The Wiki War

By John Glaser

Here's an interesting article on higher ed's relationship with Wikipedia from Inside Higher Ed's Steve Kolowich:

Of all the Web 2.0 tools that have become de rigueur on college campuses, wikis fundamentally embody the Internet’s original promise of pooling the world’s knowledge — a promise that resonates loudly in academe.

And yet higher education’s relationship with wikis — Web sites that allow users to collectively create and edit content — has been somewhat hot-and-cold. Wikipedia, the do-it-yourself online encyclopedia, vexed academics early on because of its wild-west content policies and the perception that students were using it as a shortcut to avoid the tedium of combing through more reliable sources. This frustration has been compounded by the fact that attempts to create scholarly equivalents have not been nearly as successful.

However, academe’s disdain for the anarchical site has since softened; a number of professors have preached tolerance, even appreciation, of Wikipedia as a useful starting point for research. As the relationship between higher education and wikis matures, it is becoming clearer where wikis are jibing with the culture of academe, and where they are not.

Every professor to ever assign a paper to me in my four years of college explicitly warned against use of Wikipedia, citing harsh penalties if found out. There was a palpable disdain for it, as if the open-access internet encyclopedia had publicly denounced the incentive structure of tenure policies or something. It is obviously not the end all, be all, and it is no substitute for good old fashion research, but it is a brilliant supplement and a wonderful starting point (just checking the references at the end of each Wiki entry can direct you to everything from credible news sources to peer-reviewed scientific studies). In fact, as the respected science journal Nature concluded years back, Wikipedia is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britanica, when it comes to its science pages.

But even this misses the point. Forget Wikipedia specifically. As the tug of war over the relationship between traditional university curriculum and scholarship and educational technology rages on, we should ask ourselves how much further (and more scholastically acceptable) educational technology would progress with the full embrace of the professiorate as well as the school administrators at the top of America's most respected universities. As Steven Kolowich reports,

Anyway, Jones says, the professoriate is too entrenched in traditional publishing to summon much interest in helping curate academic wikis.

“To the extent scholarship in academe is caught up in questions of status, promotion, and tenure,” he says, “then it is slightly misaligned with wiki-style approaches.”

“We’ll probably need one of two things to happen before wikis can take hold in scholarship the same way that they have in teaching and administration,” Jones says. “Either senior, post-promotion faculty will need to lead some successful wiki-based projects, or there will need to be an overhaul in the way we think about publication.”

Alternatives like Scholarpedia, Citizendium, and Google's Scholar and E-book initiatives are ideas in that direction, but the professorial aversion and scorn for all things universal and web-based must first be tempered. As Anya Kamenetz frames it,

Existing institutions don't want to give up their authority, nor their faculty jobs. Even among gung-ho early adopters, there's a divide over basic issues: some see an economic opportunity, while others are eager to spread free education; some want the university to absorb the new information technologies, others see the digital age absorbing the university.

The advantages of so called "E-Learning" are already begining to make themsevles known, even with the remaining resistance. The relationship between the two will be a significant factor in overcomming our current problems.

The Internet: Educational Aid or Hindrance?

By John Glaser

The Chronicle has an interview with Nick Carr, author of Is Google Making Us Stupid and The Shallows. Nick Carr is of the general opinion that the internet information age is an impediment to some kind of higher, more effective learning and its affecting "the wiring" of our brains for the worse.

Summing up his new book, Carr says:

When you look across all of the evidence, there's very strong suggestions that the way we take in information online or through digital media impedes understanding, comprehension, and learning. Mainly because all of those things combine to create a very distracted, very interrupted environment.

Being a child of the internet age myself, this seems obviously wrong on its face given my own experience. The internet is where I find most of the books I read (and I read a lot!). Topics range from politics, to economics, to philosophy, to culture, to history, to classic American fiction. I was a Political Science major, and I'm a news junky. Without the internet, I'd be aware of a only a tiny fraction of what is going on in the country and around the world. Aside from the various mainstream news publications I read, I keep up with dozens of blogs by journalists, university professors, policy analysts, economists, activists, NGOs, think tanks, etc. From there, I run into, and often read in their entirety, government reports, economics papers, human rights reports, various PDFs on anything from constitutional law to international relations. I watch videos too. Lectures by professors from some of the most prestigious universities, documentaries on serious societal issues, political and intellectual debates, etc. I could go on, but you get the point.

But maybe I'm an outlier. Maybe I'm the strange one in this new era of the internet revolution. So lets go beyond my personal anecdotal counter-point. What about broader trends?

It's a pretty well known fact that people are getting progressively smarter. See this article on James Flynn, of the famous "Flynn effect":

James Flynn is not the sort of man to go quietly into retirement. A professor emeritus at the University of Otago in New Zealand, he still teaches and researches energetically at 73. He speaks on finance and tax for the left-of-centre Alliance Party. He has a book in preparation that will be his own last word on the relation between race and IQ. In autumn he was touring the world talking about "What is Intelligence", a book published in October, in which he sets out his explanation for a mysterious phenomenon that bears his name: the rise in IQ from generation to generation. Your IQ is likely to be higher than those of your parents, and your children's IQs is likely to be higher than yours.

"Our advantage over our ancestors is relatively uniform at all ages from the cradle to the grave," says Flynn. Nobody knows if the gains will persist, but "there is no doubt that they dominated the 20th century and that their existence and size were quite unexpected."

Or what does neuroscientist Mike Merzenich have to say about human intelligence and the internet more specifically? CNET News.com

Has intelligence changed at all in the era of the Internet?
Merzenich: Over the past 20 years or so, beginning before the Internet really took hold, the standard measure of "intelligence" (cognitive ability) has risen significantly (well more than 10 points). No one really knows what to pin this on, but it is a well-documented fact.

Are we getting smarter--or more lazily reliant on computers, and therefore, dumber?
Merzenich: Our brains are different from those of all humans before us. Our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability. Massive changes are associated with our modern cultural specializations.

The Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of "practice" events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to. Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure--but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary "tools," etc.

...Developing the skills and abilities that crucially support our refined cognitive abilities, and filling our brain dictionaries and constructing this myriad of probabilistic associations in (various) categories, are products of massive brain change. We are greatly facilitated in increasing this stored repertoire and in being guided in constructing our associative references by books, the media and in a particularly powerful and efficient way, by the Internet.

You cannot make associations about things that you have not recorded. In this respect, the Internet is one of a series of aids developed over the last millennium or so that has increased the operational capacities of the average world citizen.

In my use of the Internet or any other reference source, I do not turn my brain off. I'm gathering information and associating it in my very own computer, right along with my desktop computer and the Internet. If anything, these aids are helping my brain gather more information to get more answers right, and to see more possible associations than would otherwise be the case.

Carr goes on to question the efficacy of online learning, among other things. In the interest of brevity, I'll withold further analysis of Carr's arguments in the interview, and suggest that you read them, and then read some of my posts on technology and learning, and then maybe do some more of your own research and see what conclusions you make.

A nice tool to use for this investigation, by the way...might be the internet.

Also see here and here for some more viewpoints.

Assorted News From the Web-Education Frontline

By John Glaser

First, Inside Higher Ed reports:

Blackboard announced on Wednesday it is buying out two software companies in an effort to bolster its real-time collaboration features and satisfy a generation of professors and students increasingly shaped by social media.

The company, infamous to some in higher education for its habit of swallowing up smaller fish, said it is buying Wimba and Elluminate, top providers of software that lets students work together online, for a total of $116 million.

The newly acquired companies will become Blackboard Collaborate: a new platform in the Blackboard family devoted to “synchronous” learning — interactions that occur in real time, rather than at the convenience of each participant.

...At a time when consumer media has shifted toward a blending of asynchronous and synchronous features -- think of Facebook and Gmail with their popular chat features -- Blackboard is trying to get on board with social media and the communication habits it is shaping, Henderson said. And from a pedagogical standpoint, “There is significant academic research that says student collaboration, peer tutoring, group work prepare students better … for the real world than traditional assignments,” he said. The demand for technology that facilitates such interactions, Henderson added in a blog post, is likely permanent.

This is great news. Although it is happening all the time, often without explicit appreciation of what it is and what it means, technological innovations and new models of web-learning frameworks are important steps in the right direction for schooling. Innovators, entrepreneurs, and businesses like Blackboard are constantly coming up with new ways for people - students especially - to operate in our increasingly digital learning environments, and this news speaks to one of the main criticisms people have had of digital, web-based learning environments...that it subtracts from the important interactive aspect of learning. We should keep in mind, this is only just the beginning.

Also, here's some interesting news from Stanford University:

The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. Library chief Helen Josephine says that in the past five years, most engineering periodicals have been moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete — and books aren't doing much better.

According to Josephine, students can now browse those periodicals from their laptops or mobile devices.

For years, students have had to search through volume after volume of books before finding the right formula — but no more. Josephine says that "with books being digitized and available through full text search capabilities, they can find that formula quite easily."

The new library is set to open in August with 10,000 engineering books on the shelves — a decrease of more than 85 percent from the old library. Stanford library director Michael Keller says the librarians determined which books to keep on the shelf by looking at how frequently a book was checked out. They found that the vast majority of the collection hadn't been taken off the shelf in five years.

Keller expects that, eventually, there won't be any books on the shelves at all.

"As the world turns more and more, the items that appeared in physical form in previous decades and centuries are appearing in digital form," he says.

Given the nature of engineering, that actually comes in handy. Engineering uses some basic formulas but is generally a rapidly changing field — particularly in specialties such as software and bioengineering. Traditional textbooks have rarely been able to keep up.

Jim Plummer, dean of Stanford's School of Engineering, says that's why his faculty is increasingly using e-books. "It allows our faculty to change examples," he says," to put in new homework problems ... and lectures and things like that in almost a real-time way."

This kind of news is indicative of the path we've been on, and where we're still headed. Published academic materials are increasingly in digital formats and available in searchable forms online. There is resistance out there, I'm sure, but it is notable when these leaps of progress are made, facilitating the efficiency and productivity of this developing educational realm.

Lastly, from the Open Culture Blog, news of more intellectual and academic information being made available to everyone, for free, online:

Throughout the past year, Stanford’s School of Medicine and Stanford Continuing Studies (my day job) teamed up to offer The Stanford Mini Med School. Featuring more than thirty distinguished faculty, scientists, and physicians, this yearlong series of courses (three in total) offered students a dynamic introduction to the world of human biology, health and disease, and the groundbreaking changes taking place in medical research and health care. Now you can watch these lectures for free. The fall and winter lectures (20 lectures in total) are completely available online. And the spring lectures are getting rolled out starting this week. You can access the full lectures series in multiple formats below:

Fall 2009, The Dynamics of Human Health - iTunes – YouTube - Web Site
Winter 2009, Human Health and the Frontiers of Science - iTunes – YouTube - Web Site
Spring 2010, Transforming Our Understanding of Human Health and Disease - iTunes - Web Site

The entire series also appears in our collection of Free Online Courses.

Behold, the magic of the internet. The Open Culture site itself offers, hundreds of free e-books and audio books, hundreds of free video lectures from professors from some of the most prestigious universities in the country, language courses, music, art, etc. Similar initiatives include MIT's open courseware (which over 60 million people have taken full advantage of), where almost 2,000 university courses are made available, Academic Earth, Virtual Professor, iTunesU, YouTube EDU, on and on. And more is happening all the time!

"Time for a Revolution" - Fully Embracing Technology

By John Glaser

Charles Huckabee at the Chronicle reports:

Dana College, a small, financially struggling institution in Nebraska that had sought a path back to solvency through a sale to private investors, announced on Wednesday that the sale would not proceed and that the college would close because its accreditation would not transfer to the potential new owners.

The investor group that had formed to buy the college, an entity called Dana Education Corporation, had said in March that it planned to maintain a residential campus but also offer online courses. The college's accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, cited the planned online courses among its reasons for denying the institution's request for its accreditation to continue after a change of control.

Although it's true that there were other factors the Higher Learning Commission considered that led it to deny accreditation to Dana College, this should not have been one of them. How could the criteria for denying accreditation include the use of the world's most revolutionary tool for learning? Speaking of revolutionary, Katie Ash at Education Week reported on a recent speech by Jeff Piontek, the head of school at the Hawaii Technology Academy. He has quite a different perspective on the role of technology and the internet in education:

"It's time for a revolution in education."

"It's creativity and innovation that's going to drive our economy," said Piontek, criticizing the standardized tests that he said stifled learning and creativity in public schools across the country. Standardized tests "are not a true gauge of student learning," he said. "We need to think about how we actually assess students on a larger scale."

Educators must give students the technological tools and resources they need to become competent global citizens, said Piontek. Teachers must learn to guide students with content and curriculum and trust that the students will know how to use the tools, he said. "When you're in a classroom, you have to know that the culture you're teaching is not your own," he said, referring to the gap between those who have grown up using digital tools and those who have not.

The generational gap that exists among people who didn't grow up with personal computers and the internet and those who did is a strain on how our institutions operate. Although I believe it is a quickly waning phenomenon, those older generations, who are now heading our schools and universities etc., tend to be skeptical of just how useful and revolutionary these tools can be for the betterment of education. They have brought unprecedented efficiencies in all kinds of markets and aspects of daily life, why not in learning?

Despite the ever-rising costs of higher education, colleges are relying on enormous amounts of subsidies, grants, and endowments to cover their costs. How might technology and the internet mitigate these concerns if it were more fully embraced? We know, at least, that Dana College might still be open next year.

Update: Check out Katherine Mangu-Ward over at Reason, in a post entitled "1 in 4 Kids Now Learning Online, Only 4 Percent of Teachers Meeting Them There".

More on Technology and the Future of Education

By John Glaser

Here at CCAP, we talk a lot about the rising costs of higher education, public vs. for-profit universities, student debt, the potential "higher ed bubble," the declining value of a college degree, etc. But, as I posted on just last week, I think technological innovation and our society's increasingly digital universe is an underemphasized aspect of the coming sea-change many expect to see in higher education. Here's a brief excerpt (although I encourage reading the whole post):

The Internet has already begun to revolutionize the way we think about education, with its ease of use, widespread accessibility, and almost bewildering ability to disperse available information. This has implications for the declining costs of education as well. Entire course lectures from the world's most prestigious universities are already widely available for free on the web through sites like Academic Earth, YouTube EDU, iTunesU, Open Culture, and others, not to mention free periodicals from all over the world, NGOs and the free information they provide, freely accessible daily blogs from some of the most intelligent people on earth, Wikipedia has been shown to be as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica, on and on and on.

Here's Inside Higher Ed's Eric Jansonn's take on it:

An often-cited example of "unbundling" is newspapers: with blogs and other online tools, one no longer needs a printing press or fleet of delivery vehicles to be heard. The newspaper editorial room competes with an army of bloggers and other online media outlets. Craigslist emerges as the marketplace for used household items, local job listings, and community announcements, replacing the advertising function of the traditional print newspaper. The combination is a perfect storm leading to a steady, nationwide stream of newspaper closures.

Is liberal education as vulnerable to "unbundling" as newspapers are? Two characteristics suggest it is. First, it too functions under the economics of scarcity: gather some of the best teacher-scholars in various disciplines and seclude them with students in close learning environments on a residential campus. But where scarcity once existed, early signs of plenty are emerging: you can access engaging faculty lectures (with course materials) on Yale's OpenCourseWare site or browse the "how-to" video catalog of new upstarts like Khan Academy or dozens of similar online nonprofit and for-profit alternatives. (See Hassan Masum's recent interview with Salman Khan.) These and similar resources will grow in sophistication and offer alternatives to much general education coursework.

Second, education in general – and especially liberal education – is also primarily an information product. What you get for your money is not a set of real-world, physical goods, but intangible skills and information. So there is every reason to believe that whatever "liberal education" is, "it" can travel over a network. While the resources cited above focus on introductory curriculums, remember that we are in the early days of a digital transformation of academics: 20 years ago, most colleges did not even have reliable networks.

He goes on to note, importantly, that much of education is based on close personal contact with professors and students, and so the elimination of the system we currently have is unlikely for that reason. I think he's on the right track, yet perhaps overlooking two relevant points:

(1) if technology and the market are allowed to freely take the education sector where it ought to go, we can't foresee what kinds of innovations or ideas might nullify this teacher-student interaction issue (maybe schools remain largely communtiy based - no moving away to college - but the learning is done online or otherwise digitally, and interaction is done with friends, families, and colleagues within community...who knows?) and

(2) these issues about technology and education have to be taken in the context of all the other issues currently pressuring the education system for radical change (aforementioned hyperlinks, for example). Pressure on the status quo is coming from all different directions and taking various forms, so we should avoid a narrow lens when thinking about the changes coming for education.

The future of higher education is largley unknown, except that big change is likely to happen in the not-too-distant future. And technology may just be our saving grace.