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...

Is Google Making Us Stupid? Are you kidding me??

I read an article today by Nicholas Carr called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

The gist of it is that we're transitioning from a thoughtful, deep-thinking society (i.e. one that reads books) to one which demands instant gratification and mere soundbites of surface-level knowledge gleaned from skimming our favorite websites as fast as possible. We're somehow losing an important ability to concentrate on and/or appreciate good writing.

My own view is that the internet lets you learn as quickly as you're able; to focus on the things that matter to you and skip the noise. But I'll come back to my own thoughts in a minute.

The article generated some activity on the website for Edge magazine, where extremely smart people discuss thorny issues. I was very happy to see my new hero Clay Shirky there, tearing into Carr's article.

Shirky makes a wonderful point: "The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to *the idea* of reading War and Peace."

George Dyson adds, "We will certainly lose some treasured ways of thinking but the next generation will replace them with something new...Perhaps books will end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries (or the depths of Google) and read by a select few."

My own take is this: I have learned an awful lot, very quickly, from the internet. In the last year alone, I stumbled onto and become very interested in (and enlightened by) the world of Complex Adaptive Systems and some of the thinking adjacent to it (such as Edge.com and TED.com). Without the internet, I'd never have heard about any of this because I wasn't lucky enough to get into it at University. Without the internet, even if I *were* aware of the field, I wouldn't have any way to dig into it because I have a full-time job and a family, which together don't leave me with endless days to spend in the library, hunting for relevant texts and then reading them in one sitting.

The problem is not that the internet makes information available to us too conveniently - that's a feature, not a bug! The problem is that we're missing good tools to organize, retain, and leverage the flood of useful info. More and better information is available to each of us than ever before. It's no surprise that we each eventually hit a limit of what our brains can handle - the need to enlist tools to ride the storm isn't something to be ashamed of, it's something to welcome.

To come full circle, I suppose my bottom line question is this: If Carr thinks that our use of the internet is making us stupid -- why did he put his article there?