[Dialogue] Who are you in the current counter-revolution?

Sat Mar 3 23:46:38 EST 2012

Here's an event that just “staggered”
me, and it seems like this falls in the arena of “Living in a whole
new universe”. I was driving around Denver, Colorado (the website
says this was aired on January 23, 2012) in my “own little world”
and heard this news report on NPR about how 100,000 students had
signed up for an online course at Stanford, and they were from all
over the world and all walks of life. A this all happened in a matter
of a few days.
I just let it pass in terms of putting
it into our Dialogue, but some elements of it just keep coming up. I
know several of us are working on online stuff also.
So here it is, in parts – sections
copied and pasted below.
Here's the link to NPR for the whole
article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/01/23/145645472/stanford-takes-online-schooling-to-the-next-academic-level

Now for some of the “clips”:
Last year, Stanford University computer science professor
Sebastian Thrun — also known as the fellow who helped build
Google's self-driving
car — got together with a small group of
Stanford colleagues and they impulsively decided to open their
classes to the world.
They would allow anyone, anywhere to attend online, take quizzes,
ask questions and even get grades for free. They made the
announcement with almost no fanfare by sending out a single email to
a professional group.
"Within hours, we had 5,000 students signed up," Thrun
says. "That was on a Saturday morning. On Sunday night, we had
10,000 students. And Monday morning, Stanford — who we didn't
really inform — learned about this and we had a number of
meetings."
Thrun's colleague Andrew Ng taught a free, online
machine learning class that ultimately
attracted more than 100,000 students. When I ask Ng how Stanford's
administration reacted to their proposition, he's silent for a
second. "Oh boy," he says, "I think there was a strong
sense that we were all suddenly in a brave new world."
Thrun's online class
on artificial intelligence or A.I., which he
co-taught with Google's Peter Norvig, eventually drew more than
160,000 students who received detailed grades and a class ranking.
"I think we all realized we were in uncharted territory,"
Thrun says. "As we move forward, it is my real goal to invent an
education platform that has high quality to it, [that] prevents
cheating, that really enables students to go through it to be
empowered to find better jobs."
"What it will look like in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years —
your guess is as good as mine," he says. "But I think the
impact will be large and it will be widespread."
"On the long term, I think the potential for this to
revolutionize education is just tremendous," Koller says. "There
are millions of people around the world that have access only to the
poorest quality of education or sometimes nothing at all."
Technology could change that by making it possible to teach
classes with 100,000 students as easily and as cheaply as a class
with just 100. And if you look around the world, demand for education
in places like South Africa is enormous.
Trying 'Bold New Things'
Over the past six months, Thrun has spent roughly $200,000 of his
own money and lined up venture capital to create Udacity,
a new online institution of higher learning independent of Stanford.
"We are committed to free online education for everybody."
Udacity is announcing two new classes on Monday. One will teach
students to build their own search engine and the other how to
program a self-driving car. Eventually, the founders hope to offer a
full slate of classes in computer science.
Thrun says Stanford's mission is to attract the top 1 percent of
students from all over in the world and bring them to campus, but
Udacity's mission is different. He's striving for free, quality
education for all, anywhere.
"How it all is going to pan out is something that I don't
think anyone has a very clear idea of," she says. "But what
I think is clear is that this change is coming and it's coming
whether we like it or not. So I think the right strategy is to
embrace that change."
Over the years, Stanford has launched dozens of disruptive
technologies into the world, but now administrators and professors
seem to agree that the school may be about to disrupt itself.
This semester Stanford will put 17 interactive courses online for
free.
"Stanford has always been a place where we were will to try
bold new things," Plummer says. "Even if we don't know what
the consequences would be."

“WOW”
Walt Epley
Walter F. Epley
Denver, CO 80220 USA
Email: wfepley at yahoo.com

________________________________
 From: James Wiegel <jfwiegel at yahoo.com>
To: Colleague Dialogue <dialogue at wedgeblade.net> 
Sent: Thursday, March 1, 2012 4:05 PM
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Who are you in the current counter-revolution?

Today, our world is rife with social pioneering, and you miss most of it so long as you draw the line at the edge of this or that country and don't "put our arms 'round the earth"  At the same time the state of institutions is worrisome, not just nation states, but religious bodies and large corporations as well.  My life depends so much on them  Here is another voice . . .

http://sojo.net/blogs/2012/02/29/christopher-hitchens-diana-butler-bass-and-third-great-awakening#.T095KB28zKI.facebook 

Jim Wiegel

Many have tried to define creativity, to quantify and qualify it . . .  Some say it involves imagination;  Whatever your definition of creativity or the creative process, marvelous creations abound to improve our lives and inspire us 	Kaneko Center

401 North Beverly Way, Tolleson, Arizona 85353-2401
+1  623-363-3277  skype:  jfredwiegel
jfwiegel at yahoo.com www.partnersinparticipation.com

Upcoming public course opportunities:
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Facilitation Mastery : Our Mastering the Technology of Participation program is available in Phoenix in 2012-3.  Program begins on Aug 22-24, 2012.  See website for further details. 
AICP Planners:  14.5 CM for all ToP courses

--- On Thu, 3/1/12, steve har <stevehar11201 at gmail.com> wrote:

>From: steve har <stevehar11201 at gmail.com>
>Subject: [Dialogue] Who are you in the current counter-revolution?
>To: dialogue at wedgeblade.net
>Date: Thursday, March 1, 2012, 7:31 AM
>
>
>We learned this week that U.S. Catholics support President Barack
>Obama’s Feb. 10 compromise on contraception in almost identical
>numbers to the population as a whole. Many of those sticking with the
>Catholic bishops in opposition are evangelical Protestants.
>
>During the 1928 presidential campaign, nutty right-wing Protestants
>claimed that Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated for president by a
>major party, was planning to extend New York’s Holland Tunnel all the
>way
 to the Vatican.
>
> Today’s tunnel would run from the Vatican to a suburban Pentecostal
>megachurch. Historians are rubbing their eyes in wonder that the
>spiritual and political descendants of Protestants who founded the
>Know Nothing Party in the 1850s on anti-Papist ideas — who hassled not
>just Al Smith but also John F. Kennedy for supposed ties to Rome — are
>now embracing Catholics. Rick Santorum was recently greeted at Oral
>Roberts University by an enthusiastic crowd of 4,000.
>http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ten-miles-square/2012/02/republicans_are_unprotected_on035487.php
>
>---
>If you look at those models that Jim Wiegel drew up at the San Antonio
>meeting last year
>http://2012gatheringminds.pbworks.com/w/page/38908833/San%20Antonio%2050th%20Celebration%20Workshop
>...the interesting question remains: where to stand in this
>revolution? What's moral?
>---
> In a counter-reformation cultural revolution like the one we seem to
>be traveling in,  just who is the establishment, the dis-establishment
>and the trans-establishment? What would Bonehoeffer and HR Neibuhr say
>again? Who are the social pioneers?
>
>Wondering how Mathews would teach CS1 when there is reactionary energy
>for non-scientific, non-secular, and not-city values.
>
>---
>Seems like finding a place to stand like a social pioneer these days
>needs both the humor of  Bill Maher and the hard-hat energy of Saul
>Alinsky
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5HxUeoQa8s
>
>_______________________________________________
>Dialogue mailing list
>Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
>http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net
> 
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