Rip, Mix, Learn

Intriguing article from the Guardian on Education 2.0. The discussion centers around the intersection of social technologies and education and proposes that students may (actually, already are) constructing their own learning experiences from multiple, previously disconnected networked digital environments. An example cited is that in one week Open University saw more than 2 million downloads from its offerings on iTunesU, 87% of which were from outside the United Kingdom.

"I'm betting most of them have been downloaded by US students studying at American universities," says Peter Scott, director of the OU's Knowledge Media Institute. He predicts that students will soon be mixing their higher education experiences from resources all over the world, choosing to study at Harvard, say, while listening to lectures from Oxford, taking part in discussion groups at the University of Mumbai, and sitting exams somewhere entirely different.