Waste Not the Learning Productivity Crisis: Transforming Educational Opportunity into Educational Assurance

This 74-page monograph (PDF) by William H. Graves is a "Web Bonus" from EDUCAUSE Review, which says of the monograph: "The time is right for higher education to pursue “best for the world” strategies enabled by the strategic use of information technology to improve learning productivity by serving more students more effectively while simultaneously creating a privately and publicly affordable, stable financial model for learning—securing education’s future as an affordable first‐priority imperative for students, families, donors, employers, and governments." Graves begins the piece with three quotations:

If we can learn in the cloud, why is education still the slowest form of learning? —Anonymous student

The medium is the message. — Marshall McLuhan (1964)

Education is the slowest form of learning. —Anthony Schwartz (1964)

McLuhan’s meme about the entwinement between human communication and its enabling technologies remains insightful, even after an Internet-mediated global community of intertwined minds, cultures, and economies subsumed his television- facilitated “global village.” Virtual communities form ephemerally and more naturally from the bottom up than from the top down. This new human dynamic is virally innervated by what the technorati call the “computing cloud,” where we engage content and each other via Google, YouTube, Facebook, free blog sites, and other “cloudware.”

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA