An article at Mashable “In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero” doesn’t bode well for institutes for higher education. Universities are a different matter, as higher education used to be free in Germany and still is in countries like Sweden – also top students in any country. In the long run, costs will naturally decrease, but I don’t see language teachers being replaced by videos anytime soon. Also, lower costs don’t mean the price will fall as well – especially in education, a high price tag signals quality. Many of the courses universities offer though could be replaced by open source and keep down overall costs – readings first and foremost. Also, education could be introduced to a broader spectrum of the population, but then again, a certain mindset is neccessary to watch an MIT Video lecture about Classic Mechanics instead of a mundane Big Brother episode at Youtube.
A commenter argues that “automatization can go only so far” – but logical essays i.e. can’t be evaluated by a machine. Nevertheless, PearsonVue is attempting exactly that with the new Pearson Test of English. If it’s technically feasible, I don’t see a problem evaluating other forms of academic production as well, verbal or written.
Still, I’ve had the opportunity to both experience face2face as well as online courses: The biggest advantage is direct intellectual exchange between students working on a case – not doable with today’s tools. Many textbooks are definitely going to be free in the future, it’s just a long way. Education is certainly going to get cheaper – but as long as teachers need to be paid and class rooms needed for social interaction, institutes for higher education are not going to be able to offer completely free courses.
I’m at a great workshop today and yesterday, “Social Software @ Work” at HHU’s Schloss Mickeln in Duesseldorf. I didn’t have much opportunity to take part in such conferences – something that has to change! Dozens of like-minded people, from companies like BASF, Daimler and Siemens as well as Frauenhof researchers talking about web 2.0. Check out the speakers list and their publications.
Make Money Around Free Content in the Wired How-To Wiki – it partly touches my MBA thesis. How to develop and implement a business model, offering a high-quality service (not content) for free while being paid by a third party.
My WordPress install was borked since version 2.x, I finally got around to revamp the backend, clear out 1001 folders and all that. Oh, and there are 30+ drafts in the pipeline – most of it probably out of date, but we’ll see.
The other day, I was looking for add-ons for Thunderbird and found an article about Rapleaf. In short, if you write me an email, the addon shows me which social networks you belong to. Comes in handy, but the database is not big enough.
Google Chrome arrived – the second browser war, if it hadn’t already started with the emergence and success of Firefox, has now officially begun. I think Google Chrome is rather a huge social experiment than a browser – what’s more important, your privacy or the (second) best browser?
Reading CNET’s 10 Things we’d like to see in Google Chrome, I already know what I’d like to see in it but won’t ever be part of the software… a decent Adblocker.
The two billionth photo at flickr has been uploaded on Sunday. Very impressive, since 500,000 was not that long ago – I’m curious what’s the first photo on flickr that hasn’t been deleted or is private?
To tell you the truth, I can’t remember when Microsoft came up with something that made me go WOW – check out Photosynth
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At work, I’ve started using an expression in 2005 when dealing with internal memos and information we enter in our knowledge database, a mediawiki installation: wikifizieren
means just that, entering information into a wiki and using wiki formatting. I had to explain to my boss and colleagues what I meant, but I think it sounds reasonable. What do you think?
update: I found the term in Wikipedia (where else), the earliest entry is from 2004.
Flickrvision displays photos around the world as they’re created in Flickr. Neat.
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TOEFL is required as English became a basic requirement for jobs in South Korea, even ones completely unrelated to English. Even children are taking the test. I don’t have to mention that they’re not supposed to take it since TOEFL is targeted to candidates in their last high school year or first semester at the university. The market for TOEFL in South Korea is not huge, it is gigantic: The bank of Korea estimated in 2005 that about 54,8 million Euro are spent annually for study. The linked page gives a good explanation about the sociocultural reasons why everybody is learning English.
This year, it happened that the TOEFL online registration system (a.k.a. iSER) broke down for several weeks. Worldwide, nobody was able to register online. It’s no wonder if you have one server and hundreds of thousands of customers trying to register. This was certainly the case in South Korea. The cbt TOEFL, the computer-based variety, was taken by 130,000 in 2006. Since ibt TOEFL got introduced, the numbers were cut to less than one fourth. The numbers vary depending on who you ask. The rest of the unlucky ones who didn’t get a seat yet are even hiring people to do so for them or fly to other countries to take the test. The ETS server got pounded by Korean customers, once there were 32 million hits in one day when free seats for July admins were up to grabs. Now, that’s desperation.
ETS is going to loose a lot of customers if they don’t expand their network capacity fast: The South Korean government might create a test of their own to depend less on TOEFL. It’ll take them a few years though, and even then, ETS has a head start of several decades in language tests and a couple of years in internet-based testforms. TOEFL is a global operation, involving thousands of people working hard for it for years.
After the debacle with excluding South Korea from July admins lawyers took it in their hands and filed a complaint at the Fair Trade Commission. In the meanwhile, the importance of TOEFL is decreasing, applicants for foreign language schools are among the first who don’t need to take the TOEFL anymore.
Lee Yong-Tak (who has an English name like every English language learner in this country: his name is Paul), who has been appointed as country manager for South Korea on June 1st will need every help he can get to end the TOEFL crisis in South Korea. My advice: Four cities can’t possibly meet demand for the whole country, get every university and language school equipped with computers on board asap.
