Multilitteratus Incognitus

You don't go to Harvard for the Education. You go to Harvard for the Connections! - someone from my past (I don't remember who). The other day a long-distance friend and colleague posted an interesting blog post pondering (or positing?) that Social and Cultural capital are the main problem in online education . A very engaging twitter thread and discussion ensued (which I am having trouble locating at the moment), but I thought I'd let the dust settle a bit and collect my thoughts on the matter first.  It is a little self-serving too because I wanted to get back into the habit of writing and this seemed like a good opportunity.  As I was thinking about where to start untangling this thread the quote at the beginning of this post came to mind†. As I was thinking about this I interrogated some of my educational experiences, both undergraduate, and graduate, and free-range learning (like MOOCs).  Most of my education was residential in nature. Although I do prefer ...

Over the holiday, at some point I came across this blog post asking how much longer will (college) degrees mean something . It was a short, but interesting post, and something that I've thought about in the past; not in reference to how much longer will college degrees have a monopoly on accreditation of individuals, but rather I've been pondering  what  does a college degree mean. The impetus for this post seem's to be Stanford's AI MOOC , which apparently will give out certificates of completion to those who participate and do the work.  Jeff, the author of the other blog posses the following questions which I wanted to tackle a bit: When do we start hiring for the knowledge you have rather than the degree you hold? We used to do that, and we ought  to be doing that now. One of my concentrations while an MBA student was Human Resources Management, and as a student one of the key things is that the piece of paper doesn't matter, but rather it's ...

I know, I know, this is a few weeks late - but better late than never :-) In any case, I was reading this Op-Ed piece on the New York Times. The thesis of this op-ed piece is that: Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost I was going to write a long post about the article and the comments I read, however there are about 500 comments (as I write this blog post) and I don't want to write ad nauseum about the subject (my evernote note about this topic is quite long LOL). So in lieu of an extra long post I will respond to some of Taylor's (op-ed writer) main points. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum ...