Pushback getting fiercer: rant in Slate about everything wrong with MOOC.

We believe that the Social Learning Construct (SLC) is very important, and that it depends on, in part, creating dynamic inter-relations between and among students and “teachers”. Since we are in the midst of a “communications revolution” with powerful new connecting technologies, this should be doable.

However, it will take some time to fully develop and understand all that should be involved in a SLC, and how it should “work”. We are just at the beginning of this process, but clearly the pushback from the teaching profession and allies is that “the human interaction must be pretty much the way it is now” which of course preserves the status quo re job definitions and positions for “teachers”.

Which is ironic of course, because one of the most obvious areas that are presently lacking is human interactions in large university classes, where MOOCS are intended to help and increase interactions.

This link “implied” by Gary, who also curates a link to a response about how journalism works these days, and some of the motivations for the Slate articles fierceness.

For more on how the “human interaction” element plays out in accomplishing change, or in other words, in human learning how to do things “right”…see recent article in the New Yorker on getting health workers to learn appropriate actions and save lives with seemingly doable changes in their standard routines.

The article is called “Slow Ideas, and it will be linked at its own post soon.