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The Future of Web 2.0
An interview with WSU's Gary Brown
2/27/2008
These types of programs will be incorporating all kinds of permutations, to some extent based on the disciplines. An issue will be finding faculty with the imagination to integrate these options into their teaching and learning, and an even more difficult issue will be credentialing that kind of work. What's more, if students can demonstrate work they've done at different institutions -- even if they haven't received degrees -- at what point will we find that employers don't really care about the degrees?
Employers then will be looking simply at whether the individual can do the work. A large part of what has gone on in the past is that a college degree has meant that a person can persist and persevere. Yet, about 70 percent of students do not secure jobs directly aligned with their majors. So there's an interesting set of issues that will affect the value of a degree. And as the secret gets out of the bag that job seekers don't need a degree as much as they need to demonstrate the work they are capable of doing, we'll see different kinds of models popping up.
But certainly this is not simply about commerce; about companies harvesting a new crop of employees. Or are you saying that this is what the notion of PLEs will lead us to? No, it's not just about commerce. But there is some irony in this, too, because employers are telling us that what they want is active, hands-on, authentic learning pedagogies that actually are more aligned with what we know about learning and good practice than much of what happens in our educational institutions currently upholding ivory tower values. There's often better pedagogy implicit in career training than there is in the pure academic world. So, you may ask, are we talking about subordinating ourselves to career training to a certain extent? The answer is, if we are, what's the problem with that?
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