It’s the first article where I see a link between the decline of the music industry, and the coming decline of Universities.
And once you got the point, it’s clear as magic.
The idea comes from Don Tapscott and is basic: Encyclopedias, newspapers, and record labels have a lot in common. They all are in the business of producing content.
Not convinced?
Here are a few numbers and facts:
A dismal 58 percent of entering freshmen actually graduate from the same college within six years.
More and more students are questioning the “bang for the buck” as college tuition has risen in cost more than any other good or service since 1990, leaving students with $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt in the United States alone.
Students around the world are increasingly choosing alternative models of higher education.
In 2007, nearly 20 percent of college students in the United States — some 3.9 million — took an online course, according to the Sloan Consortium, and their numbers are increasing. The University of Phoenix now enrolls more than 200,000 annually.
Annual enrollment in the University of Phoenix online MBA program is 16,000 compared with 900 at Harvard.
Given the huge explosion in MBA courses offered online, many of which are from Asia, it’s a fair guess to say that most MBA degrees today are taken online. Yet the proportion of institutions declaring that online education is critical to their long-term strategy has actually declined.
There are more subtle indicators as well. Students and faculty alike are refusing to pay for academic periodicals and are file-swapping like it’s 1999.
For many of the smartest students, it’s fashionable to try to get an A without going to any lectures — meaning that the cream of the crop is beginning to boycott the basic model of pedagogy.
Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. If students turn away from a traditional university education, this will erode the value of the credentials that universities award, along with the position of these institutions as centers of learning and research and as campuses where young people get a chance to “grow up.”
Une conf call du Personal Democracy Forum et des organisateurs de 350.org, un site web d’activistes pro-climate change.
Leur idée principale est d’avoir organisé des flashmobs virtuelles en poussant les gens à se prendre en photo avec un panneau 350 partout dans le monde, puis à partager leurs photos sur des sites grands publics pour montrer aux gens le nombre et la diversité de leurs membres.
Le principal message qui ressort de leur expérience, c’est l’importance des personnes plutôt que celle de la technologie : The people were more important than the platform.
C’est toujours utile d’avoir les bons chiffres en tête.
J’ai surtout été étonné de me rendre compte du faible écart qui existe entre la France (2e pays le plus peuplé de l’union européenne) et la Grande-Bretagne (3e pays le plus peuplé) ou l’Italie (4e) : 65 millions d’habitants en France contre 61 en Grande Bretagne, et 60 en Italie.
I found Mandel’s essay so compelling that I decided to take a look at the actual data. Mandel rightly says that we currently lack a comprehensive “innovation index” that tracks commercial innovation: “There’s no government-constructed “innovation index” that would allow us to conclude unambiguously that we’ve been experiencing an innovation shortfall. Still, plenty of clues point in that direction.”
“We live in an era of rapid innovation.” I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase, or some variant, over and over again. The evidence appears to be all around us: Google, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, flat-screen televisions, the Internet itself.
But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted? And if that’s true, is there any reason to expect the next decade to be any better?
Gerd Leonhard m’a ajouté sur ce site qu’il a monté pour regrouper ses contacts twitters les plus intéressants. Sympa. Ca vaudrait même peut être le coup que je fasse le mien.
je crois que la vidéo est connue, mais elle est vraiment impressionnante :-)
Gunter Pauli, from the “Zero Emissions Research Initiative” gives a vibrant speech about how nature provides an important model to find solutions to the ecological crisis. His call for action is followed by disruptive and inspiring examples ranging from battery-less devices to biomimetism.
This is a weblog about what I like and what I work on : Law, Internet, Culture, Entrepeneurship and tons of other things. I have been poking around since 1999. You can read more about me, or about my work. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.
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