[tweetmeme] Carrie Oakley contacted me recently about guest posting here on Mission to Learn, and given her focus on online colleges, I challenged her to write something about why we should get rid of placed-based colleges. Here is the provocative post she produced. Comments welcome. - JTC Online schools are mushrooming everywhere these days, and it’s not that hard anymore to tell the genuine ones from the diploma mills. A number of online institutions have established strong brand names and reputations for themselves, and even with traditional brick and mortar big guns like MIT jumping on the online education bandwagon, it stands to reason that place-based higher education is losing the importance and prestige it once held. The death of brick and mortar colleges will likely be long, slow, and painful, but here are ten reasons why we should consider speeding up the process and abolishing them right now: They’re way too expensive for most people. Unless you have enough money stashed away or come into an inheritance, you’re likely to find yourself deep in debt by the time you graduate. They set admission criteria that are overrated and totally unnecessary in order to earn an education. No matter what additional qualifications you may have, it’s your grades that finally matter when you seek admission into a brick and mortar college with a good reputation. So if you’re looking for a second chance, with the hope of turning your life around after goofing up in high school, traditional institutions don’t give you one. Online equivalents are just as good when it comes to quality and the only reason people hesitate to accept them is because traditional colleges were around first. Online education builds more character and infuses discipline into your life - you’re more motivated to succeed because you’re going to college for a particular reason and not just because it’s expected of you. Online education is the best way to take learning to the masses and make education affordable to all irrespective of their background and financial constraints. Online education does not discriminate on any basis - age, race, color, caste, culture - when it comes to admitting students. The sky is the limit when you choose to study online. Online education is flexible - you can choose to finish your degree as fast as or as slow as you like, you can earn while you learn, and you can schedule classes according to your convenience. Online education lets you do more in less time - you can take two or even more degrees simultaneously if you’re able to manage the course work and keep up with your assignments and lessons. Online institutions define the future of education - with our increasing reliance on technology and the dwindling supply of the world’s natural fuel reserves, very soon people are going to prefer to stay home and learn using their computers and the Internet. This guest post is contributed by Carrie Oakley, who writes on the topic of online colleges. Carrie welcomes your comments at her email id: carrie.oakley1983(AT)gmail(DOT)com. No related posts.

Only 28% of people 18 years and older living in the United States indicated they’d read the entire U.S. Constitution in response to a telephone survey conducted by the Center for the Constitution at James Madison’s Montpelier in July 2010 to gauge Americans’ understanding of constitutional principles. Of those who had read at least some of the Constitution (98% of survey respondents), only one-third reported having read the Constitution on their own since high school or college. Those numbers got me thinking—I couldn’t remember reading the Constitution since leaving school. Sean O’Brien, executive director at the Center for the Constitution at James Madison’s Montpelier, talking on The Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio on September 20, 2010, convinced me to pick up a copy of this 223-year-old document: "The Constitution, the body of it, is 4,400 words. It’s about the equivalent of 17 pages in a novel. Most people could sit down and read that in 20 or 30 minutes, and it’s not that hard to do." With campaigns for mid-term elections well underway and O’Brien’s admonition in mind, I decided it was time to reread the Constitution. It took me only 20 minutes. I encourage you to invest that little bit of time in reviewing the country’s cornerstone. (It’s easy enough to find the text of the U.S. Constitution online, but for a screen-friendly or printer-friendly PDF, I suggest the National Constitution Center’s version.) Here are just five things I learned—or remembered—while rereading the Constitution. September 17 is the day the framers signed the Constitution in 1787. That date is still recognized as Constitutional Day, and the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, displays the full, original document only on that date each year. The Constitution is divided into seven articles, the first three are the longest and devoted to the three branches of government—legislative, executive, and judicial. The Bill of Rights is not part of the core Constitution but the first 10 of the amendments added to the Constitution. Virginia ratifies the Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791, making them officially part of the Constitution. According to Section 6 of Article I, elected representatives and senators are exempt from arrest while attending or traveling to and from legislative sessions—except in the case of treason or a felony. Section 3 of Article IV states, "…no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress." That last one may seem a bit obscure, but the day after I reread the Constitution, Dan Lewis brought it alive for me by writing about the state of Franklin in his daily Now I Know e-mail. In 1784 (a few years before the Constitution becomes effective for the ratifying states in 1788), North Carolina ceded almost 30 million acres of its western-most territory to the federal government to clear up debt incurred as part of the American Revolution. The occupants of the territory didn’t like the idea (they feared Congress would sell their land to another nation), and so, even though North Carolina rescinded the cessation a few months later, the settlers decided to declare independence—but they came up short, garnering only 7 of 13 votes, when they needed 9 to approve the move with a two-thirds majority. So Franklin existed in limbo (not a state in its own right nor a part of North Carolina) and as a de facto republic in its own right until 1789 when threats from Native American tribes made rejoining North Carolina attractive because of access to the state militia. In 1790, North Carolina again ceded the territory to the federal government, and the area wound up being the eastern part of Tennessee. What will you learn or remember as you reread the Constitution? Please exercise your first amendment rights by leaving a comment Celisa Related posts:The Power of Re-Reading

Five ways of not knowing Innocently not knowing. Simply being unaware of the existence of or need for particular knowledge. Receptively not knowing. Open to learning what you know you don’t know. Willfully not knowing. Ignoring, repressing, or generally refusing to acknowledge. Mistakenly not knowing. Thinking you know when you don’t. Hubristically not knowing. Thinking something is knowable in a final sense when it isn’t. [tweetmeme] The first two are relatively easy to address. The last three are often beyond repair. What are some others? Jeff Related posts:7 Ways the Internet is Improving Our Writing

This is a guest post contributed by Angelita Williams. [tweetmeme] If you are a frequent reader of Mission to Learn, you probably share the ideal that learning is an activity in which we engage throughout our entire lives. Even though we may hold fast to this ideal, it’s disheartening to see how many people act as if learning ends once our formal education draws to a close. We receive that diploma, and it’s on to getting a job, building wealth, and maybe settling down and having children. Of course, none of these milestones are undesirable in and of themselves, but what exasperates me is the ultimate goal that drives them: the pursuit of happiness. If you take a look at most best-seller lists on book Web sites like Amazon, you’ll be sure to find something of the self-help variety. In the vein of nearly all how-to books, they promise you the keys to happiness if you follow certain steps or guidelines; they purport that this notion of "happiness" is precisely what we must all be aiming for. One popular book and blog that comes to mind is Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. The subtitle basically says it all: Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. Without going into the details of the book, Rubin’s aim is more perkiness than happiness; like most self-help guides, it endeavors to make us feel "happier" using short cuts So, what’s the alternative? Having become disillusioned with the self-help drivel trafficked at bookstores and promoted online, I was pleasantly surprised to come across a recent Guardian opinion editorial that calls into question the presumptions underlying the pursuit of happiness as it is typically understood. In the editorial, Adam Phillips, a child psychologist and literary critic, describes what we may lose when we put all our eggs in the pursuit-of-happiness basket. My favorite part about the piece is that Phillips proposes a healthier, more rewarding alternative to seeking happiness at all costs. Phillips notes: So by way of conclusion I want to suggest that a right to the pursuit of happiness is asserted when a capacity for absorption has been sabotaged, when there is a loss of confidence in people’s passions. Happiness becomes important when the possibility for absorption is under threat. That the child does not want to be happy—or perhaps, more exactly, the child doesn’t want only to be happy—the child wants first to be safe, and then to be absorbed. There are, for example, only two reasons for children to go to school—apart, that is, from acquiring the werewithal to earn a living: to make friends, and to see if they can find something of absorbing interest to themselves. Absorption is the key. When we are truly learning, when we have committed ourselves to learning―especially beyond the realm of traditional education, where learning becomes an active, voluntary experience instead of a required one―we are participating in mindful absorption. While not every subject or concept will hold our interests, continually searching for this absorption, whether it’s by reading a book, developing a software program, learning an instrument, finding a challenge at work, or sharing a powerful idea with friends and colleagues, is what―in my mind―gives our lives purpose. So, next time you are lured by the holy grail of happiness, consider picking up something that keeps you absorbed. Try learning. By-line: This guest post is contributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the topics of online courses.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: angelita.williams7 @gmail.com. Related posts:What’s wrong with this statement? What if schools had to make kids happy?

[tweetmeme] I recently finished reading Peter Miller’s The Smart Swarm, and I highly recommend it.  In it, Miller provides a fascinating overview of how various types of animals - ants, honeybees, termites, sparrows - tackle complex problems by leveraging collective "intelligence." Better yet, Miller points to the lessons that humans might learn from these animals. What follows is a run down of some of the major lessons from the book. Also, I’ve posted an excerpt - When in Doubt, Turn to the Experts - but I highly recommend reading the book in its entirety. *** Miller identifies four major principles of smart swarms: self-organization, diversity of knowledge, indirect collaboration, and adaptive mimicking. Here are ten points I took from his discussion of the four principles: Decentralized control: For self-organization to produce worthwhile results - like, for example, the Linux operating system or Wikipedia - individual members of a group have to be free to make their own decisions within a relatively sparse set of restrictions imposed by the community (e.g., no profanity, appropriately commented code). Distributed problem solving: It’s in the very nature of complex problems that no single individual has the answer. Each member of the group contributes a bit towards creating a solution, just as many different writers and editors may contribute to a single Wikipedia entry. Multiple interactions: Of course, for distributed problem solving to work, there have to be opportunities for individuals to interact frequently and in a variety of different ways.  As Miller puts it, repeated interactions help to "amplify faint but important signals and speed up decision making" [267]. Diversity of knowledge: Of course, if all the interactions are among the usual suspects (a problem I find with many trade and professional associations), then you end up with birds of a feather syndrome, or homophily.  For wrestling with really complex issues, bring together individuals with a wide range of backgrounds and cognitive abilities.  A "healthy dose of randomness" [267] can also be a plus. Limits of human intuition:  Our "gut" is often not what we think it is. In addition to the tunnel vision that can come from homophily (above), Miller argues that our intuition, which has been "shaped by biological evolution to deal with the environment of hunters and gatherers, is showing its limits in a world whose dynamics are getting more complex by the minute." [58] Friendly competition of ideas: To compensate for the limits to our intuition and make the most of a diversity of knowledge, what we need is a bit of healthy competition among ideas - you know, the type of thing you might get when you don’t just teach to the test or dogmatically adhere to "best practices." Effective mechanisms for narrowing choices: If you are going to allow for a bit of competition, you have to have some way to narrow down the choices and make decisions. For me, Miller’s description of the seemingly byzantine processes of New England town meetings [83-91] suggested why human beings so often fail at directly leveraging collective intelligence - most of the time, we don’t have the patience and discipline for it. Indirect collaboration: Miller doesn’t really talk about it as such, but I think that human beings’ ability to collaborate indirectly - to work independently yet collectively toward a common end like Wikipedia, or, I would argue, democracy - is perhaps the great antidote to our seeming weakness in working directly together to make hard choices.  The wonder is not that we face so many problems, but that we have somehow solved so many together in spite of our differences. Adaptive mimicking: One of the reasons that indirect collaboration and many of the other concepts listed here have such power is that, once they start to take hold, they can spread rapidly because of our tendency to mimic each other.  The forces of influence are strong - particularly given the growth of the Web and mobile communication technologies. While they can be forces for good, they do also have their dark side - a point Miller brings home with force in his discussion of locusts as well as a number of human tragedies resulting from crowds spiraling into self-destructive behavior. Risk minimizing strategies: As so much of Miller’s book suggests, there are often great benefits to going along with group behavior. As one sociologist Miller interviews puts it, "Nine out of ten times it’s the right thing to do…or at least it is a risk minimizing strategy [212]."  In other words, when we run with the herd, go with the flow, we tend to increase our real and perceived safety - both physically and mentally. The challenge for all of us, of course, is paying enough attention to know when it makes sense to break away from the herd. Naturally,there is a great deal more to Miller’s book than what these ten bullets can provide. If you have the least bit of interest in how human beings learn and act as groups, reading all of The Smart Swarm is well worth your time. Jeff P.S. - Still not subscribed to Mission to Learn?! If you enjoy what you read here, I’d be really grateful if you would subscribe by e-mail or RSS. Related posts:Two Brief Lessons from the Mile High Learning Club

It’s time again for Blog Action Day, the annual initiative by Change.org to get bloggers around the world to focus their attention on a single issue. This time around, the focus is on water, a substance so fundamental to human life that the ways to write about it seem limitless. I encourage you to visit the "Why Water?" page on the Blog Action Day site for a brief but powerful overview of the many ways in which water impacts our lives, but for the sake of keeping things simple and, well, actionable, I’m going to focus here on just one small aspect of water consumption: the plastic bottle. Here’s a quick factoid on bottled water from the Blog Action Day site: The US, Mexico and China lead the world in bottled water consumption, with people in the US drinking an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year. Over 17 million barrels of oil are needed to manufacture those water bottles, 86 percent of which will never be recycled. Wow. This falls in the "we know it can’t be good but we keep doing it anyway" or "we already know what we need to know to change things for the better" camp. At least in the U.S., the tap water supply in the vast majority of places is perfectly safe for everyday consumption. In places were it is not, relatively inexpensive filtering approaches can get rid of whatever contaminants there are. There is simply no reason to keep manufacturing and filling plastic bottles - particularly when the plastic itself may contain harmful substances. Unless you are living in a part of the world where there simply is no safe water supply other than through bottled water, just stop. Stop buying those plastic bottles of water. Stop distributing them at meetings and conferences. Stop accepting them on airplanes or other places where they are casually handed out. Just stop. It’s a small step that can make a big difference. Jeff Related posts:5 Learning Games for Climate Change - Blog Action Day Eat to Learn, Learn to Eat: 7 Simple Rules for Eating Better

This is a guest post from Kimberly Bowen. [tweetmeme] Children are new to the learning process. They constantly see and experience things for the first time. They pause to listen to noises, try things over again until they master it, observe language until they can speak it and ask if they don’t know what something means. As we grow, we identify other ways to efficiently gather information. However, with this, we sometimes stop paying attention to the details in our everyday lives that could provide us with fresh insight and information.  Consider these tips on how to rekindle this childlike process for obtaining knowledge. Take Time to Observe Start paying more attention to the things around you. Take time to appreciate the clouds in the sky. Pay attention to how your coworker’s day is going. Become aware of the people you are in line with at the checkout counter. Have a purpose in your observation, whether it’s to better understand human nature, be more effective with your time or gain appreciation for others. Go Exploring Coming across things you have not seen or experienced before can help you appreciate things like a child. Hike on a new trail, visit a place you’ve never been or try a different route to work. Look at the things you see every day with a new eye. Consider how you would perceive them if it was the first time you’d ever noticed them. Learn From Everyday Moments Pause to think about the things you do every day. This can be a good practice if you feel you don’t have much opportunity to learn new things, or if you feel you are not progressing in your lifelong pursuit of education. Assess what you have learned during your day. For instance, did a conversation not go as well as you planned? Evaluate what went well and what could have been different. Consider how you can avoid a similar situation in the future. Write down the knowledge you have gained in a journal and review them occasionally. See where you have made improvements and how you have grown from these experiences. Model Other People’s Good Qualities Start paying attention to the good qualities in others. Make a list of these traits and determine how you can emulate them. Work on the qualities one by one until you master them. Take Time to Read If you are busy, which most people are, look for ways you can incorporate reading into your schedule. Listen to audio books in your car, read on the bus, take a couple minutes of your lunch break or put a book next to your bed where you can read a couple pages before you go to sleep. Try different genres. Ask people what their favorite books are and read them—not only will you gain more knowledge from the books, but you will learn more about those around you by understanding the books they like. Study famous and influential people and events in history. Read both fiction and nonfiction. Do some research on the life of the author. Find out what world and local events were taking place at the time the book was written. Talk to Others Share with others the things you are discovering, whether it’s something you read in the news or heard about in another conversation. By talking about what you are learning, you can better understand and retain the knowledge you gain. It can also help you to discover fresh perspectives. Be a Hands-on Person Find a new creative outlet. Research how to prune rosebushes and practice on the ones in your yard. Follow instructions on how to cut tile and create a mosaic table. Take something apart to ascertain how it works. Enroll in a continuing education course on NorthOrion such as photography, ceramics, yoga or bowling. However you decide to do it, incorporate learning into your every day routine. Select those methods that come natural to you. Be willing to look at gaining knowledge as a child does, unembarrassed and optimistically. You may find that you can gain their same enthusiasm. Byline: Kimberly Bowen, NorthOrion Staff Writer (www.northorion.com) Related posts:7 Secrets of a 9 Billion Dollar Industry

There is stability in change, unity in opposition. That’s my sole, indirect comment on the elections under way in the U.S. right now. Well, one other: Don’t believe everything you think. I read that one on a bumper sticker as I went out for a walk this morning, and it seemed like an appropriate bit of sophistry for the complex times in which we live - times which demand a philosophical perspective. A philosophical perspective was just what I was hoping to cultivate as I walked, and I had loaded up my iPod with a great new free resource for achieving my goal: The History of Philosophy Podcast hosted by Peter Adamson of Kings College London. It’s early days yet - as of this post, Adamson is only five episodes in to covering the entire history of philosophy - but even if he makes it only part of the way through, it looks like this will be a tremendous learning resource. So far, I’ve listened to his take on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and found it very engaging. I’ll definitely be adding this to my list of content sources for my iPod learning mix. (Heraclitus, in case you are a little rusty on your pre-Socratic philosophers, was the one famous for saying you can never step in the same river twice.  The opening sentence of this post represents a key slice of his overarching philosophy.) If you happen to feel like the words "engaging" and "philosophy" don’t belong in the same room together, much less the same sentence, I’d urge you to lay that bias aside and give Adamson a listen. Philosophy is, after all, the love and pursuit of wisdom. Or, put a bit differently, philosophy is a mission to learn. Jeff P.S. - Many thanks to Stephen Downes for highlighting the History or Philosophy Podcast in his OLDaily. There’s no telling how long it would have taken me to discover it otherwise. Related posts:Discover Your Inner Philosopher 10 Killer Content Sources for Your iPod Learning Mix

I’ve recently published an updated version of the Learning 2.0 for Associations eBook I posted a couple of years ago. It’s free - as in no money or e-mail address required - and you can download it at the link below. Learning 2.0 for Associations Home Page It’s a quick read. Once you’ve had a chance to take a look, I’d be really interested to know - how learning 2.0 are the trade and professional associations to which you belong? And do you care? Do they need to be more "2.0″ to really meet your lifelong learning needs? Please comment and share your thoughts. Jeff P.S. - I’m also continuing to build out Web pages with links to great learning 2.0 resources (see link above). If you have any good ones to suggest, please comment and share those as well. I’m not trying to account for every resource there is - just looking for real gems. Related posts:Top 10 Click Getters from the Free Learning Monitor

Success leads to happiness. On the surface, this seems like a straightforward enough statement, one that’s not difficult to accept. But there are at least three problems with it. The first two may be obvious to you: Defining "success" is difficult Defining "happiness" is difficult. Because these concepts are difficult, there is - as far as I can tell - a near universal tendency to associate success with attainment of one variety or another (e.g., lots of money, education from the best schools, high social status) and happiness with mere pleasure (or, as a guest writer here recently put it, with "perkiness.") Even if we can get past these issues and arrive at a deeper understanding of success and happiness, the third issue may not be obvious: The order is wrong. However you happen to define either success or happiness, it’s actually the latter that tends to lead to the former - i.e. happiness leads to success - rather than the other way around. At least, that’s what a growing body of research seems to indicate. For more background and a glimpse into the research, I recommend a recent Harvard Business Review IdeaCast (@ 15 minutes) with Shawn Anchor, author of The Happiness Advantage. In the podcast, Shawn talks about both success and happiness as concepts and argues that traditional approaches to success often interfere with real happiness - and ultimately with true success. Anchor’s perspective is an important one, I think, for lifelong learners. One of the key motivators for learning tends to be "success" in one form or another and consciously or not, success is usually perceived as a step towards happiness.  The problem, however, is that the steps never end - one success demands the next - and it’s easy enough to find yourself well down a path you never meant to take. Starting from a different perspective - one that puts happiness first - is no small challenge. In most formal education systems conventional notions of success as attainment - high grades, degrees, credentials - are emphasized from day one. Schools are about "success," not happiness.  (What if the opposite was true?) Breaking free from this mindset after years as a student is perhaps the greatest challenge faced by the serious lifelong learner. There is no easy way to do it, though Anchor’s comments point to habits that I emphasize often here at Mission to learn - particularly consciousness, practice, and reflection. Also, it is important to emphasize that a focus on happiness does not take success out of the equation. Rather, it leads to a higher ideal of success and ultimately to a much higher level of success than traditional approaches. In short, it gets the order right: Happiness leads to success. Jeff P.S. - If you aren’t yet subscribed to Mission to Learn, please consider subscribing by RSS or by e-mail. If you are already subscribed, I’d be grateful if you would tell a friend, family member, or colleague about Mission to Learn and ask that they consider subscribing. Related posts:Learning and Absorption: An Alternative to Happiness How-Tos What if schools had to make kids happy?