The Future of Higher Education

We were asked this week in my Higher Education in the Digital Age class to consider the question "What will the university of the future look like?" and to address the role technology will play in changing the relationship between producers and consumers in higher education.  We shouldn’t limit ourselves to just considering what future universities will look like, however, as if we are only passive observers who are not part of the very society and the very historical processes that will determine what they are to become.

I've become a huge fan of Cathy Davidson since first being exposed to her work in the readings for our class. In a blog post only a few days back, Dr. Davidson asks the question, What If the Goal of Higher Education Was to Make World Changers? The title of a blog from the University of Texas's History program, "Designing History's Future", conveys the same idea, and as the post titled Duke21C’s Field Notes illustrates, there is a sharing of ideas going on between Texas and North Carolina. We should not consider the question of what future universities will become without simulateously considering what they should become, and what role we can and should play in making them become what we want them to be.

Our readings and viewings this past week made it amply clear that big changes are already underway in higher education, but these changes are often contradictory and their futher development could lead to very different futures.  Frontline's, "College, Inc", showed us a world of rapidly growing for profit colleges backed by powerful Wall Street lobbyists able to setup rules that enable them to get rich on Federally backed student loans and avoid the consequences when the poor and working class recipients of these loans are unable to pay them back. Continued hegemony by the neoliberal ideology behind this explosive growth in for profit schools will in short order lay waste to the very society on which it insatiably feeds (in the words of the late environmentalist Edward Abbey, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell").

Steven Johnson's TED Talk, Where Do Good Ideas Come From?, points us toward a very different and hopeful future. "An idea is a network", he says, and to create an optimal environment for good ideas we need to spend time "connecting" rather than "protecting" them. He ends with the statement, "chance favors the connected mind." This was definitely my favorite assigned "reading" of the week, and one I will think about and re-watch again and again.

Returning to the work of Cathy Davidson, I've continued reading a chapter a week of Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies, the collaborative, creative commons licensed "text book" she and a class of graduate students put together during a semester course at Duke called 21st Century Literacies: Digital Knowledge, Digital Humanities. The book closely parallels the topics we are studying in class (coincidence?  I think not, but rather the clear result of connected thinking ;-)  It is a throughly enjoyable read.  I'm inspired by the way it effectively puts into practice the approach that Steven Johnson is talking about, and points us toward a future in which we can work together to solve the deep challenges that confront us.

A Satisfied Student

When I enrolled in the Doctor of Arts program in Community College Education at George Mason University, I hoped to organically combine formal study with the practical work I do in the classroom each day.  Midway through my second course in the program, I have not been disappointed.

The course I am taking this semester, titled Higher Education in the Digital Age, is proving to be just as relevant to my work as a classroom teacher in Arlington Public Schools as was last semester's course,  The Community College.

Last semester I wrote a final paper, Dual Enrollment in a High School Career and Technical Center as a Strategy to Address the Achievement Gap, that gave me the background I needed to make a post in a local community forum, Oppose Institutional Racism in the APS Budget Survey, which helped kick off a community effort to protect educational opportunity for adult immigrant members of our community. This effort appears to have been successful, and I have no doubt that my GMU study made me a more effective participant.

This semester we are looking into the future of higher education in the 21st century, and in particular the impact of educational games, flipped classrooms, MOOCs, Open Educational Resources, and other current technological innovations on education. This study motived me to start using Khan Academy with my students this year, which in turn led me to receive an invitation for a Google sponsored program to encourage female students to study computer programming using Khan Academy's new Intro to JS: Drawing and Animation course.

In addition to the Khan Academy programming course, I have also been making extensive use of the JavaScript and jQuery course materials on Codeacademy. Both of these resources are of the highest quality, and represent the effective use of online, interactive tools to enhance student learning.

In my current course at GMU, I am studying the broader context in which the new educational resources I am using in my classroom reside. This combination of theory and practice helps me make better use of both.

I am definitely and satisfied student with my GMU graduate program thus far.