It used to be that if you went to an elite school you didn't have access to the best minds unless you were physically in their presence. That is not the case anymore, Big Think co-founder and CEO Victoria Montgomery Brown recently told Beet.TV.
Since its launch in 2008, Big Think has sought to disrupt this model of education, and has focused in the past year in particular on "building out the products that are helping us get there."
These products include The Floating University, which launched last fall with an online course offered at Harvard, Yale and Bard that delivers the key takeaways of an entire undergraduate education. This product was translated into another product called Edge, which consists of career and professional development platforms that aim "to make your own life and work better."
The latest updates from The Floating University, a new educational media venture for the digital generation co-founded by Big Think and the Jack Parker Corporation. The Floating University creates and distributes online multimedia curricula, rich in text, video, animation and graphics. Its first course, Great Big Ideas, will be taught to freshman at Harvard, Yale and Bard this fall of 2011.
As we rocket head-first into the 21st century, accelerating technological and cultural change erode our old notions of expertise. Lifelong learning is no longer a euphemism for dilettantism – it's a basic tool of survival. More valuable than highly specialized knowledge is an framework that enables you to rapidly assimilate new and relevant knowledge across disciplines.
To provide such a framework is Big Think's raison d'etre, and the subject of today's lesson. It begins with an unlikely source – experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, whose work calls certainty itself into question, and advocates for the return of the voraciously curious amateur.
