[W]e strived to meet the needs of a booming New York technology and design community with a new kind of collaborative environment. Over the past year, General Assembly has become a campus for technology, design, and entrepreneurship and a social education experience for developers, designers, entrepreneurs, dreamers, and those simply wanting to learn.

 
Dougald Hine, The University Project: Five Reasons, 25-September-2011.

There’s something important coming together around networked technologies and new sociable collaboration spaces, that’s beginning to feel plausible as an alternative home for the spirit of the university.

BioCurious has made interesting strides recently, but it is still too early to tell which direction they’ll end up going. Follow the links listed below to find out more.

Like BioCurious, General Assembly (GA) bundles incubation, co-working, and learning in a physical space designed to be deliberately collaborative, but focused on the community of entrepreneurs, designers, and technology developers in New York City. For a startup that is only about a year old, GA brings deep pockets ($4.25 million investor funding) and a prime location (20,000 sq ft in Manhattan). Apropos I guess is their first certificate program on web design that costs $3000 for 60 hours of instruction. But they also offer a variety of single classes (e.g., Social Selling with Facebook Apps on the OpenGraph) and are home to an impressive number of startups. For more information, please follow the links listed below.

The University Project offers an interesting contrast to both BioCurious and General Assembly. It is a project rather than a startup, although the formative idea came as “I want to start a university” from Dougald Hine, a serial entrepreneur (School of Everything and Dark Mountain). Participants in the project are still exploring the notion that “new sociable spaces of collaboration — from hacker and maker spaces, to social centres, to coworking spaces and media labs — might offer an alternative home for the spirit of the university.” They have an unconference planned in London for the weekend of October 14-16, 2011 that features a diverse set of themes. Like GA, the physical space used by the University Project sounds extraordinary … 12,000 sq ft in Hub Westminster in the heart of London. Please follow the links listed below for more information.

Three quick observations.

1. With BioCurious and General Assembly, we’re talking about brick-and-mortar learning. There may be online components but the need for face-to-face collaborative spaces trumps virtual or digitally remote spaces. For the University Project, physical space at Hub Westminster also plays a prominent role.
2. The University Project may want to reconsider the use of the word “university.” In a profound sense, “education” and “school” and “university” all fall into a category of backward-compatible terms used to refer to yesterday’s learning.
3. I’m troubled by the scale, or maybe the aspirations for scale, evident in learning at General Assembly. I continue to believe that the truly creative and difficult work will involve imagining and birthing learning that is cheap, simple, and accessible to all.

 
 
Related Links

• General Assembly
• Upcoming classes
• Member startups
• First certification program
• University Project
• Universities: Past & Future .. an unconference weekend
• Slides of Hine’s talk at TEDx London
• Hub Westminster: a new institution for changemakers
• Related projects that re-imagine universities
• BioCurious
  • BioCurious self-description
  • Blog
  • Classes

In the post I tried to identify some characteristics of tomorrow’s learning institutions as distinct from the colleges and universities of today. Here are a few of the features: learning communities; domains of interest; free; self-selected; project-based; team-based; open content; permeable structure; public good LLC; learning networks; learning hubs. Basically it’s a picture of learning that happens within everyday living compared to institutional settings.

Today I discovered something called BioCurious that has several of the same features, enough anyway to create a resemblance. Here’s a quote from their Meetup site:

We believe that innovations in biology should be accessible, affordable, and open to everyone.

We’re building a community biology lab for amateurs, inventors, entrepreneurs, and anyone who wants to experiment with friends.

From the links listed below I got the sense that incubating biosynthetic startups might be the ultimate aim of BioCurious, but there definitely is a strong learning element that is not restricted to scientists or entreprenuers. Features included: a learning community; a domain of interest; self-selected involvement; project-based; team-based; permeable structure; and open content. I’m not certain of the legal structure (BioCurious most recently got $35,000 as a Kickstarter effort). And, of course, a long way off are such features as networks of similar entities or aggregative hubs for administration.

Most likely BioCurious will develop in ways make it less interesting as a new form of learning organization, but I’m looking forward to following it.

Other links:
1. BioCurious blog site;
2. An earlier video of BioCurious in the garage stage;
3. Adam Orem’s recent podcast interview with Eri Gentry, one of the founders of BioCurious, as a preview to her talk at OSCON.

Dave Cormier and I are offering an open course on the Future(s) of Education, starting in April. … Could you post a video/drawing/audio recording/dance routine/cave drawing/clay pot that represents your vision of the future of education?

Prologue
1. Nice that the course title uses the world “Future(s)” instead of “Future.” What country? Public or private? What level … undergraduate or graduate? Formal or informal? What time frame … a year or 5 or 20 or 100 or what? And the list goes on and on and on. It’s obvious, I know, but there is no single future for education.

2. Educational systems also do not exist in a vacuum. Discussing their futures depends critically on what assumptions we make about other factors … you know, little things like the economy. If you believe that current global financial pressures will ease and robust economic growth returns, your educational futures will look considerably different from someone who believes that we’ve only seen the first dip in a double-dip recession-cum-depression. Again, an obvious point. But seriously, we cannot talk about futures without also talking about context.

3. In a blog post, I cannot set the context with sufficient richness. But suppose we consider the United States 10 years from now in the year 2020. Further suppose that recovery from the current recession is slow but that major global economic disaster is averted. Suppose that demographic influences unfold as anticipated and that the broad digital transformation of society and culture continue. What might higher education look like in that future? Here are some guesses.

From 2020
1. Prices and cost, not technology, sculpt the higher education landscape.

2. Private for-profits benefit, as do two-year community colleges in some states. Private non-profits and public 4-year colleges and universities feel the most impact from cost-conscious families and state legislatures struggling to maintain levels of social services.

3. Fewer young people see higher education as an entry point for social and economic mobility and life satisfaction. Men started voting with their feet in the early 2000s, but more and more women now turn elsewhere. Opportunities in the web economy are especially attractive.

4. At the margins, some existing institutions fail. Others merge or are purchased by for-profits. Very few new public or non-profit institutions appear unless they serve unique specialized markets.

4. Most institutions continue to search for alternative revenue sources and innovative ways to curb costs, but traditional academe and business-as-usual erode. Institutional stress increases as administrative services and faculty power recede. Tenure and weak academic departments receive a pummeling.

5. Some institutions experiment at redefining themselves. Frequently this is done in collaboration with other institutions, not all of them educational and not all of them in the United States. Much of this is motivated by cost-sharing along lines of complementary strengths. But some of it is non-traditional, such as the construction of joint certificate and degree programs with learning blended in a combination of online and on-campus activity.

6. Dramatic institutional surgery occurs in some elite institutions that legally reorganize to better buffer their research programs from the pressures on their teaching programs.

7. Public and governmental demand for greater institutional transparency improves the quality of information available to families when making enrollment decisions. But from an institutional viewpoint, this further limits flexibility.

8. Technology plays an important role in institutional change, most frequently to minimize costs. Some cost-saving occurs but not as much as expected. Learning technologies receive support, but only if they promise to open new revenue sources or reduce existing expenses.

9. Accreditation changes to reflect inter-institutional collaboration and shared programmatic efforts.

10. The Federal government increases real financial support to higher education, but is itself besieged by an economy that is restructuring, a population that is aging, a public trust in government that is decaying, and a host of other hungry mouths that need feeding. The Federal government means well but can do little more than supply bandages for higher education.

Epilogue
As I said, these are just guesses. It’s a somewhat bleak outlook, but not without hope either. There is lots of good work to do in traditional institutions of higher education. This requires lots of talented and decent people with creative ideas. It will happen. Higher education will change and will be better prepared for tomorrow than it is today. But the transition won’t be easy.

Having said that, however, I also think that more and more talented and decent people with great ideas will leave higher education as they choose instead to build another future, one that is more just and reverent of the world.

A search for “skill exchange” uncovers the usual deluge of 124,000 Google hits. Even a cursory review turns up a number of tantalizing but barely viable choices. A few of these are listed below. Still others miss the mark more widely, such as 1-to-1 barter exchanges and more traditional community adult education offerings. These, however, tend to be more well established.

The earliest mention I found of learning exchanges appeared in an abstract to a 1974 journal article that mentions the Chicago Learning Exchange. Surely there’s an earlier history of which I’m simply unaware.

A Google search is likely not the best way to begin researching actual learning exchanges. I’m hopeful that readers can provide leads of any kind. Particularly anything prior to 1970 or in diverse cultural settings.

I’d also welcome the howl of protest that certainly must exist around the idea of learning exchanges. These are the “Yah, ok idea, but what about x, y, and z?” For example, “Peer-to-peer learning exchanges? Good idea, but what about real teachers?” Gee, that’s a great question.

Another challenge should be directed at complementary currencies and credit clearing systems. Someone should say “What the heck? Isn’t the dollar good enough for you?”

That, too, is a good question. My suggestion that local currencies and credit clearing fit well with learning exchanges actually violates Elinor Ostrom’s admonition that every situation is different, that rules must be worked out by the participants themselves, and that blueprint thinking should be avoided.

It’d be best then to consider local currencies and credit clearing as a conjecture, something that local participants might consider but could accept or reject as they saw fit.

One of the things I like about local currencies is that they tend to be countercyclical. When times are tough, people are unemployed, and money needs to stretch as far as possible, a learning exchange provides an opportunity to develop new skills without an outflow of cash.

Someone might then ask, “Ok, what happens when a person in one learning exchange wants to learn something from someone in another learning exchange?”

The threads from that question trail away into many different areas. One critical item it raises is how two different local currencies can be calibrated. A mechanism must exist to assign value to local currencies based on some commodity (eg, gold or silver) or on some market basket of commodities. This is actually well-trod territory among existing credit clearing systems.

The list of questions just goes on and on. What does federation mean? How might it work? What services could usefully be shared by various learning exchanges?

I think you can begin to sense my implication here. Learning exchanges seem an intriguing idea that might join the many other intriguing ideas now complementing or barking at the heals of traditional education. But, to use Elinor Ostrom’s warning, “nothing is a panacea.”

Community Skill Exchange
“Community Skill Exchange is a link that enables people to trade skills, knowledge and talents within their community and make friends in the process. We believe that learning shouldn’t stop with formal education, and teaching doesn’t necessitate expertise. The Skill Exchange requires absolutely no tuition or long-term commitment. The only catch is that in order to learn, you have to teach something of your own!”

Skills Exchange
“The Skills Exchange Service is based on a very basic concept. Offering our own skills or services to others on a personal basis in exchange for the skills and/or services that they can offer us in return. A kind of skills / services swop shop or bartering service.”

The commons is a core component of learning exchanges. Members treat their combined learning as a resource for the common benefit of all members. And the credit clearing system used to finance learning transactions also serves the common benefit of all members.

But huge questions remain about how a learning exchange might actually function. I cannot answer those questions here, because there is no one answer. However, I will draw parallels to the work of Elinor Ostrom on the design principles found in successful examples of self-governed common-pool resource systems. These principles provide helpful guidance for thinking about how a learning exchange might be implemented.

First, however, a word of caution. There are significant differences between a learning commons and the common-pool resource systems that Ostrom and other researchers study. These include:

• Common-pool goods are what economists call rivalrous (one person’s use prevents use by others) and non-excludable (it’s difficult to exclude a person who has not paid for the good from using it). Examples of common-pool goods are fisheries, forests, and groundwater basins. Learning doesn’t fit these characteristics [1].
• Many of the common-pool research studies were conducted among indigenous peoples of the world. Learning exchanges would likely include greater diversity, not necessarily within a single exchange but certainly across exchanges.
• Internet technologies seem to play only a marginal role in self-organized common-pool systems studied. That would likely not be the case for learning exchanges.

Please keep these points of departures in mind as I go through several areas where research on common-pool resource systems does have something quite valuable to say about learning exchanges.

Let’s start with an admonition from Ostrom that permeates her work:

The design principles are not blueprints, however! They describe the broad structural similarities among those self-organized systems that have been able to adapt and learn so as to be robust to the many social, economic, and ecological disturbances that occur over time. Threats always challenge the robustness of any system – no matter how well it fits the best design principles known for a particular problem. [2]

In what follows I’ll highlight several points that Ostrom makes that seem most relevant to learning exchanges. She uses eight design principles (see my earlier post), but the list below does not categorize the ideas by principle. Ostrom’s work is most accessible and powerful when she uses general language instead of scholarly precision (eg, uses the word fairness instead of the equivalence between benefits and costs). I wanted the power of her ideas to appear in this list. Some of the items in the list are quotes or near quotes; others are lightly edited; still others are paraphrased. Any mis-statements of Ostrom’s actual meaning is solely my responsibility.

• Social norms such as trust, reciprocity, and fairness are critical for cooperative behavior, but they are not sufficient. Rules that complement and encourage these social norms are also essential.
• Rules are the shared understandings by participants about enforced prescriptions concerning what actions or outcomes are required, prohibited, or permitted.
• Rules that are fair and effective help build trust among participants.
• The cost of devising and sustaining effective rules increase substantially if participants come from many different cultures, speak different languages, and are distrustful of one another.
• Institutional learning through constant monitoring and adaptation are needed to sustain self-organized resource governance systems.
• It’s important that users define the boundaries of a self-organized resource system, especially what’s included and who’s included, rather than have those boundaries externally imposed. Increasing the authority of participants to devise their own rules may allow social norms to evolve and better sustain the resource system.
• Most users are authorized to participate in making and modifying rules. Problems often erupt when local elites make the rules.
• Rules must be enforced in some manner to achieve robust governance. In most cases users select their own monitors, who are either themselves users or responsible to users.
• Self-organized resource systems rely more on quasi-voluntary cooperation achieved through graduated sanctions for infractions rather than either strictly voluntary or coerced cooperation.
• When conflict does arise, minimizing the conflict requires access to rapid, low-cost, and local arenas of resolution.
• Autonomous self-organized resource systems usually require at least nominal recognition by a governmental unit.
• Learning the specifics of a particular setting and enabling participants to experiment and learn from their own experience and that of others is more likely to create long-enduring resource systems compared with formulaic or blueprint thinking imposed by policymakers and donors.
• Polycentric systems where citizens are able to organize not just one but multiple governing authorities at differing scales provide significant advantages, by nestling smaller self-organized systems into a larger federated arrangement where costly services like information gathering and conflict resolution can be shared.

One final note about learning exchanges. The idea is not new. Writing 40 years ago, Ivan Illich suggested the creation of a “bank for skill exchange”:

Each citizen would be given a basic credit with which to acquire fundamental skills. Beyond that minimum, further credits would go to those who earned them by teaching, whether they served as models in organized skill centers or did so privately at home or on the playground. Only those who taught others for an equivalent amount of time would have a claim on the time of more advanced teachers. An entirely new elite would be promoted, an elite of those who earned their education by sharing it. [3]

In the next and final post in this series, I’ll reflect briefly on learning exchanges as a viable institutional form.

Notes:
[1] Something about the classification of goods by subtractability (rivalrousness) and excludability strikes me as awkward and incomplete. Classifications of goods seem to change according to context, as described in this Classification Table for Types of Goods, especially the last two paragraphs.
[2] Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Note: the list of ideas that seem relevant to learning exchanges appear in Chapter 9, which is wonderfully expressive and evocative. Highly recommended.
[3] Illich, Ivan. 2002. Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd. Note: Original publication date was 1971.

In the present post I’ll explore one way that the transactions in a learning exchange might occur. Recall that everyone in a learning exchange is a learner, both a teacher and a student, both a buyer and a seller.

For ease of discussion let’s assume that Alice, Barbara, and Cathy belong to the Boston Learning Exchange (BLE), and that this is a group of about 100 professional women in the Boston metropolitan area. The women in BLE treat their aggregate learning as a common resource for the benefit of all members.

Let’s see how that might happen. Table 1 shows 9 exchanges among Alice, Barbara, and Cathy. Obviously the exchanges among the entire BLE membership would be considerably more complex, but these 9 transactions serve to demonstrate the basic ideas involved.

In transaction 1, for example, Cathy introduces Alice to the HTML5 video tag. The sale price is 50 units. In this case Cathy is the teacher/seller and Alice is the student/buyer.

The BLE uses a currency system that is complementary to the national currency. There are many examples of such local currencies in operation throughout the world (see resources below). One prominent example is the Swiss WIR, a business-to-business currency created during the Great Depression of the 1930′s and in continuous use since that time.

No physical exchange of currency actually occurs in the BLE. The seller in any exchange always sells on credit to the buyer. In transaction 1, Cathy (the teacher and seller) extends 50 units of credit to Alice (the student and buyer) so that the transaction can occur.

But the really interesting aspect is that the buyer never actually pays the seller directly. The seller extends credit to facilitate a transaction and receives similar credit extensions when she wants to learn. In a properly managed learning exchange, the total credit outstanding at any one point in time is small compared to the total credit ever extended. It’s a case of “what goes around, comes around” that naturally modulates the credit actually outstanding.

Exchange systems like this are called mutual credit clearing systems. It sounds kind of strange, but watch what happens through a series of exchanges in a credit clearing system. Table 2 shows the results of the 9 transactions.

In the first transaction, Cathy sold 50 units to Alice. The bookkeeping debits Alice 50 and credits Cathy with 50. The column labeled Total Cleared is the total amount of credit ever extended in the system. Because it is the initial transaction, that number is 50 units in transaction 1. The column labeled Money Supply is the total amount of credit outstanding in the system. This, too, is just 50 units in this first transaction. The columns labeled Balance provide the cumulative total balances for each individual.

In transaction 2, Alice introduces Barbara to the GIMP image editor. The price of this transaction is 100 units. The bookkeeping debits Barbara 100 and credits Alice 100. Alice’s cumulative balance at this point is 50, Barbara’s is -100, and Cathy’s is 50. The total amount cleared in the two transactions is 150 (ie, 50 in transaction 1 + 100 in transaction 2). The money supply, however, is 100 because only a total of 100 units of credit is still outstanding (the money supply is the sum of all positive cumulative balances).

Note that the money supply fluctuates near zero and sometimes may actually reach zero, even though the total amount of credit ever extended continues to grow. This is a feature of credit clearing systems of complementary currency. Here’s how Thomas H. Grecko Jr, one chronicler of these systems, describes it:

A credit clearing association is based on an arrangement in which a group of traders, each of whom is both a buyer and a seller, agree to allocate to one another sufficient credit to facilitate their transactions among one another. … In such a system, the total amount of credit outstanding at any point in time can be thought of as the money supply within the system. [1]

Credit clearing systems treat credit as a form of commons. As such they are not immune from a series of problems that Elinor Ostrom and others have documented. Not the least of these is the free-rider problem where one person takes from the commons but does not give to it. Trust and reciprocity are critical components in governing a commons, so it’s important that members have rules to deal with these situations.

In my next post on learning exchanges, I’ll return to Ostrom’s empirical and theoretical work that provides design principles for successfully managing a commons. These principles are not prescriptive. Each situation is best treated as unique. As I said previously, it’s messy but very real and quite hopeful.

Notes:
[1] Greco, Thomas H. 2009. The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company. [Note: Table 1 and 2 above are modeled after an example provided by Greco on pages 132-133.]

Complementary Currency. [Wikipedia].

Community Exchange System
“The Community Exchange System (CES) is a community-based, global trading network using a money other than our familiar national ones — an alternative, parallel, local, community or complementary currency system. In short, the CES is a new money system.”

Complementary Currency Resource Center
“The Complementary Currency Resource Center is a international, multi-lingual non-profit organization with the goal of providing free knowledge, resources and assistance in the building of an economy of social and economic solidarity and appropriate development.”

New Currency Frontiers
“We invite you to explore innovative interpretations of money, economics and society which are resulting in a new way of thinking about our future. You will find pieces of the puzzle on this web site to understanding the next economy.”

Time Banks
“For every hour you spend doing something for someone in your community, you earn one Time Dollar. Then you have a Time Dollar to spend on having someone do something for you. It’s that simple. Yet it also has profound effects. Time Banks change neighborhoods and whole communities. Time Banking is a social change movement in 22 countries and six continents.”

Main Street Cash
“Local sustainable economies add safety and security to our world. A number of groups and individuals across the country and around the world are working towards smaller sustainable economies. The tools used for local economies can include a local community currency. Our blog hopes to bring quality information to those looking at local currencies, sustainable economies and even new open source digital currency.”

The Money Fix
“THE MONEY FIX examines economic patterning in both the human and the natural worlds, and through this lens we learn how we can empower ourselves by redesigning the lifeblood of the economy at the community level.”

In this post I’d like to sketch some rough ideas and identify a few sources for anyone who might be interested.

The corpus of Ostrom’s extensive and detailed empirical and theoretical work demonstrates that, contrary to popular impressions, it is possible to successfully manage a common-pool resource (eg, forests, fisheries). The aspect of this work that I find most wonderful is that there is no one model for success. It is complicated and messy. This brings me joy because it feels so very real. As Ostrom says at two different points in her lecture, “there are no panaceas.”

Ostrom identifies 8 design principles important for successful management of common-pool resources:

• Boundaries of users & resource are clear
• Congruence between benefits & costs
• Users had procedures for making own rules
• Regular monitoring of users and resource condition
• Graduated sanctions
• Conflict resolution mechanisms
• Minimal recognition of rights by Government
• Nested enterprises

These are terse abbreviations for robust thoughts that I cannot explore in detail here. But I will attempt a short summary. My apologies to Ostrom if the summary unknowingly misrepresents her ideas.

Open access to a common-pool resource results in overuse (ie, the tragedy of the commons). People act in their own short-term interests and neglect or remain unaware of a sustainable longer-term in which everyone is better off. Achieving a more optimal outcome requires cooperation based on considerable communication among members. Building trust is an essential component and this requires time to invent and modify many diverse sets of rules. These rules cannot be generalized beyond the specific social and ecological context. Members must have the ability to create rules, monitor adherence to the rules, and determine appropriate sanctions when rules are not met. This requires considerable transparency. Everyone must be able to see what others are doing and to judge their individual and collective impact on the resource itself. Successfully managed common-pool resources often have multiple institutions in a nested or polycentric organization that may be quite complex, including various public and/or private units. Regardless, members play a core role in cobbling together something that works given constraints such as culture, politics, finances, time, and personal strengths.

No one solution fits all. Success is local, situational, social, nested, transparent, and institutionally complex. Basically it’s a mess. Wonderfully real. And, I think, a message. There is no panacea.

How does this relate to the future of learning? At first blush, it seems at best tangential. Afterall, learning is not a common-pool resource in the same manner that forests are. If someone cuts down a swath of forest, those trees are gone. This is not true when someone learns; knowledge still exists for others to use after the learning. Indeed, knowledge may even be reinforced the more it is used.

What happens, however, if we look obliquely at learning? Bear with me here for a moment.

It’s quite ordinary for two friends to share some portion of their combined knowledge. To take a simple example, consider two children in grade 3. One excels in mathematics but is not so good in reading. The other excels in reading but is not so good in math. They each help the other according to their strengths.

Now imagine this situation on a larger scale. With three friends the cooperation remains intact and the opportunities for sharing increase.

At some point in the scaling, however, the communication and trust built on friendship gets diluted because there are just too many people, some of whom may only be acquaintances or even strangers. So the natural ability to share common knowledge at small scale becomes more difficult at larger scale.

But suppose this larger group of children had some way to communicate, to build trust, to determine rules for sharing, to gain experience cooperating with others. Might they not create a successful institutional arrangement for sharing knowledge? It seems possible.

Now imagine maximum scaling so that everyone in the world was included. We’d be sharing a vast knowledge commons both within and across local and situationally specific micro-institutions concocted from whatever arrangements created the conditions to thrive.

Is that possible? To me it seems too obscure to consider seriously at this time and at that scale.

There does seem merit in further work on learning commons at the level of real people in real contexts. Ostrom’s design principles will provide guidance but are unlikely to transfer cleanly. It’ll be messy. You’ve got to love that.

Elinor Ostrom. 2009. “Governing a Commons from a Citizen’s Perspective” (pdf). In Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons, ed. Silke Helfrich. Berlin: oekem Verlag.

Paul B. Hartzog, Sam Rose, and Richard C. Adler. 01-February-2010. Resource Sharing – Grounding the 21st Century Economy. The Forward Foundation.

A Commons Manifesto:
Various authors. 2009. Strengthen the Commons – Now! (pdf).

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.

Both articles appeared in the April 3rd (2009) issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Start by reading Kevin Carey’s piece called What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers’ Decline. Carey is the policy director of a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization in Washington, DC whose mission is “to promote changes in policy and practice that lead to improved student opportunities and outcomes.” Here’s a taste of his argument.

As of today, there’s no Craigslist busily destroying the financial foundations of the modern university. Teaching is a lot more complicated than advertising, and universities have the advantage of sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation. … [But] it would be a grave mistake to assume that the regulatory walls of accreditation will protect traditional universities forever. … Perhaps the higher-education fuse is 25 years long, perhaps 40. But it ends someday, in our lifetimes.

Then read Obama’s Plans for Higher Education: a Good Beginning, but More is Needed. This article was written by Sandy Baum and Michael S. McPherson, both thoughtful and longtime advocates for reform of higher education pricing and, in particular, student financial assistance.

Sadly the Baum and McPherson article sits behind the Chronicle’s subscription firewall. But here are the principles that the authors believe should define a student aid system that “works well for students and families.”

The system, we argue, should be simple, clear, and predictable. Money should be appropriately directed toward increasing opportunities for students with limited resources. The focus should be on students – not institutions, lenders, or governments. Student aid programs should encourage students not only to enroll in college but also to graduate. Taxpayer money should be used efficiently.

There is an abundance of common decency and common sense in these principles. But the undercurrent in the Baum and McPherson article indicates that decency and sense are anything but common in the U.S. higher education industry.

Ossified. That’s the one  word that best describes for me the condition of higher education when viewed from a macro level. Deceptively solid, primed for fracture under the appropriate stress.

The stressor will almost certainly be revenue erosion. Not because of the current economic recession. But rather because the business of teaching and learning, which most colleges and universities perceive as their core function, will no longer be confined by ivy walls and institutional gates.

There is no mystery in this. It’s happening all around us and in broad daylight for everyone to see. Digital networks, not institutions, increasingly provide access to learning. And both the digital content and the access are largely free to learners.

YouTube EDU is only the most recent major initiative with obvious heritage through courses, faculty, and curricula to traditional colleges and universities. Others include iTunes University and the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Educational entrepreneurs abound. Examples most similar to traditional higher education include P2P University, University of the People, and Academic Earth. Beyond these there is a large, exciting, chaotic jumble of innovation that may portend bigger changes for colleges and universities.

Ossified. That’s the macro view. But at ground level, things are different. Colleges and universities come in every flavor and hue imaginable. That diversity is reflected in their business models. See, for example, the research (pdf) I conducted last year on more than 1,100 private institutions of higher education in the United States. Some business models simply provide more buffering to revenue erosion than others.

I agree with Carey about the sea swell of change facing higher education. But I also agree in part with Baum and McPherson when they focus on pricing. They did not frame the pricing issue in terms of macro-level change, but nonetheless pricing at the institutional level does provide colleges and universities a mechanism to confront an uncertain future in a controlled manner. However, pricing requires answers to tough questions about what, why, and how a college or university does what it does. If not teaching and learning, then what?

The economic stimulus bill now being considered in Congress must look like manna from heaven to colleges and universities. According to an article by Sam Dillon  in today’s New York Times, the stimulus bill would “shower the nation’s school districts, child care centers and university campuses with $150 billion in new federal spending, a vast two-year investment that would more than double the Department of Education’s current budget.”

However, the stimulus package might easily be the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Here’s a question for you. Does your strategic plan include the unthinkable, that university life as you know it may be coming to an end? Take a look around and listen to the distant rumblings that may portend trouble for higher education on the same scale as has already affected industries like music and newsprint.

Ask yourself, can my institution survive change of that magnitude? And then ask yourself, would the economic stimulus plan just further entrench my institution on an established path where change will be even more difficult? Would you be accepting a handout that just further cements your feet in place?

I could easily be wrong, of course. It may be that higher education leads a charmed existence so deeply buffered that it will be impervious to the rumblings of change. In which case, the stimulus money will be welcome.

But just for a moment, consider the possibility that you will be asked to steer your institution into troubled times that dwarf the current economic recession.

Let’s look at just one of the rumblings. In yesterday’s The Wired Campus of the Chronicle of Higher Education, there’s an article by Jeffrey Young that describes two new online universities that use extremely low-cost business models. Young ends his article with these words:

It seems that either University of the People, or P2PU, or some yet-to-be-created institution, will find a way to offer a radically cheaper college degree using online tools. The new models will probably take some time to mature until the right mix of teaching and self-study is perfected.

In the comments to Young’s article, there’s a revealing look into what some of your faculty (particularly your adjuncts) may be feeling. Joe Erwin asks:

Why are we who are highly qualified to provide educational services not being the entrepreneurs in all this? We could “cut out the middle man” (expensive physical campuses and expensive administrators) and enable motivated students to pay us more directly for our services. How essential are all the “overhead” aspects?

If you weren’t already concerned about the viability of today’s form of higher education, it’s time to be afraid. Perhaps very afraid.

In the course of being afraid, you’ll want to ask yourself if manna from heaven is worth the price.

I say this as a friend of higher education, a third-generation academic who has loved university life but now thinks it needs to change.