I recently watched TED ny lecture where Jeff Jarvis, a Professor of Entrepreneurial Journalism talks about how the best lectures (MIT open courseware and others) are already online, so educators need to become curators and complementary to online content and also to involve their audience to a much greater degree.

Here’s what I was able to take out of his lecture:

• You are the Audience – you know more than I do. The conversation must be happening there. Bullshit!
• Classroom – a system built for the industrial age, where we stamp out the students all the same with only one answer each.
• That assumes that all the knowledge flows from the lecturer; if you don’t feed it back, you are wrong – you fail.
• Similar to the newspaper [and TV]. One size fits all, one way, it’s the person with the newspaper who decides what questions to ask, what to answer, how to answer, in what form, you’re welcome. The journalist becomes the speaker, the decider.
• We should question the form and, more importantly, we should enable the students to question this form.
• Never seen a negative tweet from a TEDster – I wonder if they hand out the Soma in the [schwag] bags; Ironically – God bless irony – Chris Anderson, the curator, dean, professor, teacher, boss, had just issued a negative tweet about what Sarah Silverman had done – he apologized for her, then he apologized for the apology. As I was asking “what the hell did she do” (which took a long time to find out – turns out she used the word “retarded” in reference to Sarah Palin or her family), someone scolded me for using this tone: “TED gives us so much” and I said “What?” and she said “VALIDATION” – BUT THAT’s THE LAST THING WE NEED
• we need challenges, discussion and collaboration but what do schools and journalism do? they validate a lot. they also repeat a lot.
• we can no longer afford to repeat news that’s already out – EGO
• Why do we need thousands of instructors repeating the same lecture on, say, capillary action, when it’s already on YouTube? wasteful.
• One of his students, Joe Filipazzo (sp ?), is starting just that.
• Educators, like journalists should become curators. The best stuff is already there.
• Rosenberg:
• In the real world, tests are all open-book and your success is inextricably determined by the lessons you glean from the free-market. (..) It’s easy to educate for the routine, hard to educate for the novel.

• If not the lecture hall, what is the model for this future world?

• He has previously mentioned the “distributed Oxford” – lecturers and tutors here and there. Once you become distributed, you have to ask: “do we really need an University / school / newspaper?”
• The tasks shift from creating and controlling the content and managing scarcity to curating people and content and creating an abundance of students and teachers. This is a world where anyone can teach and anyone can learn. Instead, we sell scarcity.
• We have to stop this culture of standardized testing and standardized teaching. Fuck the SATs!
• In the Google age, what is the point of teaching memorization as a skill? We should stop looking at education as a product, but rather as a process. In a world like that, mistakes are the Gold, mistakes are the lesson. Why don’t schools copy Google’s 20% rule?! In that case, the role of the school shifts from being a factory to being an incubator.
• Facebook tries to give schools “elegant organization”.
• So why didn’t he do that? He didn’t want to mess with the forum. You are not supposed to do that. Another answer: EGO.

I shall discuss my opinions in a separate article. What do YOU think?

Sources / More info: gould1, gould2, zd-phone-dead, wired-phone-dead, ent-j, fora, buzzmachine, wiki-jeff-jarvis,