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0 points6ren15y ago0 comments

The internet is definitely disrupting education; especially some organizations that use it (Christensen has a chapter about it in Seeing What's Next, and in fact a whole other book Disrupting Class, specific to it http://www.claytonchristensen.com/books.html - I've read the former).

You make an interesting point: as education has become more widely available, it's lost its quality as a signal because everyone goes there; and it does appear that quality has gone down (I guess it must, if you cater for everyone). Odd: it's usually the disruptions that go down-market, targeting non-consumption. One can see the net as an extension of this downward/expanding trend of education.

But I do think it's an extremely rare person - maybe just as rare as autodidacts of years past - who has the self-discipline/interest and wisdom to use these resources. It's not easy (in fact, my PhD supervisor liked to say that the purpose of a PhD was to enable you to learn how to learn - I wouldn't go that far, and indeed haven't completed). Most people look at videos of cats online - a sort of downmarket TV.

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BTW: If you're interested in reading Christensen's other books... they are co-authored, and he's also running a consulting business. And sadly it shows. His first book was beautifully written, forming a compelling and inspirational narrative (really), and rigorously supported by data. His later ones aren't. They are written like a cross between undigested research paper (but without data or support) and an overly casual self-help business book. I suppose it's too much to expect even of someone as brilliant as Christensen, a Rhodes Scholar, to do the equivalent of a PhD for each of his books (his first one was based on his PhD). They have interesting ideas, but they are complex and not supported, leaving me with the sense that they little more reliable than plausible ideas. Actually, they are pretty good, but just irritating, disappointing and confusing.

He's refined terminology for his theory (e.g. target non-consumption; asymmetrical motivation between poor entrants and rich incumbents) which I think is good. He also relates it back to the basics, of succeeding by meeting customer needs/wants, and generalizes. It's a bit insular, self-indulgent and inward looking, focusing on his theory instead of data in the world. Solipsistic, in a wordy word.

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hga15y ago· 1 in thread

You're right, in that a bachelor's degree per se no longer means what it did, but my point about high school diplomas is that what most everyone got, as of say the Silent Generation (my parents'), used to mean quite a lot. However, by or sometime after say 1955 when Why Johnny Can't Read was published it apparently wasn't even a guarantee of functional reading (I wouldn't directly know, having grown up in a city that Reader's Digest reported on a year or two later with the title "Why Johnny Can Read In Joplin").

Ny point here is that "everybody goes there" wasn't to the best I can tell a factor in the degradation of the high school diploma. I'm pretty sure the expansion of colleges and universities due to the G.I. Bill etc. didn't result in too much of a loss in higher education, that seemed to arrive in the cultural '60s (due to draft deferments and the general Zeitgeist) and very few if any colleges avoided some grade inflation and watering down of the curriculum or its rigor (not even MIT).

Anyway, I don't see these formal educational developments really fitting into the Christensen framework, it's not like the real world where an excavator or a disk drive must perform at some minimal level to get the job done.

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Thanks for the warnings on the subsequent books, which I haven't read. The first is indeed a jewel, and thanks to my background I could tell that his primary data set on disk drives was spot on, as seemed to be his conclusions. I'll be careful if I decide to go back to the well.

(Have to run, tornado warning....)

hga15y ago

Make that a provisional EF4 in Joplin, 116 confirmed dead so far, hundreds injured. 2,000 structures damaged, including my apartment building and apartment.

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