This post is a follow up to Affecting Educational Change.
A comment left by the inimitable Gardner Campbell the other day has lead me down another rabbit hole of thought that I need to explore in depth with regards to the prospect and need for educational change, and that is the notion that in striving to change the system we must inevitably and in parallel change the culture within it. In fact you could say that the Institution and the Culture are so inter-twined that you cannot really differentiate one …

Warning: I’ve got a jumble of thoughts and seemingly unrelated concepts floating around in my head that I’m trying to draw connections between and make sense of, so this post may ramble and/or lose the plot from time to time while I work things through.
Background

There are a number of different conversations going on across the web right now, each of which in some way discuss the notion of the need for educational change, the nature of the flaws in the current model, and the most effective way of moving this …

There are a couple of really thought-provoking themes floating around at the moment that have just taken me down a train of thought I want to reflect on.
In a post today (“Cloning the UMW Blogs Empire“), Jim Groom discusses how he set up a WPMU installation for Longwood University by cloning their existing UMW blog framework and transplanting it to a new domain. It’s a phenomenal example of reuse and sharing, and how quickly innovation can occur at a local level once the barriers of perception are cast off …

Here’s an innocent statement I just can’t let go without commenting on. In a post yesterday (“LearnHub Relaunches Its Social Learning Network“) Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch said that “Online education has been booming recently…”
Online education is not a recent innovation. Large-scale corporatisation of education is a recent innovation – if you can call it an innovation. I happen to think that “innovation” carries a far more positive connotation than this financially driven trend deserves.
For as long as the internet has been in existence, forward thinking educators have …