The Deseret News has provided an editorial response to the interview with me they published earlier this week. The editorial is titled Universities will be relevant.
The things about the response that make me giggle are: (1) the newspaper felt a need to write a response to a piece written by one of its own reporters, and (2) the editorial largely agrees with my assessment of the future risk to higher education. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only disagreement the Deseret News has with the earlier article is an argument with the headline of the story – in which I was quoted very much out of context, as I explained yesterday.
Life goes on…
RT @zephoria: Most people who seek mass attention are unaware of the costs of being famous. Few know what they’re getting into. Coping w/ fame ain’t easy.
If the Chronicle’s headline When Professors Print Their Own Diplomas, Who Needs Universities didn’t catch my colleagues’ attention, today’s front page story in the Deseret News seems to have done the trick: Universities will be ‘irrelevant’ by 2020, Y. professor says. By 8:30 am today (the day the article was published) I’d already received multiple emails and a phone call.
Now, I did actually say something like this – but it was preceded by “If universities can’t find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them (what’s happening in the economy, affordability, the impacts of technology and openness, etc.)… universities will be irrelevant by 2020.”
(It reminds me of my very first newspaper interview ever. I was an undergrad. I was singing Nanki-Poo in the Mikado at Marshall University, and the local paper came to talk to us about the production. I had just recently returned from serving an LDS mission in Japan, and had a number of things to say to the reporter about the culture, setting, etc. of the show. The quote attributed to me in the paper the next day read something like, “The Mikado really demonstrates how women don’t fit into society.” I was devastated.)
I hope this most recent article in the DesNews catalyzes some useful conversations and does more good than harm…
John said that a prophet hath no honour in his own country.
While USU OCW has earned international attention in some of the world’s greatest media outlets, it has only just this week hit USU’s own news service, as they recognize in the story OCW Receiving National, International Recognition. It’s great to see the institution paying some attention to this wonderful program.
While the administration may not know it, according to Google USU OCW is the 4th most useful / important / interesting thing happening at USU, only ranking behind the university home page, the athletics page, and the extension page. No USU college or department outranks USU OCW in the eyes of Google. Therefore no USU college or department outranks OCW in the eyes of millions of individuals around the world who depend on Google to help it understand what is useful, interesting, and important.
In a time when huge financial pressures are squeezing every university’s budget, here’s hoping that USU will recognize the long-term value of USU OCW.
The New York Times ran a piece today on the outrageous cost of textbooks, That Books Costs How Much? that mentions Flat World Knowledge. It’s currently the second most blogged piece in the Opinion section!
I’ll have another post coming on Monday explaining more about the FWK business model for those of you who are interested.
