"We're supposed to be preparing students not for our life, but for their life. We're not. It is a tragedy."

Dr. Cathy Davidson teaches at Duke University, where she co-directs the Ph.D. Lab in Digital Knowledge and holds two distinguished chairs (Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies). She served as Duke’s first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and helped to create the Program in Information Science + Information Studies and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. She is a cofounder of the global learning network HASTAC, which administers the annual $2 million HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, and she was recently appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Humanities.

Author or more than a dozen books, her latest book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn was named a "top 10 science book" of the year by Publisher's Weekly and has been the occasion for over sixty invited lectures and book events in the U.S. and internationally. A frequent speaker and consultant on institutional change at universities, corporations, and non-profits around the world, she writes for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, Times Higher Ed, and many other publications in the US. and abroad.
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"...I think that economic justification is not the primary reason we ought to pursue open scholarship. In short I think this is a moral issue."

Dr. David Parry is an assistant professor of Emergent Media and Communications who studies how the transformation from an analog to a digital archive changes knowledge production and dissemination. Primarily, he is concerned with how a digital literacy and digital public develops around a networked archive that differs from, although is still informed by, prior analog structures.

After receiving a PhD in English from the University at Albany-SUNY in 2007, he joined the UT Dallas faculty, where he has taught classes in philosophy, literature, and new media. Currently he teaches courses on writing in the digital era, and the digital archive. His presentations and published writing include works on digital games, web technologies, digital literacy, and the emerging networked archive.

Dr. Parry writes for several online resources including his own blog, academhack.org, and has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education for his work on microblogging as a pedagogical practice. He was a keynote speaker at the NC State University Computers and Writing Conference 2012.
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"It ups the value of every single activity, of every single homework assignment if that has been published to the web for everyone to see, for a global audience."

Dr. Lodge McCammon is a Specialist in Curriculum and Contemporary Media at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation on North Carolina State University's Centennial Campus. His work in education began in 2003 at Wakefield High School in Raleigh, NC, where he taught Civics and AP Economics. He finished a Ph.D. from NC State University in 2008, where his work at The Friday Institute continues to bring innovative practices to students, teachers and schools.

He developed a teaching and professional development process called FIZZ which encourages and models best practices in implementing user-generated video and online publishing in the classroom to enhance standards-based lessons. He is also a studio composer who writes standards-based songs, with supporting materials, about advanced curriculum for K-12 classrooms. More information, user-generated videos, and songs can be found at www.iamlodge.com.
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"A free world-class education for anyone anywhere”

The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization created in 2006 by Indo-Bangladeshi American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. It supplies a free online collection of more than 3,000 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and computer science. The academy's YouTube channel has over 150 million total views and more than 320,00 subscribers. All videos are available through Khan Academy's own website, which also contains many other features such as progress tracking, practice exercises, and a variety of tools for teachers in public schools.

The success of his low-tech, conversational tutorials - Khan's face never appears, and viewers see only his unadorned step-by-step doodles and diagrams on an electronic blackboard - suggests an educational transformation that de-emphasizes lecture-based classroom interactions. Bill Gates endorsed the learning resource, calling it "unbelievable" and noted that he used it with his kids. Goldman Sachs' Victor Hu describes Khan Academy as "part of a looming tech-education iceberg" and Time Magazine named Sal Khan as one of the hundred most influential people on the planet in 2012.
Khan Academy Website
Read USA Today article about Khan Academy



MOOCS: The Fad of the Hour or a Major Educational Shift?

The two articles below explain how MOOCS may revolutionize the traditional paradigm of instructional delivery:

Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls
Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses - known as MOOCs - a tool for democratizing higher education. While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free).
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Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses
In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans - one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world - Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced in May a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.
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Are Textbooks Going the Way of the Dinosaur?

Driven and supported by a new pedagogy for the 21st century, there appears to be an inexorable global march toward digital learning instruments, leaving physical textbooks behind.

This article looks at hardcopy textbooks as antiquated technology. It includes observations and opinions from Socrates, Nicholas Negroponte, Bill Gates, David Parry, and Victor Hu.
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Bill Gates: "In five years the best education will come from the web."
Bill Gates thinks the idea of young adults having to go to brick and mortar schools in order to get an education is going to go away relatively soon.
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Opinion . . .

"Once technology gets into schools, things start to go wrong."

Nik Peachey is a freelance learning technology consultant, writer, and teacher trainer, based in the UK. He has been involved in ELT since 1992 and has worked for a range of companies including the British Council. He now specializes in the use of web based technologies for language learning and teacher training and maintains a learning technology blog for English language teachers.

In a recent blog post he laments that technology can sometimes be wasted on English language teaching and that in many classrooms expensive equipment is of little value. Obstacles faced by teachers include schools' lukewarm commitment to adequate broadband connectivity in classrooms and teacher training and the defensiveness and hostility of many "IT gatekeepers" who rarely have pedagogical training.
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"My predecessor as Harvard president famously compared the difficulty of reforming a curriculum with the difficulty of moving a cemetery."

Harvard University President Larry Summers describes the paradox of American higher education thusly: "The expectations of leading universities do much to define what secondary schools teach, and much to establish a template for what it means to be an educated man or woman. College campuses are seen as the source for the newest thinking and for the generation of new ideas, as society's cutting edge." However, he maintains, undergraduate education changes remarkably little over time. Conceding that some inertia may be appropriate, he speculates on how (and if) the educational system should be drastically altered to reflect the structure of society and what we now understand about how people learn. He concludes: "Here is a bet and a hope that the next quarter century will see more change in higher education than the last three combined."
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