What happened to Rob Lue's big (and not so big) ideas?

A story in yesterday's NY Times "Most of U.S. Is Wired, but Millions Aren’t Plugged In" brought to mind the Harvard Allston Task Force meeting in June when Harvard Professor Rob Lue gave a long and enthusiastic presentation about online learning, the Ed Portal, and helping more people get online and gain proficiency with computers and the internet. Some of Prof Lue's comments were:

"HarvardX is one of those Harvard efforts which I think could be used to strengthen and expand the Ed Portal’s work. HarvardX is an effort to bring  educational content to the internet"

"I think HarvardX has a  place in the Ed Portal. Bringing HarvardX to the Portal would allow for us 6 to train people to use a computer and to plug people into knowledge and the information super highway."


"I want to look into establishing a tablet loaner program."

After all of the enthusiasm from Rob and other Harvard staff, it was strange to watch Harvard's community benefits proposal presentation last week and see nothing about about Prof. Lue's ideas.

In Chicago, the Smart Community program has training courses that "offer participants a notebook computer once they’ve completed a designated set of classes—in total nearly 1,300 computers will be distributed."

Compared to that, Prof. Lue's suggestion that maybe Harvard could create a loaner program to let people borrow a $200 tablet computer doesn't sound all that generous. But according to the presentation given last week, Harvard won't even be creating that iPad library.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous2:41 PM

    there really is something wrong with harvard. it will serve the institution right if someday these entities are made to pay taxes the way individuals do.

    ReplyDelete