Drumbeat Web Festival Looks at the Changing World of the Internet

How can ideas such as open learning and peer-to-peer assessment transform traditional higher education? Those are some of the questions Duke scholars will consider at Mozilla's first international Drumbeat Learning Freedom and the Web Festival Nov. 3-5 in Barcelona, Spain. The festival brings together educators, students and technologists to discuss how the Internet is changing learning and shaping the future of education.

Part of a class taught by Duke professor Cathy N. Davidson, the group of three Duke students, one Duke alumnus and one graduate student from UNC-Chapel Hill, will explore how to rethink traditional syllabi, publishing and peer review, and grading as part of two days of interactive programs titled "Storming the Academy."

"We're using the lessons of open web development to infuse traditional higher education with new pedagogies, methods and interdisciplinary cross currents," Davidson wrote in a recent email message.

Her students also have created a "FutureClass" website featuring a multimedia documentation of all their activities at the festival. The site will host a "class in a box" toolkit developed during the festival with methods for applying the open web to innovation in education.

"Our chief idea is that face-to-face learning should not be taken as a given in education but as an affordance, as an opportunity, not a default," Davidson wrote in a recent blog post. "Here's the mantra: If your classroom can be replaced by a computer screen, it should be."