Status Report, September 2009

In July 2008 I posted the first installment of what I hoped would become an annual report. Called What I Think I Know Now, it was an attempt to consolidate my learning over the previous year and to reflect on possible directions for future projects.

July 2009 came and went without a new annual report, but I still think the exercise is important. So I’m now calling these intermittent documents Status Reports and am issuing one today on the autumnal equinox.

Regular readers know the context for my work in this blog. But others may not, so I’ll restate the core reason I do what I do. It’s a simple but audacious idea. I want everyone everywhere to have unlimited and free cradle-to-grave learning. In short form, I usually just say free learning for everyone everywhere.

Ridiculous, isn’t it? It means changing the world.

Over this past year, I’ve solidified three areas where I think I can make a contribution.
1. Systems modeling, research, and theory. I don’t subscribe to a mechanistic and deterministic view of change. Rather I feel much more comfortable with a probabilistic and uncertain perspective. This means that I do not believe there are throttle points that can be adjusted to affect change. It means instead that I pay attention to constructs of larger systems (eg, economic, educational) to help identify possible pressure points, which then require lots of experimentation, failure, and learning before something promising unfolds. This experimentation occurs in research labs and in entrepreneurial markets.

This is probably too abstract. Here’s an example. Presently in the United States, price is a pressure point in higher education. For reasons that we don’t need to go into here, many colleges and universities in the U.S. have chosen to follow strategies that leave them vulnerable to lower-priced competitors. There are now a range of these competitors, from the well-established private for-profits to the considerable number of evolving online alternatives. Most of the latter will fail, but nonetheless it is creative experimentation.

It’s important to take a mile-high systems perspective, even if that perspective is necessarily dim, and to pay attention to pressure points and the experimental efforts trying to exploit pressure points. The knowledge gained from this attention might tell us quite a lot about system perturbation and change.

2. Systems feedback loops, reporting, and analysis. It’s common to find feedback loops in complex systems. For example, information flows feature prominently in negative loops used to monitor and keep system performance within certain acceptable ranges. Information can also affect positive feedback loops that may eventually drive systems to chaotic states or to collapse.

Under a variety of terms like transparency, openness, and Gov 2.0, we now have a remarkable opportunity to broaden and affect the information feedback loops evident in complex systems like education. We can even create new loops that did not exist previously.

It is easy to view higher education in the United States as a mess that’s beyond hope. I’ve certainly made contributions to this rhetoric. But if existing institutions voluntarily change, then we may make a softer transition into an uncertain future.

This is the reasoning behind the work I’m doing with XQuery, data API’s, and the rest of the technical stuff that creeps into this blog. I’m headed toward analysis and reporting that I hope will plug into existing or new feedback loops and thereby encourage change in higher education.

There is just a colossal opportunity here. But because it is so difficult to move the impervious, benefits relative to effort are not favorable. Still, it’s an effort I choose to make as a way of acknowledging debts to the past and the good that remains in higher education.

3. System design and development. I believe we’re tantalizingly close to being able to design and develop viable new components in education-cum-learning systems. Eventually these components will dazzle us with their obviousness. But right now they’re the provenance of dreamers, researchers, and entrepreneurs.

I made a previous contribution in this area with Imagining Tomorrow’s University, more as a demonstration of technique than a serious proposal. I’ve also continued to play with designs that may one day provide the basis for market-based experiments. And with some luck I should be able to share these notions in the next year. I have no intention of actually doing the development work, but I can contribute design ideas and early prototypes.

There are also many other people working in this area and making important contributions. It’s incredibly invigorating.

So … that’s basically where I am and where I’m headed in the near future. Three areas of complementary but distinct work.