free for anyone with access to a web browser.

This is my project presentation; consider it a working white paper.

22 April 2012
Self Learning as a Lifelong Process

The distribution of education, the idea of the University, the nature of dissemination of information, is coming under pressures threatening to dissolve basic assumptions regarding the process we call education. In many cases the model for distribution of education and information has broken down. The Internet and the web of communication that now ties most of the planet together allows for redistribution of material, technology, and knowledge that is unprecedented in human history. The redistribution of knowledge is challenging the assumptions underlying higher education: the guarantee that a graduate possesses a basic skill set and the value of credentials awarded by the university.
Two thirds of college seniors graduated with loans in 2010, and they carried an average of $25,000 in debt. They also face the highest unemployment rate for young college graduates in recent history at 9.1%. Those statistics come from the Project on Student Debt. At the same time new data released by the US Department of Education shows that 8.8% of student loan borrowers had defaulted in the two-year period from 2008-2010 (“Project on Student Debt”).
That’s just for a Bachelor’s degree; if you continue on in academia the costs just get higher. Even with the many scholarships and loans available, many potential students will simply never have the opportunity to receive a university education. Their financial and living situations do not allow them to participate in the usual academic process.
The de-institutionalizing of education allowed by the Internet is creating industries, notably in the digital sector. Most of the new jobs created in the next ten years have not been invented yet. The rapid rate of change is making the idea of a “career” impractical as people become more mobile, changing jobs and even careers many times during a working life; “the new reality is multiple gigs… constant pressure to learn new things and adapt to new work situations, and no guarantee that you’ll stay in a single industry” (“Four Year Career”). The University System is not constructed to react to such rapid change. These are the new rules of disintermediation and revolution: “Our institutions are out of date; the long career is dead; any quest for solid rules is pointless… you can’t rely on an established business model or a corporate ladder to point your way (“Generation Flux”). This sounds like chaos. But it simply means old structures are breaking down while new structures have not yet been formulated or at least stabilized.

This is our time of challenge: to live in interesting times, when old structures crumble and new ones have yet to be established.

More tomorrow…