Other writings by the authors of
The Social Life of Information:
The University in the Digital Age
Times Higher Education Supplement (THES)
1996 May 10: 1-4
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1966 July-August: 10-19
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© Heldref Corp.
1995
Abstract
The university's value, we claim, lies in the complex relationship
it creates between knowledge, communities, and credentials. Changes
contemplated in either the institutional structure or technological
infrastructure of the university should recognize this relationship.
In particular, any change should seek to improve the ability of
students to work directly with knowledge-creating communities.
We offer a couple of examples of currently successful Internet-supported
teaching that suggest how technology can do this. Then we explore
some hypothetical institutional arrangements that might enable
the university to take the fullest advantage of these emerging
technological possibilities.
1 Introduction
What will the university of the digital age look like? We really
ought to know by now. It's been twenty-five years since Donald
Schön (1971) urged universities to start considering life
"beyond the stable state." At about the same time, the
futurist Alvin Toffler (1971) confidently predicted that the information
age would force universities to accommodate an "accelerating
pace of change," prepare for "life-long learning,"
and even consider "learning contracts" instead of the
conventional degree. Since then, there have been a flood of reports
on the future of "the university" and a deluge of technological
innovations, yet beyond the replacement of the library catalog
with computer terminals and the use of PCs as sophisticated typewriters,
on many campuses things don't look very different. Ivy and bored
students still climb the walls.
Perhaps it's just a matter of lag, as an acquaintance suggested
to the hypertext guru George Landow (1993):
It took only twenty-five years for the overhead projector to make
it from the bowling alley to the classroom. I'm optimistic about
academic computing; I've begun to see computers in bowling alleys.
(p. 161)
Yet things clearly aren't quite that simple. Universities are
rife with computers. Landow himself runs his hypertext projects
at the Institute for Research into Information and Technology
at Brown University, former home of Ted Nelson. Schön teaches
at MIT, the spiritual parent of such early hi-tech successes as
Wang and DEC. Colleagues there include such irreproachable frontiersmen
of the digital age as Nicholas Negroponte, Marvin Minsky, and
Bill Mitchell-each of whom is more likely to give you his Home
Page URL than a business card. These universities aren't waiting
for the superhighway. They form its major intersections.
So the lack of apparent change in university life in the past
25 years isn't simply a matter of computational backwardness.
It's probably truer to say universities are schizophrenic, a combination
of high-powered computational centers and highly conventional
institutional practices. Indeed, the advanced technological infrastructure
of a university is itself probably as good an indicator of a certain
strain of institutional conservatism as any. Those institutions
that were able to accumulate the resources (financial, intellectual,
social) to develop a computer-intensive infrastructure were most
likely to be large, wealthy, and above all (despite Schön's
pleas) profoundly stable. After all, building the Internet wasn't
a job for the 7-11 franchise.
It's important to note right away, the sources of this institutional
conservatism aren't found only in the easy-to-criticize administrative
bureaucracies. Tenured faculty, for both good and bad reasons,
tend to cling to the institutional and disciplinary sources of
their own hard-won security. It took an English academic to say
to one of us "We've done things this way for five-hundred
years, why should we change now?" but similar currents of
conservatism run through American faculty senates. Alumni and
parents, too, don't always encourage change (Arenson, 1995). They've
paid a lot for a chunk of tradition and often refuse to be cheated
out of it. This is surely why at commencement, a ceremony more
for parents than for anyone else, the campus abounds with mediaeval
costumes and dead languages. And while business, which as the
dominant customer for the universities' graduates has significant
influence, might congratulate itself on being a force for change,
Motorola and MacDonald's universities and most industrial training
programs don't offer very bright alternative horizons.
Nonetheless, for all the institutional inertia, universities are
changing-primarily because their "environment" is changing.
The conventional 18-to-22-year-old undergraduate going through
a parent's paycheck and school in four consecutive years is becoming
increasingly rare and unconventional. Members of increasingly
diverse student bodies no longer have the time, the patience,
or the money to obey the universities' implicit command to assemble
at conventional campuses for conventional periods, for conventional
forms of teaching. (Many of these conventions are not much younger
than the costumes and customs of commencement.) People are taking
up their degrees later and over longer periods, assembling them
out of one course here and a few credit hours there, snatched
between jobs and bank loans, when time, money, interest, and opportunity
arise.
It's probably less helpful, then, to say simply that the university
will change because of changing technologies than to say the emerging
computational infrastructure will be crucially important in retooling
the already changing university and in providing access to these
students of tomorrow.
So, what might a reformed, post-millennial university that has
adapted to this changing environment look like? Some suggest that
it won't so much "look" as "be"-that the university
of the future will be a virtual place with no need of the physical
campuses that have marked a university for so long. We, however,
doubt that the university will dissolve into cyberspace so easily.
The idea of the virtual university, we suspect, both underestimates
how universities as institutions work and overestimates what
communications
technologies do. Learning, at all levels, relies ultimately on
personal interactions and, in particular, on a range of implicit
and peripheral forms of communication that technology is still
very far from being able to handle proficiently (Brown & Duguid,
1994).
Of course, communications technology will undoubtedly support
and transform many of the interactions of researchers and students,
teachers and learners. Moreover, its marginal cost is also much
cheaper than the conventional classroom. Undoubtedly, its contribution
to the university of the future will be immense. Yet the feasibility
and financial viability of technological intervention are, we
believe, as much issues for concern as celebration. Implemented
without due understanding of the institutional character of educational
forms, intervention might only further polarize an already divided
system. For instance, rather than disappearing, the conventional
campus with all its rich and respected resources could easily
become the reserve of those who can afford it. Those who cannot
would be offered the Net as their alternative. And though catalogs
might claim that such an education and the degrees granted would
be virtually the same, we suspect they would be materially different.
The Net degree, though it might command the same letters (B.A.,
M.A., M.Sc., etc.), would almost certainly not command the same
respect as its distant campus cousin. In consequence, despite
all the claims that the Net is a means to overcome inequality,
the already steeply tiered system of higher education would probably
become only further divided by the unequal financial resources
of its students.
An alternative approach, and one more in tune with the way people
learn, is not to divide the student body between those who get
the chance to go to school and those who are given only the opportunity
to go on line. Rather, it may be wiser to consider ways to divide
each student's career between time better spent on campus or in
communities and time better spent on-line-so that all may have
the opportunity to experience the best of both worlds.
To achieve a democratic expansion of the system will require,
however, quite different pedagogical paradigms than delivering
"education" and quite different administrative arrangements
than simply establishing ever more "Open Universities."
It will also require, we suggest, acknowledging the strengths
and resources of the current system and using technology in support
of these, not in opposition or as an alternative. So, in contrast
to those who suggest that the university of the twenty-first century
will not so much "look" as "be," we argue
below that it may be better to think of it "looking"
in many ways surprisingly similar but "being" very different,
because the most profound changes may be those made in the institutional
arrangements rather than the physical infrastructure that makes
up what people think of as a university.
Our own view of what the university of the next millennium may
look like isn't based simply on a naive desire for a more rather
than less egalitarian system of education. It's also based on
our sense of what it is universities do, what roles they play
in society, and why people think them worth the often huge sums
of money invested in an education; most important of all, it's
based on our understanding of how people learn. So, to explain
our view of the university of the future, we begin by addressing
questions about what it is that universities do when they
"teach"
and what it is that students do when they "learn." We
also investigate the important role that credentials, certificates
of teaching and learning, play in the system.
Our answers suggest that it is a mistake to think of the university
"delivering" knowledge or students as "receiving"
it. Central to higher education is the way universities provide
access to communities of scholars and testimony for a student's
experience among these communities. Consequently, universities
should explore resources for bringing people together, not, as
some interpretations of "distance education" suggest,
for reinforcing their isolation. Having presented this argument,
we then describe a couple of examples of the sort of technologies
that are moving in this direction. Nonetheless, we continue to
maintain that technology on its own cannot transform the university
to meet the demands of the future. New institutional arrangements
are called for.
So, in the final sections of this paper, primarily as means to
provoke discussion, we offer an example of how the university
might be radically reengineered. Reaching back for a historical
precedent, we argue that, just as education hasn't been built
around isolated individuals, so it hasn't always been built around
individual campuses. Past administrative arrangements allowed
flexible, small, distal communities to develop at a variety of
sites, allowing scholars to congregate in dispersed, peripheral,
learning groups, for which a university provided both "cover"
and support. These arrangements allowed students to tap into resources
beyond the campus in local sites of excellence.
In conclusion, we suggest that, supported by the powerful new
communications technologies now available, such a system might
best promote the democratization of learning, where the incautious
use of technology might actually thwart this goal.
2 What do universities do?
So our first question is what do universities do. But before we
attempt an answer, we need to express our own sense of the difficulty
of talking about "universities" in general. Everyone
is familiar with the story of the group of blind people inspecting
an elephant. One stands by the trunk, another by a foot, another
by the tail. Unable to see the whole, but only to grasp what is
immediately before them, each comes up with a completely different
account of what an elephant is. With colleges of higher education,
it is less like the blind inspecting a single elephant than, in
Geoffrey Nunberg's phrase, the blind at a menagerie. To indicate
the range of this menagerie, the U.S. Department of Education
reported that in 1992 there were 10,800 postsecondary institutions,
of which 5,400 offered only diplomas for less than two years'
work; 3,600 were regarded as accredited colleges of higher education.
Of these, some 2,700 offered 4-year degrees, 797 M.A.s and 660
doctorates (NCES, 1993). Finally, other sources suggest that there
are about 170 institutions designated "research universities."
The menagerie has many beasts and several species.
Given the extent of the menagerie, it is tempting to focus on
a small part, such as "the research university," or
a particular school or discipline. But as Daniel Alpert (1985)
has argued, part of the failure to change "the university"
has arisen from the failure (often, as Alpert makes clear, for
systemic reasons) to address "the national university system
as a whole" (p. 276). What follows is an attempt to discuss
that system as a system, if only at a very general level, and
to raise some system-wide issues involving teaching, learning,
and credentialling. So, when we use the term "university,"
we are using it deliberately loosely in an attempt to encompass
this "system" of higher education through accredited
colleges and universities.
To consider the nature of this system, we begin by adopting a
strategy from business consultants who have to evaluate huge and
diversified corporations that address manifold interests. What,
we want to ask, are its "core competencies"? What do
its institutions do that other institutions don't? Why are individuals,
families, states, and government agencies willing to pay so much
for a university? What is it they want and universities offer
that's worth so much?
The easiest answer, and one in line with the distinctions made
in the Department of Education report we cite above, is that they
give degrees.
3 Learning by degrees
Undoubtedly, people in the system don't usually like to be thought
of as providing and seeking credentials. They have higher aims
and higher goals. Moreover, as we will emphasize shortly, providing
credentials is very far from all that universities do. Nonetheless,
credentialling provides students with a tradable token in the
job market. Crass though this may seem, this makes credentialling
an important and complex part of what universities do. The exchange
value of that token provides both a measure of a university's
status and, if the exchange value is high, cover for many practices
that are not themselves so easily valued. So we believe that discussion
cannot get very far unless it acknowledges the central importance
to universities and their students of credits and credentials,
degrees and diplomas.
No doubt for some, education may indeed be an end in itself. But
for the vast majority, it is an investment-a down payment on a
career, social status, or, more immediately, just a job. Most
people give universities the time and money they do because that's
how to get a degree. And people take the degrees they do to get
the jobs they want, knowing or hoping that the status and salaries
of the jobs they become eligible for will fully repay the investment.
For the vast majority of students, universities implicitly provide
a route into the general job "draft," much as they more
explicitly prepare athletes for the NBA or NFL draft. Academic
aspirations and career aspirations are very tightly entwined.
Still, degrees are seen in very different ways. To some, primarily
those inside the system, they are often, as we have just noted,
a vulgar misrepresentation of what universities really do in detail.
While to others, particularly those outside, they are valued as
a succinct representation of the experience gained from a university
career in general. Within the system, many rightly want to consider
"how you play the game"; but without what matters most
is whether you won or lost.
These two worlds are not, however, separable. The public perception
and exchange value of degrees can exert strong influence on university
practice at all levels. As Peter Eisenberger, professor of physics
at Princeton University, noted recently in a discussion of the
research university, "Once students hear that investing years
and thousands of dollars in a Ph.D. has little or no economic
value or intellectual satisfaction they will start changing their
plans" (Roundtable, 1995: 50). So, though it can seem a crude
measure, in fact the exchange value of a degree remains a fairly
sensitive indicator of the market status of a university, a degree,
a discipline, and a graduate.
But we also want to suggest that degrees are actually more complex.
They don't simply either helpfully represent or unhelpfully misrepresent
what universities do. Rather, they provide a helpful misrepresentation-a
misrepresentation that provides both universities and society
with important slack in a system that should not be too taut.
The degree's exchange value gives both universities and students
a certain license to do what the degree permits but cannot acknowledge.
It allows students to "play the game" in varieties of
creative ways, on the simple condition that in they end they
"win"
a degree. Behind the "front" of the diploma, students
and faculty can undertake activities that are socially valuable
but not easily evaluated for the market. Simultaneously, it gives
the job market and society as a whole more diverse and versatile
candidates than they probably know to ask for.
To shift our metaphor to politics, the degree is, in legislative
terms, an "omnibus package" that can draw broad public
support. If this support is neglected, each of the university
practices that at present comes unobtrusively "tacked"
to the overall "omnibus" degree becomes vulnerable to
a "line item veto."
4 Learning and lading
The degree, then, is in some ways useful for what it mis/represents.
As long as it represents certain things about a degree holder
with reasonable accuracy, it can creatively obscure others to
advantage. But that still leaves the question of what are these
"certain things?" What does a degree represent? What
is its significance in this world of exchange? Where does it get
its acknowledged value?
Most commonly, we suspect, degrees are taken to be a sort of intellectual
bill of lading, a receipt for knowledge-on-board. Teaching, in
this view, is a delivery service; universities, a loading site;
and information technology increasingly looks like an intellectual
fork-lift truck. Of course, no one actually says this, but a delivery
view nonetheless underlies much of what is said about universities.
(It also helps explain many misguided educational and technological
strategies. If it's true that the most effective technology in
the classroom is still the overhead projector, this is probably
not because of universities' inherent conservatism, but because
they and the technology they use are seen in this fork-lift way.)
The knowledge-delivery view strikes us, however, as both wrong
and misleading in a number of ways: it misunderstands how people
learn, where they learn, and when they learn. In the first place,
it takes students as empty vessels into which the university pours
information. This is an extraordinarily passive view of how people
learn, one which takes no account of the active participation
involved in learning and knowing.
Anyone considering using the Internet for education should barely
blink before rejecting such a passive view of learning. Net users
don't sit around waiting for knowledge to be delivered. They go
out actively hunting down new ideas and building new connections.
They scour catalogs, Gopher and ftp sites, World Wide Web documents,
MOOs, BBs and so forth, following established links and making
new ones. In the process, they form elaborate and informative
chains. A serious journey on the net can articulate a complex
pathway, joining both nodes and links into intricate and informative
narrative structures. It's not a passive process. (Nor, contrary
to the associations of "surfing," is it necessarily
a superficial one.)
Second, the knowledge-delivery view of the university can't account
for all the things that people learn on campus outside the classroom.
These can be as important to a student's career as what goes on
inside. People leave college knowing not just things but knowing
people and knowing not just academic facts but knowing social
strategies for dealing with the world. Reliable friendships and
complex social strategies can't be delivered and aren't picked
up in classroom hours alone, but they can give a degree much of
its exchange value.
And finally, a knowledge-delivery view radically devalues learning
and knowledge creation that occurs outside the classroom and beyond
the campus. Learning doesn't stop after a university career. It
is, as we note below, a life-long practice. Furthermore, learning
doesn't stop at the campus edge. T-shirts that proclaim "I
got my degree at the University of Life" neatly ridicule
the idea that the university's the only site of learning.
The degree doesn't look much like a bill of lading, then. And
it isn't much treated like one either. Employers and clients,
for whom most degrees are ultimately earned and with whom they
are exchanged for status and income, usually look at a degree
with infinitely less care. Where they would scrutinize a delivery
rigorously, they rarely look beyond the central letters (B.A.,
M.Sc., etc.), the name of a school, and a mumbled "major."
No inventory is taken of all those classroom hours the degree
mis/represents. No one outside academia really wants to examine
a transcript.
Those who have received a degree don't act as though it was the
delivery that was most important to them either. Alumni tend to
blur on classroom information. The details of what they were taught
usually fade exponentially after finals. They wouldn't easily
forgive someone who asked them to take their exams a couple of
years-or possibly even a couple of weeks-later.
Alumni memories do, however, provide some insight into what it
is that universities actually do behind the degree. Alumni remember
the groups they joined, the scholars they worked with, the teachers
and students they met, the friendships they made. Such memories
tend to be far stronger and far more important than the facts
they were fed. We don't have to look much further than the group
of Rhodes Scholars around our current president to see how college
networks formed around an Oxford PPE degree can be far more important
in later life than the degree's formal content.
Such networking is not simply a campus sideshow. The groups people
join at university, some social, some academic, are important.
There's much truth in the old saying "it's not what you know,
but who you know," though that doesn't quite reflect the
intricate connection between "what" and "who."
It's this connection that ultimately explains why parents pay
high fees for "good" schools; why students and faculty
struggle so hard to find places at relatively few universities,
while the vast majority of institutions often struggle to fill
their places; why academics are concerned as much about where
someone received their degree and with whom as about what degree
was received; why outside academia diplomas are in the end significant
indicators of job worthiness, though transcripts are not; and
how university experience helps people find their way through
life after university. For the core competency of universities
is not transferring knowledge, but developing it, and that's done
within intricate and robust networks and communities.
5 Universities, communities, and learning
The idea that communities are at the heart of what universities
do and the experience their degrees represent may seem a heretical,
wrong-headed, foolish, romantic, or simply anticlimactic answer.
We want only to insist it's not a frivolous one.
A community view, we suggest, allows a more rounded view of what
learning, all learning, is and how it happens. A delivery view
assumes that knowledge is made up of discrete, pre-formed units
which learners ingest in smaller or greater amounts and in specialized
settings until graduation or indigestion takes over. To become
a physicist, such a view suggests, you need to take in a lot of
formulas and absorb a lot of experimental data. But, on the one
hand, knowledge is not a static, pre-formed substance; it's constantly
changing and learning involves active engagement in the processes
of change. And, on the other, people don't become physicists by
learning formulas any more than they become football players by
learning plays. In learning how to be a physicist or a football
player-how to act as one, talk as one, be recognized as one-it's
not the explicit statements, but the implicit practices that count.
Indeed, knowing only the explicit, mouthing the formulas or the
plays, is often exactly what gives an outsider away. Insiders
know more. By coming to inhabit the relevant community, they get
to know not just what the standard answers are, but the real questions
and why they matter. You don't pick up those things in textbooks,
any more than you learn to talk like a native by studying grammar
books. Anyone who has traveled in a foreign culture knows that
what goes down on the street isn't what's put down in the books.
Learning involves inhabiting the streets of a community's culture.
The community may be made up of astrophysicists, architects, or
acupuncturists-for academic disciplines are themselves just one
among many types of community-but learning involves experiencing
its cultural peculiarities.
The central point we want to make-a point which lies behind the
various arguments we present in this essay-is that learning does
not occur independent of communities. Indeed, it's exactly because
students can gain credentials without ever gaining access to knowing
communities that the relationship between learning and credentials
is highly problematic. People can and do end up with the label
but without the experience it's meant to signify. Consequently,
the central thrust of any attempt to retool the education system
must involve expanding access to communities not simply to credentials.
But our argument is also driven by the recognition that in our
highly commodified society it is naive to believe that access
on its own is enough. Those who have the label but not the experience
present one problem. But those who might have the experience but
not the label face another. Experience without a formal representation
has very limited exchange value-as those whose only degree is
from the university of life well know. The purpose of retooling
must be two-pronged-it must seek to provide wider access to
communities,
but it must also expand ways to represent new forms of access
in the markets where students need exchange value.
But before exploring these issues, we need quickly to clarify
this notion of "community." Recently the notion has
been trumpeted most loudly by the "communitarian" movement.
Consequently, by describing universities in terms of community,
we may seem to put academic disciplines somewhere on a cozy line
running between a neighborhood watch and the football-team boosters.
The communities we have in mind, however, are usually less formal
and often less congenial than either of these. They comprise the
enduring interpersonal relations that form around shared practices.
People come to share the same community by sharing the same tasks,
obligations, and goals.
Stephen Toulmin (1972) has explored the community character of
academic disciplines. He argues that through a complex of shared
practices and institutional arrangements (in which the university
has come to play a major part), disciplines form "communities
of concept users" (p. 12). What is often thought of as
"concept-acquisition,"
he maintains, is really a rich process of "enculturation"
as newcomers become members of the community (p. 37). This
enculturation,
as we have argued elsewhere, involves genuine participation in
the community whose concepts are to be acquired (Brown, Collins,
& Duguid, 1988).
Toulmin's argument throws light specifically on academic disciplines
as communities. The force of his insight into how learning occurs
is significantly expanded, however, by the work of two learning
researchers, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991), who argue that
all learning, whether specifically "academic" or not,
involves enculturation in communities. Thus, though the content
may differ, the form of academic communities is at base much like
the form of other communities. They are all what Lave and Wenger
describe as "communities of practice."
More generally, such communities are, we think, essential and
inevitable building blocks of society. Being an inevitable rather
than optional form of social arrangement, they have the same credits
and debits as society as a whole. They are as likely to be hierarchical
as egalitarian; to be restrictive as open; to resist change as
welcome it; to be internally divided as united. What connects
members of a community are the practice and the concepts they
share, not a warm glow of fellow feeling.
So we are not claiming, as communitarians do, that it would be
useful to form communities and that universities would be a good
place to form them. Rather we claim that communities, with all
their strengths and shortcomings, grow inevitably and inescapably
out of on-going, shared practice. For more restrictive communities,
such as academic disciplines, the challenge is not to form them,
but to join them. The university has, for better and for worse,
become gatekeeper, controlling access to these important communities.
The real test of a university is what sort of access it provides.
However crude the comparative exchange values of degrees may be,
they usually indicate reasonably well not just the quality of
participation of particular individuals, but also the quality
of access that the university makes available.
6 How universities work despite their best intentions:
Graduate and undergraduate education
Much of graduate education and research makes the attempt to bring
newcomers into the disciplinary community quite clear. Practical
collaboration between aspiring students and established scholars
introduces the former to a discipline's theoretical and institutional
characteristics. Graduate students are predominantly involved
in working their way ever deeper into a community and its institutions,
moving away from a toe-hold on the periphery towards increasing
participation. For this, the first things they need are authentic
communities and direct access. Given these, despite the occasional
didactic distractions, graduate students can confront in full
the characteristic demands, standards, and practices of the particular
community. Graduates thus learn not only how to join a community
in general, but how to move through one in particular; not only
how to recognize members, but how to be recognized as one.
The reality of graduate education turns on its head the assumption
that as people go into an academic field they simply become more
theoretical. In many ways, they become more practical. Advanced
graduate students are like apprentices being led into a profession
by someone who has previously mastered its practice. The resulting
mentoring relationship allows, for example, medical students to
begin treating patients, law students to compose briefs, historians
to undertake historical research, physics students to engage in
the practice of physics rather than merely learn about it, and
so on. It isn't abstract theory but concrete, community practice
that's at the top of the pyramid.
Things are obviously different for undergraduates. They, after
all, are prime targets of mechanisms of delivery. They prompt
the question how can learning go on in the way we describe if
no one is paying any attention to it-if both faculty and students
think of themselves as engaged in a process of delivery? Luckily
for learners (and universities), life is full of unintended consequences.
Undergraduate curricula may often be designed to deliver a lot
of predigested knowledge, but to do so they usually have to bring
together practitioners from a lot of different, highly specialized
communities. These community members, whether intentionally or
unintentionally, display for students much of the reality of what
life in those communities is like.
Perhaps the most important thing undergraduates gain from this
exposure is an implicit sense of how society is made up of communities
of practice and how these all differ from one another. From a
distance, academic disciplines appear engaged in the collective
and seamless pursuit of knowledge. As students begin to engage
with the discipline, as they move from exposure to experience,
they begin to understand that the different communities on a campus
are quite distinct, that apparently common terms have different
meanings, apparently shared tools have different uses, apparently
related objects have different interpretations. Learning this,
however unconsciously, is a key outcome of a college career. As
well as spotting the differences, undergraduates also tend to
recognize the common social demands professional communities make.
This is an important part of the socializing effect of universities
that makes their diplomas, like high-school ones, congenial to
corporations (see Eckert, 1989).
Undergraduate students don't only get to see how particular communities
differ. As they work in a particular community, they start to
understand both its particularities and what joining takes, how
these involve language, practice, culture, and a conceptual universe,
and not just mountains of facts. So by the time students have
finished an undergraduate career, they have usually had sufficient
experience of a variety of communities that a diploma is a safe
indicator that its bearer has learned the rudiments of community
joining-which is only another way of saying that he or she has
begun to learn how to learn.
7 Beyond graduation: Life-long learning
In the past it has been quite easy to regard universities as essentially
the focus for the sort of graduate and undergraduate education
we described in the previous section. For a long time as universities
have acted as gatekeepers to academic knowledge, the campus has
maintained a certain isolation. "Town" and "gown"
have been separate. Alumni have primarily been sources of cash
for the university; universities a source of nostalgia for alumni.
Such distinctions, however, have ignored the role of communities
not merely as purveyors of knowledge, but also as creators of
it. "Communities of concepts" don't merely trade in
concepts, they revise, and develop old ones and introduce new
ones. These changes, moreover, don't occur only in the communities
of the traditional "ivory tower." Knowledge is created
elsewhere in society, too. Between the university and the rest
of society, knowledge is constantly being changed and interchanged.
The increasing dispersal of significant changes is putting pressure
on the conventionally distant relations between town and gown.
On the one hand, universities need to draw on resources-not merely
funds of money but also funds of practical experience-that lie
beyond the campus. While on the other hand, universities need
to extend their contacts beyond the campus to make sure that the
knowledge they create gets out to where it can be most useful.
One way for the university to look outside itself is to consider
the question of life-long learning and the notion of learning
contracts. The community insight acquired during a four-year degree
never, of course, sufficed for life. But in the past almost everything
else a man or woman needed to know in a particular job could be
picked up in situ. Increasingly, this is no longer feasible.
As jobs transform themselves and develop in unprecedented directions,
people need to reimmerse themselves in specialized communities
to pick up specialized knowledge. This creates a new role for
the universities-looking to education after the conventional degrees
are long past, catering to the need for life-long specialized
learning.
So universities need to find ways to address people beyond the
conventional degree courses and to open campus communities to
participation from "outsiders." In particular, universities
should consider some of their unexploited assets. Whether for
practical or organizational reasons, alumni and local communities
don't usually have access to campus activities-classes, labs,
seminars, field trips, and the like. But the use of live links,
videotapes, ftp sites, World Wide Web documents, and burgeoning
informational technologies should help universities to capture
the otherwise transient practices on campus to make them useful
in other circumstances. This needn't be thought of simply in
"broadcast"
terms. Hours of videotapes of classrooms have only limited use.
To increase use value, universities could tailor documents (including,
video, audio, or multimedia recordings) with particular audiences
in mind.
One approach might be to take advantage of a flourishing campus
practice of circulating the notes of good students. These notes
help a class develop a shared sense of what seems to be worth
emphasis and attention in the otherwise continuous stream of information
produced in class. Such a practice could be developed to add value
to recordings of a class. Members of the class, as a part of their
own note-taking practices, might provide real-time annotations
to a recording that others will use later. An annotating system
could allow a member of the class to highlight what they believe
will be of particular interest to a secondary user. (If they know
who that user will be and what his or her specific interests are,
the class member could probably do this with some precision.)
Secondary users, particularly if they are well-versed in the background,
could then move rapidly from one annotated point to another as
they use the recording, though they could always play intermediate
sections for clarification and context if they needed. Such annotations,
in effect indexing the recording for future access, might greatly
increase the value of classroom recordings, which are already
fairly commonly made.
Many of the arrangements and the technologies they could use for
this work will, of course, also help universities to reach the
diversified conventional student body. Another strategy, one that
covers both types, might be to offer "learning contracts"
to incoming students. The university might contract with them
to continue to maintain connections between students and the relevant
academic communities after graduation in a variety of formal or
informal ways (including, perhaps, the annotated recordings).
In reaching out beyond the campus in ways like this the universities
would not only be expanding their fee base. Simultaneously, they
would be maintaining links to the sort of practical expertise
they often lack. Thus arrangements like these should also help
the university draw on the resources in non-university communities.
8 Technology paradigms: Distance education
We began with a descriptive account of what we think universities
do. In the last section, however, as so often happens, we changed
to talking about some things that universities ought to do, but
don't. These primarily involve blurring the university's traditional
boundaries while extending its reach across space and time. These
are changes that the evolution of the university's environment
is beginning to demand. And now, the emerging technological
infrastructure
is starting to make them possible. Information technology is particularly
good at breaking down traditional boundaries and reaching across
space and time. So now it's time to give a little more detail
to roles technology can play.
While considering what new things a university might do, we need
to keep in mind our own answer to what it is that universities
already do that's valuable-their core competency of developing
certain types of communities. With this in mind, our first step
will be in the wrong direction: we start by saying what educational
technology probably shouldn't focus on.
In the last few years, new technologies have turned universities'
eager attention to "distance" teaching. Administrator's
eyes gleam with the thought that distance education will allow
them to reach more people across greater distances more cheaply
than ever before. The attractiveness of low-cost, technologically
mediated teaching is pushing some in the direction of maximum
distance, minimum cost, and a virtual university. We think this
is the wrong goal to pursue, for several reasons.
First, distance teaching still operates under a delivery paradigm.
The concept was developed under the influence of previous generations
of technologies, as the broadcast capacities of television and
radio proved useful for reaching unconventional student bodies.
The Open University (OU) in England, for instance, used these
technologies instead of conventional classrooms. Broadcast media
allowed the OU to reach people who had little or no access to
conventional universities. It didn't, however, change the underlying
delivery-structure of the pedagogy. It questioned the privilege
of the classroom, but it didn't question the practice. It simply
used broadcast media to mediate much the same old delivery from
a broadcaster at the center to recipients at the periphery (Bell
& Tight, 1993).
Second, as we noted earlier, universities succeed despite themselves.
It's the collection of communities they open to their students
as much as their formal pedagogy that makes universities such
a valuable site for learning. By attempting to push all of a student's
university education onto the Net and retaining conventional pedagogy,
universities simply risk making inaccessible all the valuable
insights into communities that students previously gathered by
default. Furthermore, students in dis-located universities will
be unlikely or even unable to form the local networks that can
be so important to their later life and the health and the wealth
of a region. Unreflective notions of distance learning simply
chase academia ever-higher up a virtual ivory tower. Technology
needs to be thought about in different ways.
9 Talking the talk
It's at first difficult to see what technological paradigm follows
from the community rather than delivery view of education. As
each community has its own specific interests, its own ways of
knowing, its own central endeavors, generalizing seems out of
place. But communities are made up of people, and at the heart
of all social relations and practice lies human communication
of one form or another. On the basis of this assumption, we suggest
that learning technology should be build around a conversational
paradigm.
That declaration probably drew about as much applause as our earlier
claim that communities explained the core competence of universities.
Indeed, conversation can seem just about as insipid as community.
It too rings with a tone of feel-good consciousness raising. But,
like communities, conversations are not necessarily placid or
polite. Nor do they deal solely with explicit exchanges of information
between direct participants. They are complex and powerful social
processes that involve silence as much as saying, knowing as much
as information, and peripheral eavesdroppers as much as central
interlocutors. Through first listening and slowly participating,
people learn how to speak and when, what to say and to whom; they
come to understand a community and practice from the inside, to
recognize not only the accents, inflections, and jargon, but most
of all the social significance of a practice. Conversation is
the way understanding gets around.
Saxenian's (1993) comparison of Silicon Valley and Route 128 implicitly
recognizes the power of conversation. She saw that one of the
differences between the two, what made one set of communities
more adaptive than the other, was the presence in one and the
absence in the other of a central communicative technology: local
bars. The geography of Route 128 provided no central gathering
point, while the more formal social structure tended to isolate
employees. In Silicon Valley, by contrast, word spread and ideas
were disseminated because people from different businesses relaxed
together over a beer at the Wagon Wheel and talked.
More formally, pragmatic philosophy and theories of practice,
on which the idea of a community of practice is based, have emphasized
the importance of conversation. For both, knowledge is not some
external, general object that people uncover and pass around,
but a product of communal inquiries and investigations. Such claims
lie behind Dewey's influential idea of "productive inquiry"
(Hickman, 1990, Cook and Brown, in preparation), which essentially
replaces the idea of closed, objective knowledge with an open-ended
idea of knowing as inquiry. Knowing is thus always shaped by the
tools of inquiry, and central among these is conversation. Conversation
also underpins Wittgenstein's (1968) philosophy of "language
games," Rorty's (1979) pragmatism, and Oakeshott's (1991)
anti-rationalist practice theory. One way or another, all these
philosophers suggest that it is through the web of language and
conversation that people come to know. Stanley Fish's (1980) literary
criticism similarly puts understanding at the heart of the open-ended
conversation of an "interpretive community" who together
reach a consensus about what's what.
10 Conversing with and conversing about
The centrality of conversation helps to explain why the Internet
is such a significant phenomenon. Previous communications
technologies-books,
film, radio, television, telephones-have all supported distance.
But they allowed primarily either monologues or one-to-one
conversations.
Communities, however, thrive on many-to-many conversations, which,
even in the technologically rich twentieth century, have for the
most part only been possible in face-to-face situations. So the
campus and the workplace, which bring people together, have long
been crucial sites for learning. Technology in general and the
Net in particular now offer low cost ways to hold many-to-many
conversations among people who are no longer in the same place.
The value of the Net doesn't simply lie in the way it allows groups
of people to talk with one another. It also comes from the way
that, unlike telephones or video links, the Net can provide common
objects for participants to observe, manipulate, and discuss.
It's not, then, simply a medium for conversation, nor is it just
a delivery mechanism. It combines both, providing a medium for
conversation and for circulating digital objects. Furthermore,
it also allows participants to turn the ongoing conversation itself
into another object of conversation for further reflection. Usually,
educational technology tries to do one or another of these things.
Ideally, it should combine all three. Some technologies do.
E-mail E-mail, usenets, bulletin boards, and listserve
mail lists get their usefulness from the way they transmit transient
comments and allow them to be captured to make up an archive.
Of course, not all comments are illuminating, but an archive is
helpful in showing both dead ends and possible developments. Participants
see for themselves the ebb and flow of exchange and its history.
Lists and their narrative archives are particularly useful for
people not directly joining in, list "lurkers" as they
are sometimes known. The experience of lurking, particularly if
it comes with the right to join, can be quite rewarding. Like
a good conversation or a lively radio talk show, list exchanges
can be enjoyed as much by those who don't contribute as by those
who do. For those who don't, there's a lot to be learned merely
from eavesdropping. On many lists, the only evidence of the many
lurkers haunting the virtual space comes when someone threatens
to take an interesting conversation off list. Then people suddenly
materialize to protest, writing to say how much they've learned
from merely lurking.
CoNote Nonetheless, everyone who's hung out on a list knows
that for every good conversation that gets going, there are a
dozen false starts. And for every useful contribution, there can
be a dozen uninformed and highly opinionated ones that derail
everyone. Often, the conversational wheels merely spin or community
conversations with potential get side-tracked by outsiders who
haven't grasped the context. This is particularly true when the
participants are not well versed in the topic. Dan Huttenlocher,
a professor in Cornell's Computer Science Department, tried to
create a useful closed list for informal undergraduate class discussions,
but he was disappointed to find how little it helped. "Particularly
for undergraduates," he notes,
A list makes conversation easy, but focus difficult. Students
don't need the opportunity to talk. What they need is something
to talk about.
Conversely, when he put problem sets on a class ftp server, Huttenlocher
found this gave students a great deal to talk about, but no means
for simultaneous conversation.
To help focus conversation, Huttenlocher with Jim Davis of the
Xerox Design Research Institute at Cornell, designed "CoNote,"
a Mosaic-based tool that in essence combines the server and the
discussion group. CoNote allows students looking at problem sets
on a Web document both to post and to read questions and comments
attached to particular points in the document. With CoNote, students
could raise and discuss tricky issues, learn from others, discover
they weren't the only one stuck, and generally enter into lively
debates about issues important to the class. By capturing the
transient and attaching it to the particular point at issue, CoNote
allowed students themselves to add context to the original document,
thereby helping other readers. The system was an instant success,
proving much more useful and used than either the list or the
ftp site alone.
LatinMOO Nowhere on the Net has conversation become as
lively as in MUDs and MOOs. MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) were designed
so that several players on computers connected by modems could
play the game "Dungeons and Dragons" together. MOOs
remove the game goals and turn the "virtual space" into
a manipulable set of "rooms" with programmable
"objects."
By allowing rooms to be built, modified, and given their own character,
MOOs have given an important, "ownable" sense of place
in the void of cyberspace-providing a place rather than merely
a space for people to congregate. This makes MOOs significantly
different from forums and chat lines. In consequence, MOOs have
become the clubs and coffee-houses, pubs and cafés of the
Internet. Now you can go to an on-line Wagon Wheel to see what's
up. In these on-line programming environments, communal knowledge
spreads like wildfire.
University teaching took eagerly to MOOs. Many have simply been
used on one campus, but one of the great attractions of MOOs is
that they allow people on several campuses to get together for
discussions. Especially for courses that have difficulty finding
enough live bodies on one campus, the MOO offers an interesting
prototype for distance learning. One particular instance is James
O'Donnell's courses on Boethius, run in the fall of 1994 for credit
from the graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. Graduate
mediaeval Latinists are few and usually far between, but LatinMOO
allowed students from the United States and Asia to form a reasonable
graduate-seminar quorum. (The course on Boethius spanned some
9 time zones.)
The structure of the course and the use of the MOO reached far
beyond simple "delivery." LatinMOO was much more than
a chat line. It was designed as a "complex" with a quadrangle,
several classrooms, a common room in which only Latin could be
used and a virtual Coke machine around which people would gather
to chat. O'Donnell opened the MOO classroom to students enrolled
in the class, while he made other parts of the MOO available for
Latin students from his regular courses (including a "live"
class on Boethius) to get together more informally. To widen the
conversation, O'Donnell combined other Net facilities with the
MOO creatively. He made the central text available to all at a
Web site with links to a commentary and other resources. And he
started a Boethius e-mail list that included all in the MOO seminar
and the live class, but which essentially created space for virtual
"auditors." This opened discussion to students and academics
from around the world, while maintaining a separation between
levels of participation. The e-mail exchanges were themselves
archived on the Web.
These are examples of learning technologies (though not all designed
for educational uses) that succeed, we think, because implicitly
they honor community and conversational paradigms. As such, they
begin to show the sort of technologies universities need to support
their core competencies.
They may suggest the way to go, but they also raise certain challenges.
In the short term, they offer means for universities to expand
their mission while maintaining their current arrangements. But
in the long run, as we suggest in the remainder of this essay,
they may create a need for more radical rearrangements-rearrangements
that allow "open" rather than just "distance"
learning. Open learning seems to us a much more valuable goal,
but it will put much greater pressure on universities to change.
11 Transformations and rearrangements
The sort of learning that goes on the Net outside classrooms (whether
real or virtual) with no-one in charge but the learner is closer
to what has been called "open learning" (which the Open
University never quite achieved) than it is to "distance
teaching" (Hodgson, Mann, & Snell, 1987). Open-learning
advocates seek to bring down barriers that prevent learners from
taking charge of their own learning as much as possible. These
barriers are not simply physical or technological, but also social
and institutional (Boot & Hodgson, 1987, Bell & Tight,
1993, Coffey, 1977).
So unlike distance teaching, the promotion of open learning cannot
be taken as primarily a technological issue. Institutions will
have to cede significant amounts of control if learners are actively
to take charge of their own learning. Or perhaps it is truer to
say, that as students use the Net to take increasing control over
their learning, universities will have to recognize and accommodate
themselves to changes this will provoke in their conventional
gatekeeping roles.
But if the Net questions universities' conventional control over
access, it makes problems for learner's too-problems of access
and problems of representation. In the matter of access, if learning
involves legitimate participation in communities, the Net often
provides only an illusion (though often a very powerful illusion)
of participation while actually keeping people at a safe distance.
As anyone who has sent e-mail to the White House, Congress, or
even a newspaper knows, the Net can often be used to give the
impression of access while refusing the actual experience. So
the Net may, for instance, allow students to tap into community
objects, but not into the community itself. They may find access
to a text, but not to the communities that give that text significance.
Where Fish (1980) was once challenged by the question "is
there a text in this class?" the Net raises the challenge
"is there a class with this text?"
Furthermore, though Net groups-newsgroups, mail lists, MOO
fraternities,
and so on-are, we believe, profoundly useful means to support
and develop existing communities, they are not so good at helping
them to form. Huttenlocher argues there is important synergy between
his live classes and the exchanges on CoNote, that CoNote alone
couldn't provide. "The Net isn't a good place to form
communities,"
he claims, "though it's a very good place to keep them going."
Rheingold's (1994) notion of "virtual communities" as
well as O'Donnell's experience in LatinMOO at first seem to challenge
Huttenlocher's claim. But both are special cases. The WELL, where
Rheingold's community formed on line, brought together a group
of like-minded people from a fairly homogenous social background
and geographical region. They seem to have managed to meet off
line almost as frequently as on. Certainly, their on-line behavior
reflected norms formed off line and shared by most participants.
The Net works well to bring like-minded people together like this,
but not to make people like minded. Follow a list joined by people
from radically different communities and the difficulties are
often quite apparent. For instance, it's often not the notorious
"flame" that's a barrier to cohesiveness but the difficulty
of recognizing (as writer or reader) what is inflammatory. What's
brisk and to the point to an American or amiably assertive to
an Italian can be quite offensive to British or Japanese contributors,
with their distinct and culturally specific notions of politeness,
deference, and self-deprecation. Similarly, members of different
disciplines often fail to understand each other's interests. What's
important to a historian, for instance, is often irrelevant to
economists, making list discussions of economic history quite
volatile encounters.
In O'Donnell's class (in which one of the current authors took
part), too, on-line participation was appreciably tempered by
common off-line experiences. In particular, the participants were
graduate students, which by our own analysis, makes them quite
distinct from Huttenlocher's class. Graduate students have already
been heavily socialized into the patterns of university and graduate
work and behavior, whereas undergraduate classes are actively
engaged in this difficult socializing process. Unlike Huttenlocher,
O'Donnell didn't have to instill too many social conventions beyond
those of MUDding itself. The niceties and the idiosyncrasies of
scholarly behavior were already there.
This takes us back to our original argument. A good deal of what
an undergraduate diploma signifies and of the exchange value it
gains comes from the way education socializes students, making
them unreflectively familiar with diverse communities and helping
them learn how to learn. Experience on the Net, we suspect, doesn't
do this quite so easily.
Even if the Net did provide full access, it still presents learners
with another problem. Net autodidacts, who have taken full advantage
of the Net's open-learning potential, lack a recognized way to
represent their experience-and, as we argued earlier, it's the
representation of experience (not the content) that has exchange
value. Employers who have proved generally reluctant to accept
credentials from the "university of life" are unlikely
to behave very differently with open learning on the Net.
We believe that the university's oversight and credentialling
function will still be needed in the digital age, and so will
the learner's need for access to communities of scholars. What
the digital age is likely to change, as we suggest in the following
sections, is the relationship between these two.
12 A historical, distributed model
If we ignore, as some prefer, the way credentials provide both
constraints on and resources for the higher education system-a
valuable form of mis/representation as we have called them-then
it's possible to see the march towards distance learning as a
fairly direct march to progress. With the development of various
technologies, it can be claimed, students have slowly been able
to take advantage of each new form of distance learning: the correspondence
course, the broadcast-media course, and now Net courses. The future,
as electronic university proponents assume, is simply to continue
this progressive trend and move towards an "Electronic World-Wide
University" (Rossman, 1989).
From our standpoint, this view of the future has three disturbing
flaws. First, as we have argued, providing students with direct
and legitimate access to face-to-face communities has been a central
and important role of the university. Electronic universities,
primarily seeking to "deliver" knowledge to individuals
over a distance, would not do this. Moreover, the idea of a worldwide
university focuses on knowledge as universal and ignores its particularity
and locality.
Second, the idea of a virtual university leaves unresolved the
close relation between pedagogy, credentialling, and control and
the subtle mis/representation involved in the getting and granting
of degrees.
And third, the history to date of this progressive march, this
story of a steady loosening of an age-old university grip on knowledge
and access, though appealing, simply isn't true. We have already
discussed the first two points. The third, which we discuss in
this section, suggests alternative possibilities for organizing
post-secondary education, and these alternatives, in turn, help
us address in the following section some of the problems our discussion
of the first two points raised.
The sort of highly centralized university control that "Open"
learning seeks to break down is not, in England at least, an ancient
arrangement, but a rather recent one. In the past, universities
played less of a monolithic gatekeeping role. The professions,
for instance, relied much more on professional apprenticeship.
In these areas as elsewhere, university dominion has been increasingly
extended, its control continuously centralized rather than diffused.
Formerly, several universities oversaw much looser, more highly
devolved arrangements. Students from Scotland to Singapore, for
example, took courses and external degrees from the University
of London, many without ever leaving home (Bell & Tight, 1993).
Nor, importantly, were these simply correspondence courses-early
forms of distance teaching. The external degree allowed students
and teachers to form or join relatively autonomous groups thousands
of miles from the degree-granting university. In the nineteenth
century, for example, high quality high schools opened their facilities
to students, particularly women, beyond conventional high-school
leaving age, enabling local scholars to provide university-level
courses in places without a university.
In this devolved system of higher education, pedagogy and control
were widely distributed, involving both local and distal scholars
and communities. From a distance, the university acted primarily
as an administrative body, providing oversight, materials, and
credentialling. This arrangement meant that students were neither
dislocated from local networks nor yet trapped by the limitations
of local resources. They could gain access to established credentials
without losing their connections and access to local communities.
They could, in fact, draw on the strengths of both the metropolis
and the periphery. Moreover, this form of arrangement significantly
opened educational opportunities for rural woman, the poor, and
Third World residents who lacked access to universities.
For various reasons, the use of external degrees has diminished
(though the University of London still administers some). Moreover,
much of the "open" potential of the external system
has given way to distance teaching, which paradoxically only continues
the trend of centralization, replacing local resources with metropolitan
ones. So the twentieth century has not provided a linear story-either
of progress or of doom. Certainly learners have wrested some control
from the university, but in other areas the university has increased
its control. The single (and increasingly large) campus as the
sole source-of faculty, disciplines, and colleagues-for matriculating
students has been the result of a twentieth-century trend of concentration
that has probably been as significant as the opposing triumphs
of dispersal.
Any rethinking of the university as a resource for open learning,
it seems to us, needs to steer a path between the university's
centralizing tendencies, on the one hand, and the optimistic faith
that technologically mediated distance education will necessarily
and inevitably over come this. More than a technological fix is
called for. In the following section, we suggest ways to think
about restructuring the university to meet these goals.
13 Breaking down the monolith
To take advantage of the technologies of the future without losing
sight of the resources of the past, a successful university should,
we believe, aim for three things:
(a) to enable students to engage in open learning, exploration,
and knowledge creation
(b) simultaneously, to provide the resources to help them work
in both distal and local communities, and
(c) to offer them the means to earn exchangeable, equivalent credentials
for work done in class, on-line, or through hands-on experience.
To achieve this goal, the monolithic university needs to become
a good deal more flexible than it is today. There are various
ways this might be done. Here we suggest one in what, we must
state immediately, is much more a thought experiment than a rigorously
thought-out model.
The University of London system for external degrees suggests
that there are really four parts to the standard university. These
are a degree granting body, academic staff, campus facilities,
and students.
In recent years, as we have suggested, these have increasingly
come to be thought of as a single unit. Historical precedent and
contemporary technology, however, argue there's no inherent reason
to keep these tied tightly together. Take them apart again, and
the system of higher education might become much more flexible.
In a distributed system, these four parts of the university might
evolve as follows:
The degree-granting function might be taken up by
degree-granting
bodies (DGBs). A DGB would receive its own degree-granting credentials
from exactly those bodies that assess universities now. They would
fight over students and faculty, just as universities do now.
They could take on as many or as few students and faculty as they
thought viable, becoming smaller than a liberal arts college or
larger than an entire state system. They could set degree requirements
and core courses as they saw fit. Depending on the outcome of
these options, their degrees would gain recognition, reputation,
status, and exchange value much as now. But DGBs would be essentially
administrative bodies, owning little beyond their administrative
competency and a building to house their (administrative) staff.
Without the need for the massive capital investment that a university
requires today, DGBs would be much more flexible than their predecessor,
able to evolve to meet the needs of students, faculty, and the
labour draft.
Faculty, in this scheme of things, could then become independent
contractors. Like doctors who contract to HMOs, they would have
to find DGBs to sanction their teaching, and like doctors, they
might find more than one to do this. DGB recognition would allow
students who study with a particular scholar to gain credit for
work done towards a degree from the DGB. Scholars could contract
individually or in teams. But unlike today, they wouldn't have
to assemble in one place. There is no reason for all the faculty
of a DGB, nor even all the members of a team, to be in the same
place. Some could be on the East Coast, some on the West Coast,
and some overseas. They might teach students from several DGBs
on-line or in person, through tutorials, lectures, or seminars,
or any combination.
Fees could vary depending on the type of teaching offered-a lecture,
a tutorial, a research seminar, a lab, or in-work training for
graduate, undergraduate, or extension students. DGBs might pay
a per capita fee to reward a teacher's ability to attract
high-quality students to the DGB. Or, like eighteenth-century
academics (including Adam Smith and his Edinburgh colleagues),
scholars might collect a fee directly from the students they attract.
If the DGB pays for matriculating students, auditors might pay
teachers directly, offering an incentive to ensure that the structure
and content of a course were not shaped by degree and exam requirements
alone.
Research might be administered by a DGB, or staffed and funded
separately. For both teaching and research, faculty could find
their own facilities. For some these would be extensive, involving
labs and expensive equipment. For others it might only be a library
or a classroom. Others running small tutorial groups or on-line
classes might need no facilities beyond an Internet link.
Facilities, then, might look very much like the campus
of today yet be quite independent of either the DGB or the faculty.
A particular facility would compete for faculty and students in
the region by the quality of its facilities. Both faculty and
students using a particular facility might come from several DGBs.
The facility itself would become a regional magnet for staff and
students. Thus it would be in the region's interest to maintain
a high standard of facilities. Faculty and students wouldn't have
to travel to their DGB, but they might travel to be close to superior
facilities. On the other hand, they wouldn't be locked in to one
set of facilities. In well-endowed areas some faculty and many
students might use more than one facility. DGBs, faculty, and
students might not use campus facilities at all, though, given
the needs for socialization, most DGBs and many faculty might
insist that as part of their degree candidates spend a set amount
of time on campus in groups rather than on line individually.
Student choices grow dramatically if the university is
broken up. Their central choice would involve finding a suitable
DGB. Perhaps they would choose one that insists on conventional
campus life. Perhaps one that made no campus demands. Perhaps
one that included certain faculty. Perhaps one that had faculty
in the various regions they expected to live in over the next
few years: northern Scotland, Singapore, or San Francisco. They
might choose one whose degree in an area of interest is known
to have a particularly high exchange value; or one that was prepared
to validate certain kinds of in-work experience. But students
wouldn't be committed to working with the faculty of a single
campus or a single region, and in particular, they might be able
to work with local communities of excellence whose credentials
under present arrangements are not accepted by universities.
In particular, a distributed system might allow much greater flexibility
for local sites of professional excellence-research labs, hospitals,
architects' offices, law firms, engineering offices, and the like-to
offer mentoring programs that give students practical experience
and course credits simultaneously. Regions that lacked conventional
academic facilities might start to attract students through the
quality of mentors in their conventional work force. Students
in forestry, agriculture, mining, conservation, or ocean science
would, for instance, be able to go and work with experts in their
field in the field, however far this might be from conventional
academic centers.
Essentially, a student's university career would not be through
a particular place, time, or preselected body of academics, but,
rather like their current explorations of the Net, through a network
of their own making, yet endorsed by the DGB and its faculty.
A student could stay home or travel, mix on-line and off-line
education, work in classes or with mentors, and take their own
time.
Funding of universities wouldn't change much. DGBs would take
tuition fees, while arrangements for faculty and facility per
capita payments could be negotiated in a variety of ways,
as we have suggested. Subject to accreditation, private institutions
could set up their own DGBs; states could set up their own. Some
DGBs might try to be exclusive, others inclusive. Each would over
time develop its particular reputation, attracting faculty and
students through the exchange value of their degrees. Groups concerned
about education in their field might try to establish themselves
as DGBs-the MLA, Computer Scientists for Social Responsibility,
or "Academics to bring back Western Civ.," who might
not all be dead, white, or male. As we suggested earlier, degrees
that reflected too much concentration, that represented too accurately
the work involved, might well fall in value compared to those
that mis/represented greater diversity. For in the end, the goal
of a devolved system would be the flexibility to enable students
to avoid sacrificing breadth to depth or vice versa, graduating
students as capable of change as the world they encounter.
14 Conclusion
This sketch is intended more as an intuition pump than as an accurate
picture of the future. Yet for all its limits, we hope it will
make the general point that the radical changes occurring in a
university's environment, from the reconstitution of its student
body to the reengineering of its technological infrastructure,
will require quite different institutional arrangements than those
found today. Distance learning, where much current interest lies,
is, we believe, too deeply enmeshed within current arrangements
to produce sufficiently radical change. More far-reaching alternatives
will be needed to take advantage of the resources new technologies
offer. Without different institutional arrangements, we fear that
not only will these technologies be underexploited, but they may
well reinforce the current limitations of our higher educational
system.
Whether the university of the future will look anything like the
picture we've drawn we can't tell, but we're confident it will
look more like our hybrid, combining the local and the distant,
the real and the virtual, open learning and conventional diplomas,
the strengths of the old and the resources of the new, than it
will look like the aging system of today or the ethereal system
some envisage for tomorrow.
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URLs
For O'Donnell's work, see http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/jod.html
For Huttenlocher's see:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/dph/annotation/annotations.html
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