Skip to main content.
Home » Blogs » Ljones's blog

Hacking Education

Submitted by Ljones on March 8, 2009 - 9:26am

Have you heard of hacking education? It's all the rage on Twitter. Fred Wilson suggests that teachers are going the way of newspaper reporters and that diplomas are becoming less important due to technological changes in education.

Hacking Education

Hmm

Submitted by wdmartin on March 25, 2009 - 12:01pm.

I read the linked post, and also the first post on the blog, and his approach seems to me fundamentally well-intentioned, but impractical. His comments acknowledge the crucial importance of teachers to the learning process. But nowhere in his vision of a decentralized tech-based educational system do I see mention of how teachers would get paid.

I'm all in favor of open source, but that model does not translate well onto education. Most hackers who work on open source projects do so either because they are employed by a large company who pays them to work on it, or they have a full time day job and program as a hobby. Either one of those approaches is seriously problematic for paying teachers. If you're a teacher in the employ of a corporation, you'll teach what your bosses decide you should teach, and that's going to be whatever they decide best supports the company's corporate goals. So much for the idea of a "well rounded education". If, on the other hand, the teacher force does it part time as a hobby, you run into problems of availability of unusual subjects, and difficulties with wildly varying educational standards.

So I'm skeptical.