Clay Shirky on education
Clay Shirkys Here Comes Everybody is required reading here at Jiva and even if your humble blogger does have some issues with how well it works as a book I do fully subscribe to the concepts and ideas that Professor Shirky writes about.
So I was very interested to come across a couple of videos where Shirky is interviewed about how these ideas can work with education. With much of my work here at Jiva focused on Beanbag Learning at the moment this is a topic close to my heart.
You can find the videos here on Will Richardsons’ blog – http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/clay-shirky-interview/ – the interviewer was Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach a prominent edublogger in the States. The content is obviously a very US take but no less interesting for that.
One of the final parts of the Q and A is especially interesting for our work at Beanbag and I’ll quote it here:
Q: What would happen if there was no public education? Would society still value taking responsibility for individual learning?
A: Home schooling is growing for every economic class except the very well-off. Create some social model for learning, organized online? Coordination of problems; find others struggling with the same issues. When you are diagnosed with a disease, you go online to read about it and find a group. Similar approach to education could work. Go online to find others who have kids who are having problems with a particular issue.