December 14, 2007

Disruptive Innovation - When dot com Becomes dot edu?

Earlier this week, I picked up on the fact that the Google UK site now has an area for education: Google - UK Schools, which offers:

  • Lesson plans and student activity sheets for primary (cross-curricular) and secondary (geography, history and citizenship)
  • A discussion group to share ideas on how to use Google in the classroom with other teachers
  • A comprehensive guide on how to use Google Earth, including when carrying out fieldwork
  • Links to information on how to use Google tools
  • Tutorials for students on how to search well
  • Useful "gadgets" for teachers that you can add to your Google homepage such as the latest news on education and schools
  • Links to other Google projects for schools
With barriers to accessing information coming down, threatening one element of the academic value proposition, and opportunities for developing personal knowledge networks and accessing subject matter expertise increasing all the time (as Stuart picked up on today in Constructing Your Own Knowledge Network), I wonder what would happen if a disruption to the notion of what makes a socially acceptable "qualification" opened up the education market to current online businesses; and furthermore, how might those businesses wear an educational hat?

That is, suppose that "that bit of paper", the degree certificate or other formal qualification, no longer guarantees the foot in the door to a new job because there's a new reputation/competency model in town (I don't know what that might be, but in a market where 50% of the population have a first degree, for example, a degree is maybe not such a differentiator any more...).

And suppose that today's properly commercial dot com corporates (not just http://openuniversity.co.uk or http://www.openuniversity.com/) could move in to provide the services that supported the "teaching and learning" bits of the new reputation/competency model - what would they offer?

  • ebay.edu - a marketplace for instruction and tutelage, as well as a clearing house for courses and educational materials. What would determine the value (and price) of a "real qualification" compared to an offprint degree certificate from Lower Dogswallop Univercity (sic), I wonder?
  • google.edu - lesson plans, discussion groups, lots and lots of information, online office tools, bibliographic research tools and so on (err.....?;-)
  • itunes.edu - err...?
  • amazon.edu - I wonder how many educators are putting their reading lists into an Amazon listmania list, and creating an academic aStore off the back of it, like the OpenLearn_daily store? And why buy articles (if you have to pay from them) from one of those hard to use services your library subscribes to when you can buy academic research articles from Amazon? (They are sold as e-Docs.)
  • facebook.edu (or linkedin.edu) - duh...
  • bbc.edu - public service broadcasting in support of a lifelong learning agenda... (did you see that BBC watch again programmes can now be streamed to the browser on any platform via the new iPlayer streaming service? For example: Have I Got News for You?)
  • yahoo.edu - Yahoo teachers, whatever... (I can't believe people are calling it a platform for teachers, rather than a platform for sharing learning and teaching expertise, experience, knowledge and resources... In a future where we learn from each other as well as from content, we'll all be teachers and learners, won't we?)
Maybe we should be thankful that the dot edu top-level domain is so carefully controlled...

Tags: ,

Posted by ajh59 at December 14, 2007 12:07 AM
Comments