'Laptop U' Misses the Real Story - Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

Nathan Heller's terrific New Yorker article Laptop U has been making the rounds in our professional networks. By Tweet and e-mail, photocopy and blog post, many of us are spending some quality time with some of the good folks responsible for bringing higher education to scale. Like most of the colleagues I have spoken to who have read Laptop U, my responses to the article on first read were positive. Heller is both an engaging writer and a terrific storyteller, and he approaches the whole MOOC phenomenon with an open mind and a refusal to draw simplistic conclusions. He clearly like the academics whom he profiles, and he gives the MOOC experimenters and MOOC doubters equal and positive weight in discussing the impact of open online classes on the changes and stresses faced by our colleges and universities. The one problem with Laptop U is that in all of its 9,000 words the online and blended education world, really the higher ed world, that most of us spend our days fails to make any appearance. http://trap.it/#!traps/id/5a946279-9ad4-452a-b18f-b1f8cc166a09/articles/6GkEtKk8v002q6JIJIFc