Aerial view of Finney Chapel, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, United States (oberlin.edu)

The idea of a university (updated)

Reda SadkiQuotes

So I’m reading John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, which begins by asserting that the university “is a place of teaching universal knowledge”. I’m fascinated by the historical context (Catholicism in Protestant England), by the strength and substance of the ideas, and by the narrative style of carefully-constructed arguments. I’m also struck, however, by the centrality of learning as transmission, the line of demarcation between invention and teaching, and the belief that it is possible to know by disconnecting from society (although I acknowledge that concentration and flow tend to require quiet, in a pragmatic sense): To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. […] He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new. The common sense of mankind has associated the search …

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LSi.io interviews Plan B’s Donald Clark: Universities and humanitarian organizations in the Age of Disruption

Reda SadkiEvents, Interviews

Donald Clark is an education innovator with no institutional ties to refrain him from telling it like it is. He answers three questions from LSi.io‘s Reda Sadki: Zach Sims at Davos referred to university brick-and-mortar structures as the “detritus” of a bygone area. Agree or disagree? We all remember Sebastian Thrun’s predictions about the impending concentration of higher education. Why does it feel like it’s just not happening? A key insight about MOOCs is the significance of suddenly connecting millions of adult learners to faculty previously bunkered down at the top of their ivory towers. Can you tell us more about your analysis on the significance of MOOCs? The humanitarian sector faces growing challenges, yet we continue to train like it’s 1899. How would you approach such a ‘wicked’ learning problem? Interview recorded at the Second European MOOC Summit at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland on 11 February 2014.