Letter to a Lecturer, on third level education and its inflexibility in the post internet era.

 My idea for the masters project would have been to use the internet and social media to research a children's program for dvd/bluray delivery, through direct interaction with child care workers, child psychologists and pedagogy professionals - while also gathering information through interactive multimedia games where children can be allowed make choices directly from ideas that were collect from my surveys on social networking sites with the professionals mentioned above.

    Now my question is why would I have to write or even learn the code to firstly implement the database surveys and then create a multimedia experiment where children can interact with different characters and sounds and take live statistics and interpret them as a visual map or direction in which to create my TV/DVD /internet youtube etc.. program ( a system which would have many uses in all areas of business and marketing online for example GUI navigation and statics to improve usability or product development with the public directly involved in design decisions  ) ?

     While talking to an industry professional and past graduate of your school the point was made to me that I have plenty ideas but there comes a stage when it might be easier to hire a person to do the work which is rather specialized and maybe concentrate on the ideas,design then animation and sound as I wished to work in these areas. Further more I noticed your masters course had expressed explicitly that no collaboration between projects was allowed - eg. 3-4 people on one project. In a real world scenario one would expect to be working with at least that amount of colleagues or many times more. Back in 2004 when finishing the multimedia course (which technically I did not complete as I did do work experience and final project as I was working full time in a hotel throughout the course and had gathered all I could learn by completing all learning modules ) I had wished there would have been a second year where the students all 11 or so would have formed an actual company and directed by the tutor create a product and market it in one year ,

   Simply, this type of education is exactly what is needed and an emphasis on coordination and complexity is sorrily missing from academia in its current anachronistic form. The work being done in open source forums and tutorials freely available could surly impact the way people are educated and especially third level education - I have been watching this progress since the internet's inception. Of course employers still look for qualifications and masters applicants are also required to have them as well but the public will use an opensourse product if it is up to standard. Universities and technical institutions may set standards and implement best practice but they do not have a monopoly on this and with the fast pace of change in both the jobs market and direct downloads online one wonders if a degree or a masters would improve ones chance of a stable income. Especially when people like Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to make some money. My point is not that we all can be like Bill but that college did not make him, networking there did, and college no longer holds the monopoly on this meeting of the minds, dissemination of knowledge  or even creation of good practice standards, it only plays a role.

   Last example is in the art world where there exist private schools that mainly enroll college graduates to teach them foundation in drawing - there is something rotten in the state of Denmark methinks they also do a DVD to reduce price for people that cannot travel, not as good as attending I hear you say well in large impersonal lecture halls with a limited tutorial time in schools I think a dvd and some internet forums critiques for free might suffice  http://barnstonestudios.com/