It seems that you can't go anywhere these days without seeing a new pretender to a digital revolution in education. Just this week, Harvard and MIT launched an online initiative, edX. It follows Stanford University's digital education initiatives and the start-ups it has spawned, CourseRA and Udacity. Apple (with iTunes U) and now Microsoft (with its …
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Over at Forbes on my Parentonomics blog I recount the experience my 11 year old son had taking Stanford's Game Theory course. My take-a-away is that designing online content and also assessment is a real challenge and it is unlikely that normal course content will simply translate over to the new medium.
Some folk like to read blogs. Some folk like to listen to podcasts. Why not give everyone the option to do what they prefer? Now it is possible to read or listen to many of the essays that appear in my IEEE Micro Economics column (and appear here in digitopoly). The IEEE deserves credit for …
Just a conference announcement related to the Sloan Foundation program I co-direct ... for those interested. NBER Workshop on Scholarly Communication, Open Science and Its Impact This workshop is part of a Sloan Foundation program co-directed by Joshua Gans and Fiona Murray. This year's workshop will focus on scholarly communication, its incentives and the effectiveness …
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[HT: Geekdad] Or what Facebook might do. Just don't ask about happiness.
Just an alert to interested people (especially grad students, current or newly minted) of a competition for proposals for research into smart disclosure. What is smart disclosure? "Smart Disclosure” policies help consumer markets work more competitively by providing decision-makers with convenient, computable, and cogent data--both about products or services and also about personal use patterns …
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Felix Salmon observed the other day that the NYT's Walmart expose sent Walmart's share price tumbling. As it is the kind of investigative reporting we'd all like to see if someone would pay for it, he wondered if this fact meant there would be someone to pay for it. A slight tweak to the NYT's …
Just before he stepped down as CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs tried to buy DropBox for Apple. But he and Dropbox founder, Drew Houston, had a dispute about what DropBox was. Jobs had claimed it was "a feature, not a product." I agreed, much to the consternation of some. This week saw the "feature" story gain weight …
TED has just released Ted-Ed, a series of videos for educational purposes. The organisation is slick but the best part is that educators -- like myself -- can edit a video's page to tie in with their own lesson preferences. Here is one that I just edited; mostly because it is a longstanding interest of …
So it started with JK Rowling who went platform independent and effectively DRM free on the Harry Potter series. This meant that for those books purchasers would not be locked into any one platform (e.g., Kindle) and that also meant that no platform could use lock-in to build up market power. Interestingly, you can't buy …
Digitopoly 