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Outsmarting Outsourcing: Making Your Course Priceless in a Competitive Market

One of my favorite things about language education is that it’s a complete free-for-all. No one cares where you studied or how many books your instructors have published. Results are all that matter (unless, of course, you’re planning to become a professor yourself). Students have their own objectives in mind when they take language courses, and the only assessments that matter to them are the ones they pass or fail in the real world:

  • Can I tell a Brazilian taxi driver where I need to go?
  • Can I discuss controversial political issues with my German friends?
  • Can I tell a Spanish-speaking parent how to treat her child’s illness?
  • Can I translate this brochure to Chinese in time to send it to the printer?

I like to think of foreign-language education as a sort of wild frontier where pedigrees are meaningless—where fortune favors the bold and there are a thousand ways to strike it rich. It’s the Wild West of educational technology, which means there’s plenty of room for mavericks and snake-oil salesmen. Because students have so many options when it comes to studying a language, professors have to work extra hard to prove their time is worth more than a box of listen-and-repeat lessons. In addition, they have to compete with more polished and engaging self-paced options like Rosetta Stone and teachers in foreign countries willing to offer immersion courses for a fraction of the cost of a typical college course in the States.

If all that wasn’t challenging enough, now there’s eduFire.com. The site allows teachers to offer live lessons via video, with some courses providing as many contact hours as a typical college course. On eduFire, teachers are referred to as tutors, classes are small, and lessons typically cost ten to twenty dollars per hour. Students can also rate tutors, creating more demand for the most reputable tutors and allowing them to charge more for their services.

So how do foreign-language professors compete with a live teacher who is willing to offer more personal attention at a 90 percent discount to the cost of a typical college course? There are essentially two options:

1) Offer a degree. For some students, the main reason to take a foreign language course in college is because it satisfies requirements for a degree. In this model, all students really care about are a handful of classes that relate to their major, and their standards for all other courses are relatively low. They believe that much of their college experience will be dominated by coursework they don’t enjoy or find useful, but they accept it as a necessary evil.

2) Offer a superior learning experience. For students who are passionate about learning the subject matter, a great teacher may actually be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars more per course. If a great professor can teach students what they need to know ten times faster than a student could learn it through some other means, then the professor’s time should at least be worth ten times the cost of the alternative.

For now, sites like eduFire still feel like unstructured, wobbly imitations of the online-learning experiences offered by accredited institutions. But it’s not hard to imagine these sites becoming  serious competitors in the language-education marketplace. As more users try out the site and rate their teachers, the best tutors will make more money. As compensation rises, the site will attract better instructors. Better instructors will attract more serious students and the whole process snowballs from there.

As a part-time Web-site-design professor, I’m all too familiar with this trend. My students have a nearly limitless supply of educational resources available to them, from free online tutorials to highly polished sites like lynda.com, which charges twenty-five dollars per month and provides access to thousands of video tutorials covering hundreds of technology-related topics. When I teach, I have to ask myself, “How can I make sure my students get their money’s worth? What can I provide that they can’t get anywhere else?” It might seem idealistic to think that I can offer my students something no one else can, but I think it’s a good goal to strive for. With that in mind, here are a few mantras I’ve adopted in my quest to ensure that what I teach can’t be outsourced or undersold.

  • Don’t reinvent the wheel. Recognize when someone else has done something better than I can (or at least as well as I can). Take what they’ve done and build on it.
  • Reinvent the wheel. Recognize when I’m better off building my own resources. Don’t waste too much time trying to revise material that isn’t great to begin with. Ask God to grant me the patience to accept the textbooks I can’t change, the courage to change the resources I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
  • Provide at least one priceless lesson per class. During each class, I try to identify at least one “million-dollar moment” and I build it up before revealing it. It might be a tip I wish someone had given me while I was in school before I spent five years doing something the hard way. I might announce that I’m about to show the one technique typographers use the most to make text look more polished. During project critiques, I might point out a common design pitfall that separates amateur designers from professionals. The goal is to show students that every class includes at least one lesson that was worth getting out of bed for. Or, in the case of my online students who may be participating while lying in bed, they should at least feel that each week’s content was worth waking up for. (And yes, sometimes these million-dollar moments wind up feeling more like they belong in a ninety-nine-cent store, and I feel silly for over-hyping them. But even a ninety-nine-cent moment is better than no moment.)
  • Be a good filter. Distill an overwhelming body of information and resources down to the most useful parts students need.
  • Be a good prioritizer. Filter everything; then filter it again by putting the most important information first. Assume your students will read half of what you put in front of them; then assume they’ll only remember the first half of that.
  • Be a good coach. Good coaches don’t just provide information. They provide guidance, motivation, criticism, and praise. They bring out the best in students by helping them believe in themselves, demand more from themselves, and tap into their own talents.
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Is “Teamwork” an Oxymoron for Online Learning?

Students are not fond of teamwork, especially when it’s online. That is one of the findings of my dissertation, which explores the relationship between online students’ interpersonal needs and interaction preference. Nine years have passed since I received my Ph.D., and this unfavorable feeling toward teamwork still seems to be present to a large extent for online students.

Both of the two online students invited to speak at our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program stressed that they were not interested in building the so-called learning community or social network through any collaborative project. One of them pointed out that after contemplating the costs and benefits of conducting a group project, he decided to give it up. “That two points for the grade isn’t worth the pain of having to deal with a guy [the assigned team member] who had never returned my calls or e-mail,” M. J., a student from the School for New Learning, told us.

The fact that students are thinking about whether “it’s worth it or not” sends a strong signal to faculty and online-course designers. Is the teamwork required by the course worth the “extra” time and effort that students have to put in? The answer to this question depends on the goals and objectives of a course. As with all the other learning activities, the use of teamwork should be driven by the desired outcomes of a course. Rethink incorporating any team project if you don’t expect or cannot afford the time for students to meet the following objectives in a course:

  • Multiple perspectives among students
  • Team-building knowledge and skills
  • Competency in technology-mediated communication
  • An understanding of various processes of learning (or “no one right ‘path’ to the result”)
  • Resolution of both cognitive conflict and affective conflict

I admire course quality standards that make collaborative learning an optional item rather than a required one, because as powerful as it is, this strategy might not be appropriate for every course or every discipline. But if you do find a strong match between the course goal and the teamwork activity, do it very seriously by giving it enough time, points, and support to make it “worth it” for the students.

I came across an article this month by Staggers, Garcia, and Nagelhout on “Teamwork through Team Building: Face-to-Face to Online,” in which the authors argue that “teamwork most successfully occurs after team building, and too often this team building is lacking in online environments.”   I think this is the exact reason why teamwork has become an oxymoron for many online courses: it has been thrown at the students without anything to prepare them for it or any guidance to support them (one online introduction isn’t enough).

Over the past ten years, I have been working with Dr. Pete Mikolaj, a professor from the School of Business at Indiana State University, to experiment with collaborative problem solving in the online environment. We’ve used his insurance and risk-management courses as the test bed to implement a number of strategies to engage students in a group project, which serves as the main outcome of the course. Among the various ideas we’ve tested, the following strategies were found to be very effective for online teamwork:

Heavy Weight on Teamwork

  • Make the project weigh 50 percent of the total score or more (since it constitutes a major goal of course)

Heavy Weight on the Process of the Teamwork

  • Give 50 percent weight to the process (involvement) of the project and 50 percent to the product (final report)
  • Interim evaluation given about six weeks into project based solely on process (teamwork)

Frequent Progress Monitoring

  • Weekly project log required from each team member
  • A weekly team log is produced
  • The log builds accountability and transparency

Clear Policy on Reward and Punishment

  • Peer/self evaluation allows +/- 15 percent deviation from team grade to create individual grade
  • Self-evaluation counts one third and peer evaluation counts two thirds
  • Individuals can be fired from the team for nonperformance

Guidance from Faculty

  • Weekly synchronous session with the instructor that primarily involves discussion of projects. Sessions are recorded and available for viewing throughout the term
  • Sample project reports from prior classes are available from the first week of the semester

When it comes to online courses, the choice of teamwork is not “to do or not to do” but rather “to do it well or not to do it at all.”  So, before adding any teamwork into the learning activities, think twice about the “why,” and then (if it’s a good fit), work hard on the “how,” because that is the only way to make teamwork work.

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Tools for Course Planning: Outcome Statements and Online Activities

As an instructional designer, I find that two of the things that faculty struggle with are developing sound outcome statements and developing interesting online activities that effectively assess those outcomes. I don’t mean to imply that faculty don’t know how to do these things but instead that often, especially with objectives, they are implied instead of explicitly stated. In the face-to-face classroom environment, an instructor can easily adjust objectives and assignments based on class reaction—unfortunately much of this flexibility disappears when teaching online. Online students need to know up front what the objectives are (at both the course and week/modular level) and see a clear connection between those objectives and the assignments/assessments.

Frequently, objectives are written in such a way that the outcome is measuring capabilities only at the lowest end of Bloom’s Taxonomy, e.g. “students will understand….” Not only are these objectives at the lower end of the cognitive-domain scale, but they are often not measurable—how do we know if a student “understands”?

To help faculty develop good objectives, I often refer them to a wonderful tool called the RadioJames Objective Builder. This tool allows you to choose what you want the students to do from a drop-down menu:

ObjectivesBuilder1

Once an area is chosen, a list of verbs and sample objectives appears along with an overview of that level:

ObjectivesBuilder2

This tool makes it so much easier to write good objectives. Once you have these good objectives, the next step is to design good assignments. At the recent EdMedia Conference, there was a presentation on a new tool developed by the LAMS Foundation in Australia. Like the Objective Builder, the LAMS tool, called the LAM Activity Planner, scaffolds and guides faculty—this time in the creation of learning activities. Using a predeveloped form, faculty can choose from activities that have already been created or add their own content. Activities are varied and include things like case studies, role plays, jigsaws, and WebQuests. To view a video and request an account to explore the planner for yourself, see the information on the LAM Activity Planner Wiki page.

Tools like these make the course-planning process easier for both faculty and instructional designers.

Evidence for Online Pedagogy—One More Tool!

It is particularly gratifying to read a headline like this one, which appeared in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education: “Online-Education Study Reaffirms Value of Good Teaching, Experts Say.”

Gotta love it! "Good teaching" finally makes it into the online tool kit!

The ‘study’ is Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: a Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies–recently released by the U.S. Department of Education. The full report is available online.

I quickly downloaded, printed out, read, and marked up my own copy!

While the report found that students taking all or part of their class online performed better than those in a face-to-face class, the study suggests that it was not the medium for delivery itself that accounted for the difference but rather "it was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages" (p. XVII).

This report could serve as a discussion prompt for faculty interested in developing or teaching an online class. And it would also be useful to instructional designers who may want to review some of the specific learning practices reviewed in the report.

As always, the IDD Blog is interested in what you find to be of interest. Read the report yourself and let us know.

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Avoiding Intellectual Clutter: A Student’s Perspective

Students today have access to more information than ever before.   Beyond Google-fu and Wikipedia, new technologies allow anyone to research and order practically any publication with a few keystrokes.  College students have access to expansive libraries filled with volumes on the most obscure topics, and at larger universities like DePaul, students can access full-text articles in respected academic journals with a few simple searches.  The amount of information we students have access to before we ever reach a classroom or open up Blackboard can be overwhelming. It raises the question, given the wealth of information students have access to outside the classroom, what exactly is the role of the instructor?

It cannot simply be to impart information—all the information is out there and available for students.  Rather, I think part of the instructor role has to be to act as a filter—to cut through all the information out there and identify and present only that which is most important, most up to date, and most accessible for students who are just being introduced to a field or subfield of study.  The material then needs to be arranged into a coherent, unified form.

I think a lot of professors disregard this filtering function, and either put too much into their syllabi or overwhelm students with “optional resources” for topics they can’t cover within the course.

I know from experience how frustrating it can be when a student is confronted with an overwhelming number of sources.  I enjoy being subjected to academic rigor, but I’m put off by instructors handing me articles I “might be interested in” or optional resources, even when I’m really engaged by the subject-matter of the class.  First of all, I know of no student that has the time, at least during the school year, to go that far above and beyond the course requirements.  And more importantly, I think all these secondary resources can create intellectual clutter, distracting from the central principles the course is trying to communicate.

In short, as a student, I’m interested in what I need to know to meet the course goals. All the other stuff is a distraction, more often than not.

Working with Wikis

Wikis are a great tool for collaborative learning, but like any other tool, they need to be used properly. In my role as wiki administrator/Mister Fix-It at SNL Online, I’ve recently checked up on several course wikis that I’d initially created and turned over to faculty and was disappointed to see some that were underused and poorly structured. Here are a few tips to make your wiki (or, ahem, workspace as PB Works, née PB Wiki, now calls wikis) easier to use and a better learning environment for you and your students.

Have assignments that use the wiki. This would seem self-evident, but unless students have to go to the wiki to do course work that will be assessed, they won’t use it.

Make those assignments appropriate for a wiki.  A wiki is not a discussion board. A wiki is a great place to work collaboratively. It’s easy to work on a common document without having to exchange endless iterations of Word documents. It’s easy to post work and share it with others in a highly visual environment. You can post and share photos, audio, video, and a wide variety of multimedia widgets and Web tools–things that are clumsy or impossible to do in a discussion. You can set up private folders for each student, so he or she can post sensitive material like a personal journal that only you and the author can see. But if you want a space for students to discuss things, use the discussion feature in your learning management system.

Provide scaffolding for students. Give them low-stakes tasks to do at the start of the course, like creating a personal introduction page, adding a photo and text to it, and creating a link to it from the course-wiki home page. Again, it should be a required activity, not an optional exercise. Your students can then build on this experience.

Provide clear directions for students. Many adult students are intimidated by new technology, and a surprising number of younger students also struggle with unfamiliar applications. Both groups need to know exactly what you want from them and how to create it. At SNL Online we provide faculty and students with role-based wiki FAQs, print and interactive tutorials, and links to PB Works’ extensive library of video tutorials to help with the “how-to-do-it.”

Provide navigation. The wiki will be underused if it’s hard to use. You need some kind of navigation and site structure. It can be as simple as a list of links on the home page that direct to student pages; the important thing is to make sure that users can easily find what they need.

Provide a template or wiki structure. I’ve set up some wikis for faculty with the course foundation completed; students needed only to edit existing pages or add pages to an existing section or folder. Some of our faculty prefer to create this structure themselves. So far, both approaches have been more successful than leaving the design and creation of the wiki to chance.  

Monitor and maintain. Because any user with editing privileges can change any page you don’t lock down, things can (and usually do) frequently appear and disappear. To maintain a consistent, usable learning environment you’ll need to keep an eye on your wiki and make corrections, adjustments, and replacements. Every wiki I’m familiar with sends wiki administrators e-mail alerts when a page is edited; this makes it easy to keep up to date. You can usually set the frequency of these alerts or opt out of them altogether.

Keep ahead of your students. There’s certainly something to be said for you and your students learning as you go along, but with new technology, it’s far more preferable to be comfortable with it yourself before asking your students to use it. Familiarize yourself with the functions and features of your wiki, use all available resources to strengthen your own skill set, and you and your students will create a useful and rewarding collaborative-learning environment.

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You Get What You Pay For

My coworkers like to joke that an endorsement from me is the kiss of death to any Web 2.0 tool. It seems every time I turn around, some new tool I’ve recently tried is shutting down. Last year, I fell in love with Omnisio, a tool that allowed users to create compilations of YouTube video clips. Omnisio also had some basic editing features that let users trim out whatever they didn’t need from each clip, making it possible for instructors to assemble highly focused montages of useful video clips.  Within a few weeks of the time I’d discovered Omnisio, Google bought the company. The Omnisio site currently states that its staff is thrilled to be using their skills to improve YouTube, but so far, Omnisio’s features are nowhere to be found.

After my Omnisio heartbreak, I stumbled upon CircaVie, AOL’s tool for building time lines that could be enhanced with images and video. CircaVie always lacked a few key features that would have made it ideal for educators, but it was easy to use and worked with any AOL or AOL Instant Messenger account name. So I began recommending it to a few instructors and even included it in a few conference presentations. Sadly, the CircaVie site was shut down on January 15, 2009.

The list goes on. As of June 15, online video editing tool JumpCut will be no more. (This was particularly surprising, since JumpCut is owned by deep-pocketed Yahoo!) On June 12, I received an e-mail from Flowgram, a Web-based alternative to PowerPoint, announcing that they’d be closing up shop by the end of the month.

As I ran down the list in my mind, I realized that all of these tools had one thing in common: almost all of them had no source of revenue or depended entirely on ads to stay alive. I used to think free tools like these were a great way to work around the limitations of a bare-bones learning-management system. I also thought they could provide an interim solution while committees took months or years to approve a university-wide rollout of a new tool.

Now it’s clear to me that the best things in life aren’t always free. While we still need quick solutions for small-scale pilot projects, it’s important to recognize that you often get what you pay for when it comes to educational technology. And by that, I don’t mean the expensive tool is always the best. I simply mean when you pay for something (even if it’s just a few dollars), you usually get something in return (like a more reliable service that doesn’t shut down overnight).

While it’s sad to see innovation squelched by the almighty dollar, the current recession has done us all a favor in a way. By killing off weaker startups, there’s room for the best to thrive. For example, VoiceThread offers a great service that makes it easy to build presentations with voice comments, and the thinning of this field should make it easier for VoiceThread to grow its base of paying subscribers. And more paying customers means more money to invest in a reliable, useful product. If you’re a business owner who accepts card payments, you know how important it is to get the cheapest card payment machine for your business.

Similarly, more people should warm up to Evoca, one of the few audio-sharing sites that offers in-browser recording and embeddable audio players. I was a bit disappointed to discover a while back that Evoca stopped offering permanent, free accounts. (They now only offer free thirty-day trials.) But I completely understand why this change was needed. Bandwidth isn’t free, and Evoca now charges a reasonable $2.95 for their basic account, which offers enough storage to meet most instructors’ needs.

So the next time you’re looking for a quick fix to an educational-technology dilemma, ask yourself if there’s a tool available that you can actually pay for. Even if there are free alternatives, it might be worth suffering through a bit of paperwork and shelling out a few dollars a month for something that won’t be here today and gone tomorrow.

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VoiceThread or Camtasia: When to Use Which

VoiceThread and Camtasia are two of the many tools that we are introducing to faculty for online teaching.   For those of you who don’t know about these tools, here is a quick intro.

VoiceThread is a tool that allows you to share images, audio, and presentations online and collect comments in the form of text and audio.  See the demo below, which was created within Voicethread:

Camtasia is a tool that lets you record actions on your computer screen to create presentations or training videos.  With Camtasia, you can produce a tutorial, a quick Web-based demo, or a narrated PowerPoint presentation.   

For our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program, I was assigned to teach Camtasia, because I have been using this tool to delivery online instruction for my Chinese class.  Although I have been using Camtasia for a couple of year and am comfortable using it, I found myself struggling to find a good reason to teach faculty yet another tool after they had already been introduced to VoiceThread, a very powerful and easy-to-use application for both information sharing and collecting.

If we look at the whole functionalities of the two applications, we are really comparing apples with oranges.  But from the perspective of presenting information from PowerPoint, either can be used; the only difference is the production procedure and the presentation output. 

The following table is a result of my pondering about when to use which when it comes to selecting VoiceThread or Camtasia for online presentation from PowerPoint.

 

PowerPoint File

 

VoiceThread

Camtasia

Highlights
  • Allows  faculty/student comments
  • Allows student presentations
  • Enables online interaction
  • Launches with one click in PPT
  • Records onscreen motion and narrations
  • Results in smaller file size
  • Has multiple output formats (Web, iPod, MP3 player…)

“Additional” Step(s)
  • Requires VoiceThread account
  • Limited usage without paid account
  • Must set up viewing options (the easiest one opens to all public) or run an encryption procedure to hide the URL
  • Requires purchasing the application
  • Must run the file-packaging  process  to upload to Blackboard

 

As interaction is becoming such a key for online learning, I thought all faculty would all opt for VoiceThread.  To my surprise, several faculty told me after the workshop that they would go with Camtasia, especially those who were thinking about teaching a hybrid course.  To these faculty, it is more important to find a nice way to present their information to the students than to get input from them, which can take place at the face-to-face session.   Also, for those who are comfortable using PowerPoint,  this one-click process seems to be less demanding than learning a whole new online tool.    

As someone who is charged with assisting faculty in selecting the right tool and methods for teaching online, I need to again apply the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Faculty Support  and give priority to faculty’s feeling of “safety” and “comfort”.  So my advice then is this: pick one that you are comfortable with to begin with (even if it means a one-way stream of information sharing), and then maybe for the second or third round, try a more interactive and exciting environment like VoiceThread.

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Tools for Staying Current in your Field

Need an easy way to stay current in your field?  Table-of-contents services are a great way to get the tables of contents of your favorite scholarly journals delivered to you via e-mail or RSS reader.  A couple that you might want to explore include:

ticTOCS (Journal Table of Contents Service)  – TicTOCS is a free resource that allows anyone to keep up to date with newly published scholarly material.  The site is simple to use:  just register for a free account where all of the tables of contents you choose will be permanently saved.  Then, search for the titles of your favorite journals.  You can then add them to your list and export them in a format that is easily imported into Google Reader.  The site currently only has about a thousand titles, so your favorites may not be there.

Library databases (if you are not affiliated with DePaul check with your local reference librarian) – Many of the DePaul library databases allow you to create free accounts.  Once you have an account, you can set up issue alerts as well as have saved searches rerun each time the database is updated.  These alerts, depending on the service, can be made available via e-mail or RSS feed.  Some of the better ones to try are Science Direct and Ebsco.

Publisher Web sites – Most publishers allow individuals to subscribe to tables of contents without a subscription fee. If you don’t find the journal you are looking for in one of the above, check out the publisher’s Web site to see if you can get it that way.

These are just a couple of options available to you.  Ask a librarian (or if you are not affiliated with DePaul, check with your library’s reference staff) if you need help setting up an alert or finding a particular journal.

Webtopia—Democratizing the Internet

Writers and urban planners for years have mapped and envisioned the ideal society through designing utopian metropolises. This is my own interpretation and glimpse into a version of a “webtopia,” a re-imagining meant as a prompt for discussing democracy and citizenship on the Web.

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We might begin to think of the Internet as a public infrastructure or a spatial experience akin to walking a city’s streets. We navigate through the vague surrealism of unexplained flashing images and flash graphics; however, without the same binding of civic infrastructure and citizenship, without our ties to the streets, we comparatively navigate a corporate labyrinth—an endless mall. It is a spectacle of passive engagement, wherein we consume information, commodities, and products while hardly holding a stake in its architecture. As Google strives to unleash infinite knowledge at our fingertips and YouTube and other Web services promote do-it-yourself content creation, our productive capabilities are exploited. We might question if the intellectual value of a Web-user really drives these companies or whether they instead mean to attract our passive gaze into the corporate consumer spectacle, only interested in the activity of our wallets. These applications and services are by no means free; we pay by submitting ourselves to billions of dollars in advertising spent to follow and manipulate our habits. Furthermore, the content we generate through “free” e-mail, social networking, Web applications, etc. is scanned, exploited, and sold as marketing analytic research. Is our content, then, really our own?

Can we begin to maybe imagine a Web experience prefaced upon citizenship before consumerism? If we ever intend to renegotiate the intellectual foundation and potential of the Web, one option might be its decommercialization. The free-use Internet of the public is hinged and supported by advertising dollars. A new public space could be founded via one of two avenues: a not-for-profit Wikipedia approach or socialization, an Internet owned, financed, and governed by the people. Personal injury lawyer seo services can enhance your firm’s online presence and attract more clients. If you want to boost the security and privacy of your wifi network, you may use premium residential proxies.

The illustration above is a vision of a new interface, a “citizen portal” akin to Google’s centralized “iGoogle”. These would be the new public-domain passages and highways of the Web, owned and operated by the people and designed to encourage and praise democratic participation. Currently, the Internet, as a public space, and its Web-architecture are owned and regulated by only a handful of corperations—Google, Microsoft, Yahoo (much like the big three in television broadcasting). Google’s own page layout and interface (its line weights, color schemes, etc.) are designed to optimize its advertising revenue.  A noncommercial, government-sponsored  provider seems worthy of experiment—a PBS alternative to the Internet.

Now imagine how e-learning might be better respected if its platform, the Internet, became a nexus of civic pride. I’m twenty years old, and my peers and I remain skeptical of online learning because of its highly commercial platform—the Web. Education seems diluted into a material good for consumption, rather than active engagement, when a Web-forum discussion on Plato is a click away from penis-enlargement pills. Furthermore, e-learning presents the prospect of increased hours spent online by youth, a goldmine for commerce and advertising, as students can be easily distracted from any academic essay to Walmart.com within seconds.

When re-imagining the Internet, we must seriously consider and reflect upon how we navigate physical space, how we embed our values into the infrastructure and organization of our cities. Knowledge and education are often perceived as pillars of democracy not as IPOs or aisles in the mall. But perhaps the disorderly nature of the Web allows for the unexpected positioning of otherwise segregated forms of information. A platform coupling Penis enlargement and Plato might liberate higher education from its pedestal—its perceived irrelevancy trapped behind the gates of academia.