Although information technology has had an undeniably salutary effect on scholarship and on the life of the scholar, new practices — enabled by technology — threaten to erode scholarship, isolate scholars, and marginalize the rightful place of the scholarly enterprise in an age dominated by knowledge and innovation. Within the academy and in society, technology may be fostering new practices that are sharpening contradictions within the community of scholars. Is the modern college or university, for example, centrally important as a storehouse of knowledge? As a purveyor of expertise? As a cultural arbiter? Despite the fact that many of our finest institutions continue to lead society in these ways, the overall answer to these questions is “no.”

gml: This essay is well worth reading. I suspect it will generate considerable discussion and raise the hackles of many college and university stewards. Some of the conclusions seem questionable, but not worth quibbling about here. It’s particularly telling, I think, that Katz distinguishes “scholarly enterprises” from “institutions” and sees a vibrant future for the former and a more uncertain future for the latter. The essay concludes with a daunting list of “ifs” that need resolution for higher education institutions to thrive (emphasis in original) :

We are the “lucky” ones: as our old world dissolves, at least we can participate in resolving the new one. If we can once again create a galvanizing metaphor, a general educational philosophy, a set of carefully constructed and widely accepted academic standards, a consensus on the nature of our footprint, a supporting and flexible delivery system, and a portfolio of global partners, then higher education and its institutions will prosper in the Digital Age.

Katz, unfortunately I think, considers educational change in the context of technology, when that is only one of many critical factors that will help shape tomorrow. Meaning that the tasks ahead for higher education institutions will likely be even more difficult than Katz anticipates.

Just suppose we are in a period in which the future of human life on the planet is seriously threatened – by climate change and all the negative economic, social and cultural processes that attend it …

[N]ation states may not have been able to get their act together at Copenhagen but surely Universities – supposedly engines of reason – can.

Assuming you agree with the proposition, the question I raise is: are universities optimally organized to address the fundamental ‘global challenges’ that exist, and at the pace these challenges deserved to be addressed? If not, what should be done about this organizational-ethical dilemma?

gml: Thanks to GlobalHigherEd for inviting Thrift to write a guest post. Most impressive is the scale of the imperatives considered (ie, the very future of human life on earth) and the gentleness but power in the question Thrift asks about higher education on behalf of all of us. Very nice.

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.

The Data Singularity is Here
Michael E. Driscoll, Dataspora Blog, 08-March-2010.

I conjecture that the largest share of data on the planet sits in log files; these are the EKGs of the server farms that manage our cell phones, our e-mail accounts, and every other facet of our online existence — and which consume 3% of the US energy budget.
…
Collectively, these logs reveal the pulse of the planet — flight delays, package shipments, job losses, and human sentiments.

And as I’ll discuss in my next post, those who can extract a meaningful signal from this thunderous cacophony — the analysts, statisticians, and data scientists — are uniquely positioned to change the world.

gml: Promises to be a fun series of posts by a thoughtful commentator about “Big Data, open source analytics, and data visualization.” I don’t know, however … “data singularity” and “uniquely positioned to change the world” may both prove to be exaggerations. It’s tough to move obstinate elephants.

 
Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously
David Gelernter. Edge. 05-March-2010.

11. The Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work — but it can help create the best economy in history, where new markets (a free market in education, for example) change the world. Good news! — the Net will destroy the university as we know it (except for a few unusually prestigious or beautiful campuses).
…
23. The Internet’s future is not Web 2.0 or 200.0 but the post-Web, where time instead of space is the organizing principle — instead of many stained-glass windows, instead of information laid out in space, like vegetables at a market — the Net will be many streams of information flowing through time.

gml: For reasons that defy me, this article is arranged in 32 numbered paragraphs. Regardless of the reasons, the post has been stirring up some cackles lately. Honestly I don’t quite know what to make of it. I cannot comment intelligently on much of the article. But with regard to Gelernter’s prognosis for higher education, I think he is wrong. Given enough time, it may be true that the “Net will destroy the university as we know it.” But it seems far more likely that many universities will adapt and coexist in layers of rich tapestry with new forms of learning.

The second article, called The Learning Society, is unique in its source (a corporation), its breadth of external review and contributors, and its call for a new learning system concurrent with existing systems but based on a new set of principles and organized differently. The recommendations, however, don’t live up to the promise of the new principles.

The third document is cast as a challenge: “how can technology increase access, improve quality and lower cost?” It was published by Contact North, which was founded in 1986 by the Ontario government to serve the education and training needs of people in rural and remote areas of that Canadian province. It’s unclear exactly how the document was prepared and by whom. Some parts make provocative reading.

After considering each of the documents separately and in conversation with the others, I’m left a bit unsatisfied. Maybe that’s not unexpected. Imagining the unknown devolves with the degree of specificity.

My own take is pretty squishy at this point. Yes to a new learning society of some sort. Yes to the inclusion of everyone. Yes to its inception in entrepreneurial innovation rather than strategic planning. Yes to the criticality of innovation under the severest of constraints. And yes to concurrency with, but alternatives to, existing educational and financial systems. Beyond that the fog deepens and visibility disappears.

From the Campus to the Future
Diana G. Oblinger. EDUCAUSE Review. January/February 2010.

Higher education faces numerous challenges posed by the drivers of change, including worldwide demand for education, financial constraints, and a constantly changing knowledge base. Those of us involved with information technology in higher education thus need to ask ourselves several critical questions:

• …
• If we were to transform the student experience, what would it look like? What would we do differently? How would those changes affect the individual? The workplace? Society?
• …
• If the college/university metaphor today is a network rather than a campus, what does that mean for our work in information technology?

The Learning Society
Richard Halkett. Cisco Systems (GETideas.org). 2010.

The principles that characterize the Learning Society are informed by the demands of the 21st century, by emergent innovations at the very leading edge, and by what we now know about how learning happens. The result is the following set of principles designed to meet society’s new demands for learning and to realize the learning potential of every part of society and every part of the globe.

The Learning Society:

• Engenders a culture of learning throughout life.
• Aims to develop motivated, engaged learners who are prepared to conquer the unforeseen challenges of tomorrow as well as those of today.
• Takes learning to the learner, seeing learning as an activity, not a place.
• Believes that learning is for all, that no one should be excluded.
• Recognizes that people learn differently, and strives to meet those needs.
• Cultivates and embraces new learning providers, from the public, private, and NGO sectors.
• Develops new relationships and new networks between learners, providers (new and old), funders, and innovators.
• Provides the universal infrastructure they need to succeed—still physical but increasingly virtual.
• Supports systems of continuous innovation and feedback to develop knowledge of what works in which circumstances.

Fast Forward: How Emerging Technologies are Transforming Education and Training [.pdf]
Contact North. Challenge Paper, January 2010.

This is a foresight paper, not a policy or planning paper. It seeks to imagine what could happen for learning systems with technologies currently in various states of development. It does not address how change could be made or what these changes may be.

To provide a flavor, here’s one implication that appears in a section called Knowledge Engines, Networks, and Hubs:

Students will leverage technology, peer networks, robots and artificial intelligence in support of their learning challenges before institutions adopt them — acting as consumers, they will drive some changes in the system. They will access knowledge from global knowledge engines available through the semantic web. They will seek credit recognition for their work. They will demand acknowledgement of learning from a variety of sources. The opportunity thus exists to shift to a new paradigm for the management of learning outcomes — a paradigm likely to be resisted to those committed to the old paradigm, which has a strong and successful six hundred year history.

As a term, higher education doesn’t adequately describe what’s happening now. It connotes a stage of education beyond primary and secondary level. We’d be better off considering all education, both formal and informal, to be learning and refer to it as such. We don’t have K-12 problems or university problems. We have learning problems. Changing our lenses, from education to learning, offers hope that some of the current pervasive problems will receive fresh thought and effort.

For me, anyway, the most interesting changes in learning aren’t happening at the system or institutional level. They’re happening in the grassroots efforts of people playing with new possibilities. For example, when an accomplished professional musician opens a school for banjo and teaches online with video personal attention. In this case, the model is one of a master artist teaching his craft.

That model might replicate in many areas. Whether it will, certainly I don’t know. But it illustrates people playing at the edges of what we call education. It’s here I see great hope. Where the focus is learning, play, fun, project oriented.

Normally I would merely skim a report like this, believing as I do that little benefit results from comparing countries across time using crude proxies for progress. But the report kept drawing me deeper and deeper. There is much room for debate about specifics, but throughout the report there is also a humane tone that invites consideration of a better global future.

For example, at the conclusion of an uncomfortable section on educational competency assessment, the following sentence appears:

More generally, a QoL [Quality of Life] perspective on education would suggest the importance of looking beyond excellence in specific competencies, to include openness to other cultures, a capacity for self-expression and reasoned discussion, tolerance for other people’s views, and the enjoyment that students derive from classrooms. [p169]

The classroom phrase seems incongruous, but otherwise the sentiment is remarkable. Thank you, whoever wrote this!

The report pays considerable attention to education. Indeed, the word education appears 249 times in the 292-page document. So I was curious to see what specific education-related measures the commission mentioned and to see what new measures they might suggest.

Before getting to this, a bit of background will help. I won’t attempt to summarize even the major points in the report, but rather want to provide context for the education-related discussion.

With a name as hefty as the intellectual composition of its membership, the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Progress and Social Change was chaired by Joseph Stiglitz with Amartya Sen as chair adviser. Stiglitz, Sen, and three other members of the 28-member Commission are Nobel Laureates in Economics.

Most of the press stories that I read highlighted only a single feature of the report with headlines like “Happiness is the new GDP.” In fact, what the report said in this regard is more nuanced and more powerful:

The time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic performance to measuring people’s well-being. And measures of well-being should be put in a context of sustainability. [p12, emphasis in original]

In many ways the report is a remarkable document. You’ve got to admire, for example, a commission dominated by economists that can produce a report that includes these and other similar leanings:

For a long time, economists have assumed that it was sufficient to look at people’s choices to derive information about their well-being, and that these choices would conform to a standard set of assumptions. In recent years, however, much research has focused on what people value and how they act in real life, and this has highlighted large discrepancies between standard assumptions of economic theory and real-world phenomena. [p43]

You’ve also got to admire the diligence and rigor with which the commission explored both the limitations of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as an adequate measure of economic well-being and possible alternatives that better reflect actual social progress. Here’s an example, one among many, that illustrates how the commission struggled:

While talking about the concepts of “prices” and “quantities” might be straightforward, defining and measuring how they change in practice is an altogether different matter. As it happens, many products change over time – they disappear entirely or new features are added to them. Quality change can be very rapid in areas like information and communication technologies. There are also products whose quality is complex, multi-dimensional and hard to measure, such as medical services, educational services, research activities and financial services. [p21]

The commission judged these complex multi-dimensional services like education to be “badly measured,” but at least the report is refreshingly direct rather than snidely derogatory:

[I]ndividual services, particularly education, medical services and public sports facilities, are almost certainly valued positively by citizens. These services tend to be large in scale but badly measured. Traditionally, for government-provided non-market services, measures have been based on the inputs used to produce these services rather than the actual outputs produced. [p26]

With that as context, let’s get to a few specifics.

Education as human capital that is foundational to economic production has a long history in economics, and that emphasis is certainly evident in the report. But most other education (and health) topics appear in the chapters devoted to quality of life. I’ll concentrate my comments on those sections.

Here is a list of education indicators mentioned specifically in the report:
a. Percentage of population with post-secondary education.
b. Early school-leavers as an indicator of at-risk-of-poverty. Includes measures of educational attainment by age group.
c. Associations of education with health status, unemployment, engagement in civic life.
d. Educational inputs: school enrollment, expenditures, and resources.
e. Educational outputs: graduation rates, completed years of schooling, standardized test results, adult literacy.
f. Various international assessments of learner competencies (e.g., OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment).
g. Disparities in the distribution of educational opportunities (e.g., gender differences in school participation rates).

Here is a second list of education indicators that the report mentions as currently in active development or, if only they existed, as potentially useful:
a. ICT skills linked to early school-leaving.
b. Low reading literacy performance linked to early school-leaving.
c. The OECD Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIACC).
d. Time-series studies to better measure the wider benefits of education on communities.
e. Out-of-school educational experiences that affect the knowledge and skills development of individuals.
f. Measures of care arrangements and development of “soft competencies” in young pre-school children.
g. Benefits of adult education and training by characteristics of individuals, to better design these programs.
h. Competency comparisons of students in higher education.

Comments:
1. The Commission did not attempt to catalog educational indicators. My lists above should not be construed as recommendations of the Commission.

2. My overwhelming reaction to the education indicators in the report was one of bleakness. If expanding people’s educational opportunities is a step toward improved quality of life, as the report suggests, then the educational indicators listed above are too tame and too puny to have much impact. I’ll come back to this in a later comment.

3. I like several aspects of focus in the report. These include sustainability, a household perspective, and distributional effects. All of these could be extended to education with little effort. For example, can we continue to sustain current higher education participation rates in the United States given the long-term increases in the real net price of attendance? One pertinent unit here is the household or family that must absorb these expenses. Considering the distributional inequalities of this access and opportunity is a powerful way to illustrate the effects of business as usual.

4. Other aspects of focus in the report seem like misdirections for education. National comparisons are one. It’s difficult enough to say something meaningful for a single country, where the rules of the game are at least similar. The focus must be on institutions, technology, households, and other actors in the education game. It’s here where more innovative educational measures are most needed.

5. In a chapter on sustainability, the author asks “what do we want to measure exactly?” It’s a critical question for education also. Co-mingling multiple issues only dilutes the impact of measures. So asking the right question is a big first step. Both the question and the answer must be easily understandable by people.

6. Rather than deal in abstracts, here’s an example that may clarify what I mean. In the United States there is currently much hand-wringing that postsecondary educational attainment is stagnant. Now that’s a co-mingled issue. Suppose we narrow it and focus on the decisions that families make about university enrollment. Cost plays an important role in these decisions, so let’s narrow the question again to focus only on financial affordability. That’s a little better, but still pretty broad. But let’s stop at that point for illustration only. Then the question becomes one of indicators of financial affordability. Here we might use aggregate indicators such as the proportion of median family income needed to attend various categories of colleges and universities (e.g., 2-year public; 4-year private liberal arts; etc).

These comparisons are helpful. And they already exist. What I’m suggesting is that we need other measures with more bite to them. For example, imagine that you’re a parent with a child considering college. Gross numbers like tuition and fees discounted by financial aid are important in your decision. These measures are available at the institutional level. But they can hide a multitude of sins. Wouldn’t it help to know more precisely what you’re buying? Suppose you could do a financial ultrasound on a college or university and use it to identify institutional priorities and policies that will likely affect the experiences of your son or daughter at that institution?

Something like that is not as farfetched as it sounds. It would likely involve revenue and expense flows within institutions and summary analysis at student, course, and faculty unit levels to determine the internal transfers and subsidies that a college or university makes. Is your child likely to receive what you think you’re actually purchasing? Or, for example, does undergraduate revenue subsidize faculty research or graduate education?

It’s just an example, but a plausible one.

I’ll end with another quote from the report, directed to the educators among you. It is something you already know, but you may not have seen it presented in quite this way before:

Studies that have computed monetary estimates of human capital stocks found that they account for an overwhelming part of all wealth (80% or more). [p30]

Basically, the wealth of the world is in your hands.

———

The report is available as a pdf on the website of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. A small sample of the reaction is available here: The New York Times; Der Spiegel; Financial Times; The Globe and Mail; The Guardian; Wall Street Journal; and Le Monde (or English translation).

The University’s Crisis of Purpose
Drew Gilpin Faust. The New York Times. 01-September-2009.
“Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices. But at this moment in our history, universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society.”
gml: As president of Harvard University, Faust occupies a unique bully pulpit. But I’m always frustrated when I read her opinion pieces because they seem so … sanitized. You get the sense that she really does have something to say, if only the real Drew Gilpin Faust would take off the kid gloves and just let loose. My goodness, this is the time in the history of higher education when we need more of that.

The Don’ts of Higher Ed Reform
Robert Zemsky. Inside Higher Ed. 04-September-2009.
“Don’t Try to Reform the NCAA’s Big Money Sports … Don’t Tackle Tenure … Don’t Try to Reform Accreditation … Leave Investments in Research Infrastructure to Others”
gml: By providing a don’t-do list, Zemsky attempts to focus higher education reform on what’s possible. Instead he provides a damning depiction of just how ossified colleges and universities have become. While totally unintended on the part of the author, this is the single best piece I’ve read for why higher education in the United States is beyond hope.

In The Tension Between Reform and a New Start, I commented on two posts that George Siemens wrote about higher educational change. Each post seems precipitated in part by his experience at the conference. And now David Wiley has written Feeling Out of Place on the same important theme. He says:

[T]here is an increasingly radical element within the field [of open education] – good old-fashioned guillotine and molotov type revolutionaries. … This “burn it all down” attitude really scares me.

I didn’t attend the conference, so I have no first-hand experience with what was or was not said and how it might be interpreted. So my comments here will be a personal reflection on the tension between reform and a new start. Maybe it will just add fuel to a fire, but I hope not.

Destruction of social institutions for the sake of destruction is stupid. It may provide temporary relief from actual injustices but it inflicts major hurt on innocent people. So I have no tolerance for a “burn it all down” approach to educational change.

Which is not to say that I have no tolerance for radical ideas or people. There is ample latitude for differing opinions and strategies. Sometimes people who see the world most differently can provide the greatest insight. Other times they’re just kooks. It can be difficult to distinguish the two.

Wiley asks: “What is our collective purpose [in open education]?” His answer: “I believe it is to increase access to educational opportunity.” He later modified that answer in this statement:

Increasing access to educational opportunity is the reason I chose the path of openness and launched the idea of open content upon the world. But that goal is my own, and I shouldn’t and don’t expect others to accept it as their own.

I like the ecumenical tone here, but we actually do have a core purpose don’t we? Don’t all the spokes trace back to learning?

The core is definitely not open content or openness or open education or open anything. At this point openness is just a proposition. Maybe it will work; maybe it won’t.  For example, you could probably make a very strong case that neither teachers or learners want to be bothered by remixing and reusing open content. There’s not enough time in their days to deal with ideologies. They want solutions to problems, not more complications in overly complicated lives.

Nor is the core about educational opportunity, access, or affordability.

Pardon me for taking a less tolerant position than Wiley. There is a core. It’s learning.

For me higher educational change starts and ends with learning. And I don’t mind one bit trying to influence other people to see things the same way.

I’m back and still struggling to swim upstream in my rss feeds, but I do want to comment briefly on two important posts regarding higher education that appeared while I was gone. Both posts were written by George Siemens. One is Here we are…there we are going; the other is Change that prevents real change.

The first focuses on OERs; the second on textbook alternatives and Flatworld Knowledge. But each post speaks to a deeper underlying issue that is captured in the following quotes (one from each post):

I’m increasingly dismayed at the quality of thinking with regard to educational reform.

If we are to change, we might as well have the right kind of change. If we are going to expend energy envisioning a new world of education, we might as well be bold, creative, and future-focused.

From this core, the two posts fray (at least for me) as Siemens thinks through his concerns. Some of what he writes makes sense. Some doesn’t. And some seems just plain wrong. But this is a minor matter really. Siemens succeeds wonderfully in broaching a difficult topic in an engaging manner. In the two posts, you can almost visibly see Siemens weigh the various factors that influence his position on whether to “work within the system or create a secondary system” [his words].

While in Minnesota, I almost accidentally discovered two poems that address the same tension that Siemens identifies. Both poems were written by Kay Ryan, who is the current Poet Laureate in the United States. They appear in her book from 2005 called The Niagara River. Because of copyright concerns, I won’t quote either in its entirety.

In “The Past,” Ryan laments that “sometimes there’s suddenly no way to get from one part to another, as though the past were a frozen lake breaking up.” In “Least Action,” she puzzles about “the principle of least action, by which in one branch of rabbinical thought the world might become the Kingdom of Peace not through the tumult and destruction necessary for a New Start but by adjusting little parts a little bit.”

The tension between these two poems, one expressing an absolute need for discontinuous change and the other wishing that incremental reform might suffice, reflect a tension I hear in each of Siemens’ posts.

I suppose it’s a tension we all feel to differing degrees. And while the two extremes are not mutually exclusive, most of us do choose a position on the continuum, even if it’s an unconscious decision. It’s wonderful to see Siemens make such a conscious consideration in such a public manner.