Edupunks Guide To A Diy Credential

The EduPunk's Guide To A DIY Credential by Anya Kamenetz

2011-02-21-KamenetzDiyCredential

Stephen Downes has a variety of strong criticisms of it: It's as though Kamentetz has read about do-it-yourself learning, online or otherwise, but has never done it, much less tried to facilitate it. The remaining how-to guides (there's no need to deconstruct them all) are equally superficial and misleading. He thinks his own The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On from 2008 is a superior intro to Online Learning.

• The two of them are on a discussion thread about it.

I think the problem is that the title implies that this book's focus is on Credentials, but it isn't written that way.

• of 79 pages (PDF), there's HowTo-6 (3 pages long) and then there are some listings in parts of Appendix B and C.

• she covers a huge range of credentials, from High School through Continuing Education, some of which are completely irrelevant (e.g. why mention the International Baccalaureate certification if you can only get it by attending an IB-certified High School?) to the DIY framing.

  • I would think that the "Professional Licensing and Certification" section would be the centerpiece of this, but it's only 3 pages (Appendix A.3), and horribly superficial (for instance, while she notes that licenses are often state-administered, she doesn't mention that this means that moving to a different state can force you to get licensed in that new state, and that such a process isn't just instance paperwork).

• there are a number of example students/people mentioned, but in a very random and superficial way, rather than using them like Persona-s to structure any of the content (since she covers side a variety of situations).

• I think there's some useful content in here, it just needs a lot of work on the thinking/framing part.

  • and many of the non-Certificate sections, like the Online Research section, are horribly lame and should just be dropped

  • hmm, there might be a case for HyperText here!

    • instead of making a polished presentation WebSite for this, she should put the content in a Wiki, so that it both provides HyperText cross-linking, plus the ability for users to update/extend it!