Second Generation E-learning Part 2: Serious Media

Education, in its current embodiment, must be a lagging indicator. Whatever purposes it fulfills, from citizenship participation to professional training, its principle function is to certify. The institution provides degrees, credits, certificates and similar awards that give an indication of an individual’s competency. The faculty of the institution is the principle certifier of specific units or blocks of competencies. The classroom, lecture halls, and laboratories provide the preparation for certification. For post secondary education, the admissions process provides a first measure of the institution’s assessment of the student. Rankings of the institutions establish a form of qualitative measure of the potential of the student and a measure of that individual’s competencies on graduation. But, how does one ‘‘certify’’ for institutional change, or, in general, for ‘‘the future’’? When change was slow, bodies of knowledge, and what pieces might be added, did not change. Yes, Calculus moved from graduate programs to the high school, but, for the most part, what one learned in a particular grade was very similar to what one’s child would learn and what one’s parents learned. And, as the cliche´ goes, Plato would be at home in the classroom of today. So, knowledge learned could be certified as being valid and true because past and future looked similar. The difference seems to have been in the particular institution that one attended. Thus, what may have been learned in one institution might be of higher quality, or sufficiently ‘‘qualified’’ when delivered at a medallion institution. For example, in a conversation with a corporate recruiter of engineering students, I was informed that he visited a particular engineering schools for individuals whom the company anticipated would rise to management positions; whereas, other schools’ graduates were tapped because they were anticipated to function more effectively in operational positions within the company. A recent report by The Economist (n.d.) pointed out that students admitted to ‘‘medallion’’ or prestige institutions tended to come from a particular sector of society, even though a spectrum of students were accepted. The end result seems to be that there was little social/economic mobility between groups even in the same institutions, and that while lower socio/economic students tended to rise in income, those from the upper income and social arena tended to rise much faster, creating a widening between income groups rather than a leveling towards a middle class. According to David Snyder (Brown and Duguid, 2002), a policy analyst and futurist, emerging job skills will only require about 30 percent of those individuals, in the USA, who graduate with a college degree. Even though we are supposedly emerging into a ‘‘wired world’’ and a global society, the