Search

In this chapter, I examine potential contribution of massive open online courses (MOOCs) to universities and their students. Rather than speaking about MOOCs in the abstract, I examine actual MOOCs that point to future developments. I locate three areas where MOOCs can make positive contributions: return on investment, new revenue streams, and revolutionary new course and credential formats. The first two contribute to university students, faculty, and administrative leaders within the entrenched university. The new formats indicate a shift from that paradigm to a “Higher Education 2.0” paradigm—the revolution of access to online learning where outcomes can be documented through badges, certificates, and nanodiplomas. Higher Education 2.0 offers a pathway to employment that by-passes conventional universities and their degree programs.

Purpose —The purpose of this paper is to explain how the introduction of the Internet and digital tools renews and enriches John Dewey's experimentalist model for teaching and learning with particular attention to the place of and resources for higher order thinking. Design/Approach/Methods —The methods include a close exposition of Dewey's classical texts, and a thought experiment introducing ICT elements into Dewey's design diagrams for teaching and learning. Findings —Dewey's model has inherent difficulties, and that digital technologies helps resolve them. Originality/Value —With the Internet and new digital tools, teachers can design new virtual learning spaces and learning activities. Learners can use online information and communication tools to act more effectively using higher-order thinking skills.

While John Dewey wrote relatively little about higher education, he had a well-developed and largely unexplored conception of the university, grounded in his three- stage account of thought or inquiry as developed in Studies in Logical Theory and further developed in Logic: Theory of Inquiry. The first stage is antecedent to inquiry proper, residing in the situations of living that evoke thought. The second is inquiry proper, where data or immediate materials are subjected to systematic thought to yield judgment. The third is the moment after thought has considered its data and reached its result and brought it forth in situations of living as transformed by this new element. This final stage, is the “objective of thought” but lies outside of the context of inquiry proper. This chapter, building on the Dewey corpus, explains that conception, with close attention to university-based research, teaching, and service.

The members of the working group on National Educational Technology Policy continue to base their formulations around entrenched conceptions of education, retaining the language of teachers, students, curriculum standards, specified objectives and the like. Several of those participating in the panel examining the policy report in an earlier issue (Volume 8 Number 2 2011) of E-Learning and Digital Media worried that these conceptions hamper imagination about new educational possibilities already bubbling up around the edges of conventional educational practice. The working group authors, in their rejoinder, have defended choosing and building on the older framework as a more practicable avenue for rapid change. Here Raymond Rose and Leonard Waks respond by (a) teasing out deep conflicts about this choice within the working group report, and (b) demonstrating the heavy costs of sticking with what Rose and Waks see as an outmoded approach to learning and education in the age of the Internet.

This article critiques the report of President Obama's taskforce on educational technology, ‘Transforming American Education’. It calls into question the claims of the authors that the proposed policy is ‘revolutionary’, and then offers a point-by-point comparison between the report's recommendations and those derived from a perspective taking full account of the genuinely revolutionary implications for learning of the new web 2.0 technologies. It concludes that the taskforce proposals constrain rather than facilitate the digital revolution in education.

Background/Context Although the concept of listening had been neglected by philosophers of education, it has received focused attention since 2003, when Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon addressed it in her presidential address to the Philosophy of Education Society. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Haroutunian-Gordon offered a cognitive theory of listening, according to which an act of listening involves raising questions about both the speaker's utterance and the listener's own beliefs. Research Design This article draws on the methods of philosophical analysis to provide a competing account of listening. This account distinguishes between two types of listening, a cognitive (thinking) type and a noncognitive (empathic feeling) type. Findings/Results By considering a number of familiar classroom incidents, I show that both kinds of listening have important roles in teaching and learning. Conclusions/Recommendations I conclude by questioning whether the empathic type of listening can directly be taught. I conclude that it cannot be, but that teachers can provide three kinds of “helps” indirectly to foster its growth in learners.

MOOCs can add value to higher education in three ways. First, MOOCs can benefit students and their families by improving the ‘value proposition’ of the investment in higher education. Second, MOOCs can help colleges and universities cut costs and generate additional revenues, and thus improve their financial condition. Third, MOOCs contribute to the shift from the conventional paradigm of higher education to a ‘Higher Education 2.0’ paradigm where outside-the-system learning, documented by badges, certificates and nano-diplomas, and other verifiable experiences are packaged in searchable digital portfolios. Higher Education 2.0 offers a revolutionary pathway to employment that augments or even bypasses conventional universities and their associated costs – and MOOCs can play a significant role in this higher education revolution.

When the major MOOC platforms were established in 2012, the economy and higher education were in crisis as a result of the 2008 financial collapse. Also, due to the long-term shift from industrial to information society, the nature of work, the skill base and organization of the labor force, and the production and utilization of knowledge were all changing. Middle-class jobs were disappearing and middle-class wages were no better than stagnant, while college tuition and student debt skyrocketed. Students found themselves paying more in tuition for fewer benefits in expected pay-offs. Thus, starting in 2011 American college enrollments began to decline, and some colleges were driven to insolvency. MOOCs gained rapid visibility by promising to resolve the high education crisis by making free, ‘world class’ higher education available for all.

The large MOOC platforms were introduced against the background of the occupational and educational crises after 2008. The first Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, were introduced in 2007 and entered the higher education scene and attracted immediate attention after the large platforms entered the scene after 2012. MOOCs had their origins in distance education, e-learning and open education. This chapter critically examines the meaning of the MOOC acronym, explains the vision and aims of the MOOC founders and charts the spread of MOOCs around the world and across the spectrum of learning situations after the launch of the big U.S. MOOC platforms.

The current educational arrangements of advanced liberal democracies continue to isolate various ethnic and racial groups. Disadvantaged minority students attend inferior schools. The overreliance on the curriculum as a design for teaching and learning renders school learning less relevant for 'knowledge work' jobs in network societies. The concept of a 'networked common school' addresses these problems. It envisions linking local schools in a social network mediated by networked computers. Teaching and learning will continue to take place at local sites, but significant face-to-face, inter-group learning will take place at regional learning centers, to be followed up by virtual group learning at distributed local sites. In this article I offer a reconstructive proposal for metropolitan education in the computer network era.(1) I focus on the growing isolation of poor racial and ethnic minority students in many metropolitan regions, and the potential of computer networks to alleviate it. I introduce a philosophical framework for engendering in-person, inter-group learning activities at regional sites, and sustaining them in 'virtual groups' at distributed local school sites.(2)

In interview format this paper provides an introduction to the US education system for the non‐American faculty member, focusing primarily on the university sector. Issues addressed include: key differences inherent in the US system (versus the majority of the world); the structure of education; the role of the individual states and that of the federal government; funding; accreditation; faculty assessment and promotion; and the practicalities of teaching for an American university.

In his books Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, Walter Lippmann argued that policy leaders should deny the public a significant role in policy-making. Public opinion, he argued, would inevitably be ill-informed, self-interested and readily manipulated. In The Public and its Problems, Dewey countered Lippmann by arguing that the problem of the public was neither self-interest nor misinformation, but lack of community. He proposed a theory of public ideas - new public social science and a new journalism that gave social investigations the “potency of art” as a means for community formation. Dewey added nothing in The Public and its Problems to explain just how literary art could weld individuals into a community. In this paper I draw on the Dewey corpus to flesh out that crucial phase of his argument. The "double merger" account I offer also illuminates hidden connections between the ‘Great Community’ (chapter 5) and the necessity of local exchanges in ‘The Problem of Method’ (chapter 6) of The Public and its Problems. Dewey’s account is that (1) works of social inquiry presented with the “potency of art” (e.g., works of investigative creative non-fiction) provide broad audiences with immersive common experiences, and (2) local exchanges stemming from these immersive experiences can lead to a blurring of personal, ego-centric identities in a common citizen identity that supports effective common action.

Donald A. Schon is among our generation’s most influential philosophers of design and design education, yet remains uncelebrated in both philosophy and design education. This paradox dissolves when we consider Schon’s specific contribution. He was, by his own account, a displaced philosopher working in (among other places) a management consulting firm, a governmental agency, a non-profit center for social development, and finally a university department of urban planning. He used his marginal position in the design professions to reframe professional practice generally. Schon spoke from philosophy and design to professional practice, conceiving design to be its unifying core. From his philosophy of design he projected a new model for teaching and learning in the professions, and a new conception of the research university. The former has been taken up and elaborated by educators in the professions ‐ in schools of medicine, law, business, public administration, education, engineering, architecture, among others. The latter has entered the mainstream of discussion among higher education reformers. Philosophers and design educators have not paid the same measure of attention to Schon’s ideas. My purpose in this article is to re-introduce Schon as philosopher and design educator, to provide a simple exposition of his basic ideas ‐ his conception of design, his notion that all professional practice is ‘designlike,’ his ideas about how design is taught and learned, and his conception of the university as a collection of schools of design.

In Schon's account, the distinguishing feature of professional work is its 'designlike' character. For Schon, professional training (including teacher preparation) involves engagement in design experiments in virtual worlds he calls 'reflective practica'. Some teacher educators have developed models of teacher preparation following Schon's guidelines. Others have expressed reservations about his framework. But there has not yet been adequate critical assessment of the conceptual fit between Schon's framework and teacher preparation. This study contributes such an assessment. After providing a map through Schon's system of ideas I proffer two conclusions. First, conventional school teaching is not 'designlike' in Schon's sense. Second, teacher training cannot adequately be conducted 'off-line' in the virtual spaces Schon calls 'reflective practica'.

The publication of Kilpatrick's classic paper on the project method' sparked a lively theoretical debate in the USA about learner-directed projects in the curriculum. Boyd Bode's critique a decade later brought the American debate to a close, but projects have continued to play an important practical role. Recent trends in the US, including authentic assessment' and project-related work in the postindustrial economy, have stimulated renewed attention to learner projects.This paper reviews the earlier debate on project method and assesses its implications for postindustrial education.

During the years 1982–1983 a consensus emerged among U.S. leaders in government, business, and education regarding educational reform. Responding to a new “information era,” leaders asserted the need for a new core curriculum of “new basics,” to promote higher order skills and scientific and technological literacy, hands-on familiarity with computers to produce “computer literacy,” and the utilization of the new information technologies to improve learning in traditional curriculum areas. But since then certainty about the role of technology has faded. Despite the rush to purchase computers and put them to use in schools, district level planning has been grossly inadequate and procurement decisions have often been unwise. Potentially important technologies have been neglected, while visionary ideas for using computers to build “higher order skills” for typical learners in the traditional curriculum areas have not been validated. The “high tech” consensus of 1983 has collapsed, and a new policy agenda for “restructing” the schools has begun to emerge.

Globalization of markets and expanding communication technology networks affect all dimensions of education: curriculum, instructional method, learning environments, and administration. In this article, the author anticipates the impacts upon education in science, technology, and society (STS).

In this chapter I explain the relationship between globalization and technological literacy. After accounting for the notion of technological literacy that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in the developed nations, I argue that this notion must be reshaped to fit the needs of the emerging global network society. That is, a renewed conception of technological literacy education must be developed to take account of changes in the global economy, including the widespread use of networked computer technologies.

Today's citizens are faced with personal and social value and lifestyle choices as well as the need to make decisions on public policy issues that lay beyond the scope of traditional value and moral systems. According to Prewitt (1983), our lack of understanding about the new technology and its implications threatens the quality of our lives, our natural environment, our future generations, and even our democratic institutions. The extension of life by artificial means, genetic screening, strategic defense initiatives in outer space, the environmental repercussions of genetically engineered organisms-these are examples of the scientific and technological innovations about which citizens must become familiar and whose impact upon society has yet to be fully determined. Science, Technology, and Society education (STS) is an educational innovation designed to promote responsible citizenship in this technologically dominated era (Waks, 1987). STS was born in the late 1960s and early 1970s as school and college educators at the grassroots level spontaneously responded to new problems of population explosion, resource depletion, industrial pollution, and the control of nuclear weapons. Funded by the National Science Foundation, Project Synthesis, which reconsidered the goals of science education and identified the need for a science, technology, and society goal cluster, was initiated in 1980. In the early 1980s STS was endorsed by both the National Science Teachers Association and the National Science Board as a curriculum emphasis appropriate for all learners. In 1985 a national task force composed of K-12 teacher leaders in science, technology, social studies, and English education, and college teachers representing several disciplines, met at the Pennsylvania State University to set forth a clear definition of STS. The meeting was organized by the Science Through Science, Technology, and Society Project at Pennsylvania State University and funded by the National Science

The Indian-America philosopher Sri Chinmoy Ghose has distinguished between outer silence, inner silence, and innermost silence. In this paper I explore these distinctions and their educational relevance. My main conclusions are that (a) a deep inner silence, undistracted by questions or other thoughts, is at the root of one paradigm kind of good listening in education, and (b) what Chinmoy refers to as “innermost silence” is the moral virtue of receptivity to others that sustains inner silence, even under challenging conditions, a virtue of importance in teaching and in learning from others.