Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education: Reviewed by Donald M. Norris

Fifteen years ago SCUP published the best-seller, Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century by Michael Dolence and Donald M. Norris. So, where else for SCUP's journal, Planning for Higher Education, to turn for a review of this new book about "Transformation of Higher Education" than to one of those authors, Donald M. Norris, who is also a recipient of SCUP's Distinguished Service Award. Norris' review places Kamenetz' book in the context of nearly two decades of thinking and analyzing the effects of information technology on higher learning:

Ms. Kamenetz’s latest book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education sets an even higher goal. Its purpose is to inspire people to think seriously about changing profoundly our approach to postsecondary education, personal learning, and employment. The American model for universal higher education is acclaimed around the world. It has even becomes a sort of “cargo cult” for developing countries. But the author finds our current version to be too expensive, too complex, and too bundled. Moreover, American higher education is based on physical campuses that have been participating in a form of competitive arms race of campus amenities, expanded services, and proliferating administrative functions and staffs.

In conclusion, this is a provocative, important book. It frames these important issues in a direct, journalistic style that is sure to attract a wider audience than insiders’ books on the subject. Ms. Kamenetz will surely be tempted soon to write the sequel (perhaps “Fixing DIY Disasters: How US Graduates Got Their Groove Back”?), either looking back from the future or looking to the future, maybe influenced by higher education futurists such as Paul Lefrere (9) and their projects on DIY universities for global audiences (like www.role-project.eu). Either way, I anticipate that she will be able to report on lots of failed experiments in the sustainability of free-to-consume courses, whether self-assembled (DIY) or not, and she will find a smaller but respectable number of viable, sustainable, fully transformed instances of higher learning, which deliver the success that the US needs and that enable learners to live their dreams, within their means. Meanwhile, the US continues to need globally-elite levels of excellence and innovation, sufficient to generate the surplus wealth that we need to invest in our futures. If Ms. Kamenetz’s readers can take us past the free-trumps-fee game of today, to the more thoughtful and globally-aware debates that can accompany the choices that people make in DIY learning, that will be all to the good.