ZDNet Columnist Christopher Dawson Comments on UMassOnline’s CTO Opening

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Jennifer Brady

UMassOnline Jennifer Brady If this isn’t an example of how the Internet and the free flow of information happens for the good in this day and age, nothing is. A while back, UMassOnline posted a job opening seeking a Chief Technology Officer. In the old days, of course, that sort of thing got posted in newspapers. Nowadays it is online and as such people can not only read it, but react and/or respond online. Turns out, writing for ZDNet, Christopher Dawson, who by day is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild, did just that! You can see his post in its entirety here.

He says some very kind things about UMassOnline and about online higher education in general. In short, he’s a believer, and he paints a very strong picture of the future of online learning. His vision for online learning in this post was motivated by UMassOnline’s CTO job description in which we said the successful candidate will help define the future and lay out a compelling vision. Mr. Dawson does that, for a fictitious online school he’s been writing about off and on and then asks:

What do you think? It’s a stretch, certainly, but it is a vision, after all. It’s also a new decade in a relatively new century in a very new millennium. I’m inclined to believe that Internet access is not only ubiquitous enough, but flattening and transformational enough that online education will become the dominant form of learning in the years to come.