The Academy and the You-niverse: 

college search & fit in the internet age

Personal computing and the internet have increasingly enabled end users to personalize and customize their experience. If you have an iPod, you effectively have your own radio station with listener base of one, perfectly tailored to your tastes. Your RSS feeds may have replaced the nightly news. Until recently, college represented the greatest degree of educational agency most US students had ever had. Now? Some of them are free-range learners before they even set foot on campus. Broader shifts towards a culture of participation are reflected in students' shifting expectations and mindsets.

To what extent are we prepared to appreciate, assess, and support individual young learners as individuals?  I'd love to have a broad and specific conversation about what happens as students imagine themselves into their unknown futures as learners. What are students' hopes and expectations with regards to teaching style, academic content, campus culture? How do characteristics they want to consider map onto what's currently "searchable," and how might that change, going forward? Similarly, let's spend some time thinking about whether the increasing transparency of learning will enable students to assess their future learning opportunities in new ways.

(This is an accepted conversation proposal for EduCon2.2; for more information, see the conference wiki and/or the complete session list.)

About the facilitator:

Shelley Krause is currently serving as the Co-Director of College Counseling at Rutgers Preparatory School in Somerset, NJ. Previously, she served as the Associate Director of Admissions at The College of New Jersey and as the Coordinator of Advanced Standing and a Regional Director of Admissions during almost ten years of working in the University of Pennsylvania’s Admissions Office. She completed her M.Ed. at the University of Pennsylvania after graduating from Brown University with a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature. She tweets as @butwait, coordinates the College Lists wiki, and blogs at Relax. No, really.