Cathy N. Davidson analyzes new directions in higher education in light of both online learning, peer-to-peer, and connectivist methods of learning and the topdown, hierarchical, centralized online education being promoted by massive open online courses (MOOCs) emanating from a few elite universities and corporate funders. In light of the capacities of the World Wide Web, which allows for participation, collaboration, and self-publication without the intervention of an editor or a publisher, the recentralizing of learning in MOOCs seems more in keeping with nineteenth-century forms of siloed education designed for the Taylorized industrial era than for the current era. We need new and better paradigms for shifting the assumptions of higher education.
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January 01 2014
Why Higher Education Demands a Paradigm Shift
Cathy N. Davidson
Cathy N. Davidson
Cathy N. Davidson is the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and codirector of the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge at Duke University. Cofounder of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, she is the author most recently of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (2011) and The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (with David Theo Goldberg; 2010).
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Public Culture (2014) 26 (1 (72)): 3–11.
Citation
Cathy N. Davidson; Why Higher Education Demands a Paradigm Shift. Public Culture 1 January 2014; 26 (1 (72)): 3–11. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2346313
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