Beyond Print Based Newspapers and College Courses too

Interesting article on how Pierre Omidyar is funding a post-print "newspaper" in Honolulu. Beat reporters stay in conversation with readers by topic pages, blogs, discussion boards, and tweets. The print medium fades away. I would love to teach this way. "Students" would Interact with peers, interact with teachers, post their course related ideas and action projects, review each other's work, revise accordingly, get a "voted" grade from peers, and the teacher will post a final grade. Instead of a course fee, the student might pay an ongoing subscription. A credential might follow from having participated in a list of "topics."

Comments

[AKMA]

Volunteering for your Theology Department, Phil.

[Phil Cubeta]

It is interesting how many leaders in philanthropy have an MDiv, a Masters is Social Work, a degree in Psychology, or even in Sociology, Political Science, or Literature. "Moral compass" and "Financial capacity" are the two aspects (Paul Schervish's terminllogy; he is a former Jesuit).

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

Interesting what we discover when we begin to notice how the walls are constructed. We are so used to accepting the rules and authorities as they are.

If credentials are self-organized by learning communities, what gives them their value? What if they are no longer scarce? Can you get enough in subscriptions to fund the whole enterprise?

Knowledge in action is certainly wealth, and if we set out to have currencies that reflect our increasing capacity to build and share knowledge (in action) I think we begin to see the outlines of how value can be built long term without scarcity.

The only tricky part is how to bootstrap this in the current environment.

[phil]

Credentials without scarcity would probably lead to another credential for which the first was a prerequisite. Funding the credential bestowing enterprise, along with legitimizing that enterprise, are key. Teaching online is the easy part.