Cross-posted from The Amani Institute Blog.

 

If you’ve been reading the news much in America this past year (or talking to me at all), you’ve likely heard about the current crisis in higher education. And the doomsayers are no light-weights. They include The Economist wondering if American universities will become like its car companiesThe Washington Post predicting the decline will more likely mirror newspapers, and if you like your news delivered via guru, Seth Godin flat-out predicts a meltdown.

And that’s just for starters. Seriously. Google “crisis in higher education” and you’ll see what I mean.

But why? In this brief RSA-style videoAnya Kamenetz elaborates some of the reasons.

 

What do you think? Is higher education a bubble about to burst? Are American universities as we know them endangered? This is a topic we’ll come back to from time to time.

 

We’ll be addressing this issue among others in our new course New Technologies for Educational Practice that begins next February. Apply now to join thought leaders and other professionals in the four-week online certificate course! 

Cross-posted from The Stanford Social Innovation Review by Roshan Paul and Alexa Clay

This is the second in a series of interviews where we speak with leading innovators who are appropriating lessons from open source thinking—once purely the domain of the software engineer—for social change.

Stephen Friend is an Ashoka Fellow in the United States working to transform the culture and practice of closed information systems present in biomedical research to align with and support health outcomes by establishing a commons. He is president of Sage Bionetworks.  (more…)

Cross-posted from The Stanford Social Innovation Review by Roshan Paul and Alexa Clay

This is the first in a series of interviews where we speak with leading innovators who are appropriating lessons from open source thinking—once purely the domain of the software engineer—for social change.

We first met Stephen Song through the Ashoka Globalizer program, where he helped us develop our framework for thinking about how to scale social innovation through an open source approach. Stephen is the founder of Village Telco, a social enterprise that aims to make starting a telephone company as easy as starting a blog.
(more…)