Monday, August 4, 2008

The future doesn't need universities

Easyrider made an interesting comment in response to my last post. He says that the internet basically allows any given amateur - if determined enough - to rival any given academic on a particular topic.
I'm sure academics would tear into this with gusto (in which case, please use the comments section of this blog :) but the idea reminds me (as many things do lately) of Clay Shirky's talk on TED about distributed organization versus hierarchy.

Shirky made the point that when communication costs were prohibitive, you'd tackle a problem by founding an organization, raising resources, incurring overhead, and directing the people involved. He also suggests that as soon as you create an organization, its primary goal becomes self-preservation, and whatever goal you were trying to meet becomes its secondary (or worse) objective.

In one of his articles, Shirky talks about how blogging has enabled the mass-amateurization of writing. In other words, if you wanted to be a writer, you used to have to get a job at a newspaper/magazine or convince a publisher to publish your novel. Nowadays, any hack with a keyboard and an internet connection can put something out there for the whole world to see (c.f. this page...)

When I ponder Shirky's two points in relation to Easy's comment, I have to wonder: what is it about a university campus that makes it so special? There's no denying that it's nice to be in the same general area as a bunch of other people who share your interests. But there are a whole lot more people out there in the world who share your interests than can possibly fit onto a single campus - why exclude them from the group of people with whom you study subject X?

Basically, a university is one of those old-world insitutions that was created to solve a problem of communication and coordination: how do we preserve, pass on, and add to the body of knowledge in subject X (economics, biology, politics, etc.) The answer in the past was necessarily: rent a building, pay some experts to hang around in it, and charge admission to the rest of the world...

Now, though, you might wonder: do we still need universities? Certainly the many courses that are already offered in a "Distance Education" format suggest that we don't. But just as certainly, there are many courses with experimental components that can't be replaced by reading a page on your laptop (...not looking forward to having surgery done by the guy who got his certification online...) And at a bare minimum, a university is a probably-trustworthy source for identifying experts; on the internet, it can be hard to verify someone's credentials (Wikipedia, for example, has suffered from this...)

So I think the answer is: we will always need experts, and we still need physical resources for certain types of learning (physical sciences, medicine, etc.) But what we maybe don't need is (to paraphrase the Shirky quote in my last article) to be "genuflecting to the idea of a university degree."

How can we enable the 90% of the world who may be interested in subject X (but don't attend a university for whatever reason) to contribute to X? Rather than settle for a 1-in-a-billion Einstein to break through the walls of academia and contribute -- how can we make it easier for the other 999,999,999 amateurs to participate?

Here's one way to start: every professor in the world could publish to the web a set of "open questions", with forum responses enabled. To paraphrase yet another quote: "with enough eyes, every problem is shallow." How long would it be before people start chipping in answers to the open questions of subject X?

PS: this can only work if the system guarantees that people who participate in answering a question are forever associated to the answer. The thing would fail instantly if a prof could delete any post responding to his questions, and so delete the winning answer to publish it for himself...

5 comments:

easyrider said...

I think that we have to sit down and ask, "What must be learned in a classroom/in a lab/on the job?" As for the rest, we have to further ask, "What aspects of learning in a classroom/school do we wish to maintain, and how do we maintain them in a decentralized system?"

I think that the state of post-secondary learning has become an immediate concern, as this article suggests. If we are going to make university free and accessible to all, decentralizing the process as much as possible should make it a cheaper operation.

This is a good first step, and podcasting lectures is another. Who knows how far it will go?

easyrider said...

As a specific example, one of UC Berkeley's available lecture podcasts is an Psych 1 course. Accompanying the lectures is a textbook. Some of the lecture stuff isn't in the text, and vice versa, and students are expected to know all of it. Now, I've listened to the podcasts (sometimes repeatedly) and I am reading the text (thanks to the library). The textbook even has a website with little quizzes about the contents of each chapter. Now, short of the Q&A online message board that the prof has set up for students (and all I'd need to participate there is a password), what am I missing from this course that would require me to attend the university proper? Even the studies that are mandatory for students to participate in are taken online.

This course is definitely one where there is little to no loss when moving from virtual to brick and mortar. How many others are there?

easyrider said...

An opinion piece on the subject...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121858688764535107.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Daniel Sepulveda-Estay said...

I agree on the aspect that Universities solved the problem of communication and coordination (actually in my view a resulot of communication)

However, and given our present technological resources available for remote communication, how do we solve the big gap encountered if we realize that more than 80% of the communication is non-verbal?

It is because of this that universities will still be useful, and will pose an advantage in comparison with remote learning.

easyrider said...

"more than 80% of the communication is non-verbal"

Exactly how does this challenge remote learning? There's a leap that you've made that I'm missing. Please just elaborate, if you could.