Committee of the Hole

Dear Colleagues,

tech-ed

More on Sustaining Unsustainable
Sustainabilities
in Education

The quote below was forwarded to me by
a colleague who got it forwarded to him
by his son. THAT RIGHT THERE: the
forwarding-ability, is what COUNTS.
The content? Not so much. The media is
the message these days, damnit—not the
“message.”

A couple days ago a student forwarded a
rumination on “suicide”—to a mess of students
and staff and folks he knew and didn’t know.
THAT RIGHT THERE: the forwarding-ability,
is what COUNTS. The content? Not so much.
The media is the message these days, is what
I’m saying. The content? Not so much.
Need we argue?

How we package & Parcel our Parts:
physics
chemistry
biology
sociology
economics
history
literature
psychology
philosophy
religion..
is what COUNTS. Not so much the content.
Content’s galore. VOICE is all.

The EDUCATION DEPARTMENT is the
meta-department and the most WHAT-COUNTS
department in academia now. You may not realize
this—or agree. Of course not. Cultural lag: the
sustainability of unsustainable sustainabilities.
I wish we could think on these things and argue
together. It’s a snap. Push Reply to All and
we’re in business: Committee of theWhole.

Sampling Robert X. Cringely “War of the Worlds”

Here, buried in my sixth paragraph,
is the most important nugget: we've
reached the point in our (disparate)
cultural adaptation to computing and
communication technology that the
younger technical generations are so
empowered they are impatient and
ready to jettison institutions most of
the rest of us tend to think of as
essential, central, even immortal.
They are ready to dump our schools.

Technology is beginning to assail the
underlying concepts of our educational
system - a system that's huge and rich
and so far fairly immune to economic
influence.

But the support structure for those
hallowed and not so hallowed halls
has always been parents willing to
pay tuition and alumni willing to
give money, both of which are likely
to change over a generation for reasons
I've just spent 1469 words explaining.

MIT threw videos of all its lecture
courses – ALL its lecture courses – up
on the web for anyone to watch for free.
This was precisely comparable to SGI
(remember them?) licensing OpenGL
to Microsoft.

What is it, then, that makes an MIT
education worth $34,986? Is it the seminars
that aren't on the web? Faculty guidance?
Research experience? Getting drunk and
falling in the Charles River without
your pants?

Right now it is all those things plus a
dimensionless concept of educational
quality, which might well go out the
window if some venture capitalist with
too much money decides to fund an
ISO certification process not for schools
but for students.”

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080321_004574.html

xxxooo, Sam