I’m using the illusory urgency of getting the Disseminary cooking to put off tackling a variety of financial tasks (including, of course, taxes). One of the items on my prep list involves compiling a list of reasons that people might want to lend even token support (link-love) to the Disseminary, over and above whether they care much about theology, religious studies, or Trevor or me.
One of my reasons came in an email the other day: the Association of Yale Alumni want me to take part in one of a series of online learning events. They all look interesting, and the expert instructors are surely eminent expositors of whatever they’re on board to teach (although the big-name “Course Author” isn’t the one with whom a course consumer will interact — your tuition dollar buys you the opportunity to look at a CDROM by the course author, and interaction with “a credentialed subject-matter expert and experienced teacher to be named later”). But these events cost amounts in the neighborhood of $150 to $200, and the course itself remains sealed behind the financial firewall.
So many things about this approach bother me that I won’t waste anyone’ time stipulating them. Suffice it to say that the Disseminary is all about imagining online education very, very differently. Open, free, involving direct interaction, and available for the whole world. If you see some of this in an email from me sometime soon, please forgive me; this is dress-rehearsal material for next week.
Posted by AKMA at April 4, 2003 12:55 PM | TrackBackI am very interested in the dynamics of what you are doing. It happens that your subject is theology, but it could be social organizing, fundraising, financial planning, insurance sales, philosopy, or any learning topic. I wonder if there is a "meta" level at which you could appeal to donors -- and offer something back. I don't know, really, what disseminary is, or how it will work, but if you get it going, I would be interested in seeing if the model could be cloned. At work we are using Webex more and more to do on line education for our 200 field reps. They love it because they don't have to travel. Could you see "Disseminary" as a "for instance" or instantiation of a technology and methodology that would be transferable? Could you see you and Trevor et al, like Mena and Ben Trott, making your "product," "package" or system available to others? Your initial take would be education in educational settings, but corporate training is a huge, huge business. If you have a distribution system that works, every national corporation needs with personnel spread out over the country could use it. No doubt others will be trying to capture this market, but I have a feeling that you will have an edge, as Winer does with blogging, because he is a writer and you are a teacher and community builder. He has designed tools that have to work because he uses them. Your tools, one you get them working, might work for me, and many others. So, you might want to stress that Disseminary is about dissemination of ideas, and collaboration, etc. rather than a theologian's library or teaching tool.
Anyway, look forward to seeing how this works.
Posted by: The Happy Tutor at April 5, 2003 12:05 PM