1

Joe (and Hugh Hewitt, who referred me)

Why not add in the available distance education options, many of them accessible through internet and/or packet delivery of materials?

Try for instance the well regarded Heriott-Watt MBA programme, in which UK's FInancial Times took a major interest.

One of the points you are looking at is the issue of what is called accreditation of experiential learning, and that can be done in several ways. (INdeed, several years ago UK had a major review of parallel track academic and practitioner qualifications, and came up with a scheme. Was the name the Dearing Report, I think?)

My favoured model is that maybe we can use blog technologies to deliver online seminars, as is now happening with several of your threads. Some of those seminars can help focus experiences through structured reflection leading to a synthstic paper, that would be assessable. [It would also givce opportunity to fill in the inevitable gaps that we have through the vagaries of personal experience.]

Others could then build a foundational core of breadth and key skills for efficeint praxis. Then we go to specialisations and create a structured scheme of learning, leading to a capstone integrative project that issues in a thesis or similar report, on something original and contributing tot he body of knowledge at grad level.

Indeed, why not a Blog U, there must be enough PhDs out there to pull together an accreditable Grad programme? [BTW: professorships do not require PhD's . . . just a cluster of signal contributions to the relevant field. The PhD is a good but not the only way to go there. But, I think they want at least 4 PhDs to get an institution going.]

In the meanwhile, why not go for certifications of participation, contribution and achievement in blog seminars, with the last being for submission of a serious paper based on original investigations?

$0.02

Gordon

2

Book suggestions for personal enrichment, you ask?

Category, Title, Author, Reason for choice:

History/Political Science, The Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes. An authoritative history of the most destructive political movement of the 20th century and the philosophy that spawned it.

Law/Philosophy, Matters of Principle: Legitimate Legal Argument and Constitutional Interpretation, Richard S. Markovits, an excellent discussion of the philosophy underlying legitimate moral/legal argumentation and its role in the American Constitutional experiment.

3

You should check out MIT and their new Open Course Ware initiative. The goal is to put all of their classes online, including video, lecture notes, and project guidelines, for free.

They've adopted Brewster Kale's motto, "Universal Access to Human Knowledge."

ocw.mit.edu

I'm going to do a self-directed course of study on quantum physics this summer. Why not study from the best, and why not do it for free?

-ml

4

Exactly this question was addressed by Harvard President Charles Elliot in 1910. His suggestion was that a modest collection of good books - enough to fill "a five-foot shelf" - would be the equivalent of an undergraduate degree for a working-class person who could not afford to go to college. (I assert that the undergraduate degree of that day is at least the equivalent of a general-studies Master's degree today.) The result was the "Harvard Classics" - 50 small volumes (that would indeed fit on a 5-foot shelf) of great works by great thinkers. I have a set, but I wish I could say I have read them all. It would truly be an education. The Table of Contents of the Harvard Classics is here - with the entire text available for online reading or download from Bartleby.com. An interesting article, with suggestions for updating the set to take advantage of new knowledge, is here.

The inclination to distill all important learning down to a list of specific books is a popular one. The best-known attempt of this type is the Encyclopedia Brittanica Great Books of the Western World. It was a massive project - the 1952 edition had over 50 volumes and the 1990 edition has 60 volumes - comprised, predictably enough, of the usual suspects, and edited, predictably enough, by Mortimer Adler (grand-old-man of these "lifelong learning"-type projects). The magnificent singular feature of GBWW is the "Syntopicon" - a unique conceptual index that ties together ideas that appear in different works and references them to volumes of the set so you can follow their development over the years. In addition to being a good collection of standard works, it's a great set for browsing, research, or stimulating the mind, due to the Syntopicon, and it has been the focus of many different published "study programs" aimed at guiding readers through it systematically. There have also been many "Great Books Book Clubs" for discussion of the various texts on a set schedule (it takes years to get through the cycle); most large cities have a club of this kind. Here is the Table of Contents of GBWW 1990.

Many people have published their own suggested lists of "Great Books". Here is a site with links to other Great Books projects. Here is another.

5

Books by themselves aren't enough to be the equivalent of a degree. Discussion of the ideas with a serious group of students is a necessity if you're going to end up understanding them thoroughly; having your interpretations challenged, defending them, and challenging others' interpretations and meeting their defense will deepen your comprehension enormously, and there's really no substitute for it.

Fortunately, we have here the Internet: put up a book title, open a discussion topic for it, gather up some people who are serious about the effort (and spray some Troll-B-Gone around the place), and there you go.

6

One great source for autodidacts is The Teaching Company, (www.Teach12.com). They have a huge catalog of courses on almost any topic. They're usually available as DVD, video, audio CD or audio tape. I've purchased their courses on calculus, mathematics, the enlightenment, general science and Impressionism. All have been excellent, and sooner or later, the one you want will be on sale.

7

Gordon, if you want to make any money off your ideas, you'll have to start charging more than two cents.

8

OK, the next question is: what's the 115 book/blog reading list for an MDiv equivalent? Is such a thing available? (Hint hint :D )