Whereas Clay Shirky spoke to the benefits of online education, Mark Edmundson is a bit more skeptical in his 2012 (yet still just as relevant)1 article for The New York Times, The Trouble With Online Education. I agree with most of the criticisms Clay made in his two articles I linked to yesterday, particularly with regards to the unsustainability of the current model upon which higher education runs. However, having spent three of my high school years taking online courses from various remote schools, and now that — for the first time in my life — I actually go to a classroom on a regular basis, I feel confident in saying that there exists no absolute solution to this problem.
Craig Hockenberry making a very apropos comparison between the Mercedes-Benz S-Class line and Apple’s iPhone 5S. Perhaps just as interesting as his thoughts on the iPhone, however, were his thoughts on this particular vehicular product line, however brief.
I always find a writer traditionally steeped in technology taking a step in to the world of cars disproportionately fascinating. That meticulous nature, attention to detail, and, most important of all, the ability to take in to account the intangibles — aspects of a car that don’t appear on a feature checklist — make for an invariably interesting read.
A friend of mine used to pirate all sorts of things. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he grew up in the golden age of piracy: Napster had proven the idea just a few years ago, and sites like The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents had since stepped in to keep the dream alive and well. Fast-forward to today, though, and most of those sites have shut down. The Pirate Bay still manages to limp along, but copyright laws and watchful Internet Service Providers have made piracy a mere shadow of its former self. As for my friend, now he pays for a basic Netflix subscription each month to watch a few shows — but for the most part, nothing replaced all that content he once pirated. As Antino Kim, Atanu Lahiri, Debabrata Dey, and Gerald Kane point out in MIT’s Sloan Management Review, that may not actually be the clear win most would have you believe.