Comments on: Thinking about college for free http://info-fetishist.org/2008/02/27/thinking-about-college-for-free/ yeah, it's long -- I didn't have time to make it shorter Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:44:58 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Shaun Huston http://info-fetishist.org/2008/02/27/thinking-about-college-for-free/#comment-54 Shaun Huston Thu, 28 Feb 2008 05:10:09 +0000 http://info-fetishist.org/?p=53#comment-54 Very few of the undergrads I've come across as a professor could simply jump into constructing their own programs of study out of whole cloth from high school. Quite frankly, as ready as I was for college, it wasn't until I pretty well reached the end where I would say with confidence that I could have constructed a meaningful major for myself. This would seem to be a necessity for a "distributed" university to work. Like you, I would stress the importance of peer relationships, which I find difficult to envision a virtual university replicating. Co-curricular activities like forensics would be an extension of this. And those "deep" late night conversations in the dorms or shared house do happen, and I think that being in the same environment for at least broadly similar reasons and with a common structure is the foundation for those experiences. As is often the case with these kinds of conversations, the real trick is not how to replace one model with another, but finding ways for different models to co-exist. Very few of the undergrads I’ve come across as a professor could simply jump into constructing their own programs of study out of whole cloth from high school. Quite frankly, as ready as I was for college, it wasn’t until I pretty well reached the end where I would say with confidence that I could have constructed a meaningful major for myself. This would seem to be a necessity for a “distributed” university to work.

Like you, I would stress the importance of peer relationships, which I find difficult to envision a virtual university replicating. Co-curricular activities like forensics would be an extension of this. And those “deep” late night conversations in the dorms or shared house do happen, and I think that being in the same environment for at least broadly similar reasons and with a common structure is the foundation for those experiences.

As is often the case with these kinds of conversations, the real trick is not how to replace one model with another, but finding ways for different models to co-exist.

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