So
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt filed for bankruptcy today. For a while now
I’ve watched the sea change in the publishing industry with great
delight. To summarize, the entrance of e-books and better
print-on-demand technology has made the cost of entry into the
publishing business much lower and the internet has made it much more
likely that readers will discover and buy niche books. Big publisher are
loosing their ability to command market share by simply investing in
getting a lot of shelf space at the major book stores. The market has
fragmented and people are buying a greater variety of books that they
have heard about in a greater variety of ways. This has been bad of most
of the publishing houses and for bestselling authors. This has been
liberating for mid-list and beginning writers, giving them more freedom
to write what they want and more control over whether or not they make
money. As a reader it exciting to get the chance to read books I enjoy
that might not otherwise have been published. It’s also exciting to see
the cost of many books coming down and thus the getting to read more
books for the same amount of money.
I’m
now seeing speculation that education may be next. I’ve been thinking
for awhile that this out to be possible and fantasizing about how I
would set-up this up. I do think the information giving part of
education can be mass produced to be very low cost. It is individualized
supervision and feed-back that will be more expert intensive but even
in that there are areas where automation will actually make the product
better. I foresee a future where schools offer the lectures free as a
loss leader for their testing and certification, offered at a fraction
of what college costs today, with tutoring an optional service that can
obtained on an as needed basis from whatever vendor you choose. I see it starting already. I can’t
wait to watch the revolution happen.
If education were merely a process of communicating information and being tested on it, your vision might satisfy the process of educating an individual. However, I feel that interaction with professors and fellow students that helps the student develop critical thinking skills and tools for working with other people is an important part of education. True education should not aim to impart information, but should guide the person to find out who they are and what skills will help them become that individual person.
ReplyDeleteExactly, education should be about that but right now it’s not. And that’s why education is ripe for a paradigm change. When I was in community college 95% of my time in the instructors presence was receiving information and being tested. And I was one of the really involved one who made a habit of sneaking up in class and approaching teachers after class of in office hours. Even so their were plenty of classes were I the teacher never talked to me as an individual rather than addressing the class generally, but I still got an A. If the information giving and testing can be can be made more efficient by automating the repetitive part of it, then there is a lot more room for the actual teaching to take place.
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