Yesterday I wrote how impressed I had been by Clay Shirky’s blog article about the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) and the implications these have for ‘traditional’ educational establishments.
This article (‘Napster, Udacity, and the Academy’) is part of the reading resources for Week 2 of the Coursera MOOC ‘E-Learning & Digital Cultures’ being run by the University of Edinburgh.
In the interest of balance, the course organisers have also included a link to a critique of Shirky’s piece. This is by Aaron Bady, a doctoral candidate in English literature of the University of California and was published online in December 2012 by Inside Higher Ed.
Bady’s criticism is lamely argued and contains a series of misreadings of Clay Shirky’s article. For example Bady writes that “Shirky talks dismissively about his own education at Yale” whereas Shirky is at pains to praise Yale’s “incredible intellectual community where even big lectures were taught by seriously brilliant people”.
It suits Bady’s misguided argument to brand Shirky as someone with a “vested interest in arguing the benefits of radically transforming the academe”. In other words, the charge is that he has an axe to grind against educational establishments that fail to move with the times. The absurd suggestion here is that Shirky is not being transparent and bent solely on heaping unwarranted praise on MOOCS. Continue reading
