Un par de textos más para el debate. El primero de un anónimo «Dean Dad» en Inside Higher Ed titulado «Toughts on DIY U. Confessions of a Community College Dean» que plantea las cosas muy claritas:

Eleemosynary institutions have real and serious flaws, but they exist to empower the weak. They are necessary to empower the weak. If you rend them asunder, you will expose the weak to the predations of the strong. This is so fundamental that I’m surprised it even needs to be brought up. If it weren’t scandalously unethical, I’d propose an experiment: take two sets of kids who barely got through a weak school district. Send one set to the local community college, and tell the other set it’s free to educate itself under digital bridges. Come back in, say, ten years, and compare the results on any scale you want. Then talk to me about «edupunks.»

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If you’re serious about education for the non-elite, you need institutions. The institutions need to be accountable, and open to creativity, and efficient, and changed in a host of ways that I spend most of my waking hours obsessing over and probably more that I’ve never even thought of. But you need them. Every serious social movement of the past two centuries has understood this. The internet has changed a lot of things, but it hasn’t changed that. The rich kids may experience unbundling as liberation, and to some degree, it can be. But for the vast majority, the issue isn’t that their individuality is being squelched by The Man and his distribution requirements. It’s that without effective educational institutions from preschool on up, they will never get the chance to develop their skills in the first place.

Otro texto interesante es el de Henry Jenkins «Why Participatory Culture Is Not Web 2.0: Some Basic Distinctions«, un extracto de su epílogo al reciente libro de Colin Lankshear y Michele Knobel, DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. Y del mismo autor «What Can Teachers Learn from DIY Cultures: An Interview with Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (Part One)«.

Incorporados quedan al conjunto de reacciones al libro de Kamenetz que estoy leyendo (véase post anterior). Seguro que mañana Downes, Felstein, Wiley, Groom y compañía hablarán del tema.