I've heard a lot about Marshall McLuhan over the years, most recently in an excellent article by Megan Garber at the Nieman Journalism Lab, so when I passed him in the library, I thought the time had come.
The basic idea of the book is that printing didn't simply alter the economics of book production, it actually altered how we think. Prior to printing, we lived in an oral culture. Ideas came in through our ears and out our mouths. Teaching methods were (it is thought) centred around discussion, dialectic and the scholastic method - very open and verbal.
After printing, the book length argument became the quantum unit of knowledge. Ideas now came in our eyeballs, and out of our hands. We became a visual culture. With that, we lost something. You can't argue with a book, except maybe by writing another one. The book becomes an eternal Authority. It establishes a monopoly, and the idea that any idea not in a book form is somehow trivial.
The implications for the development of higher education are interesting. With the book comes the text book, and the idea that one course maps to one (or a small group of) text books which the course aims to help students understand. The book and the course became symbiotic, containerised learning blocks.
McLuhan's book also raises the idea (in 1962!) that what he called 'The Electric Age' was undoing this transformation, and putting a closing bracketed on a 500 year period of book centric history - 'The Gutenberg Parenthesis". McLuhan saw that the media of the day was moving people back from a print and book centric culture to an oral culture. We've seen it accelerate since, from the radio talk shows on to the internet, bloggers and twitter, as the quantum of knowledge gets smaller again. Later ideas like Connectivism make the case that the knowledge doesn't really sit in a fixed, static object like a book any more, but resides in a network of connected people and resources. We've moved from an audio/oral culture with a small quantum of knowledge, to a visual/text culture with a large quantum of knowledge, and now back or onwards to a multimedia (visual and oral) mode of culture where the quantum of knowledge is small again. The Megan Garber article I linked to above demonstrates it nicely, putting short text, a piece of video and hyperlinks in one easy to digest quantum of learning. The medium is the message, as McLuhan says.
The implications for the future (and present) of higher education are substantial. The quantum of learning shrinks back down again from a book sized argument to 500 word blog post, a 6'40 second Pecha Kucha presentation or even a 140 character tweet. The quantisation of knowledge into Bologna Standard modules stops making sense again just when it has been formalised. The Gutenberg age is over, knowledge is now sized for Fedex Box, or a postcard, not a Shipping Container.
In terms of style, I was surprised to find McLuhan is a pain to read. The book opens with a lengthy discussion of King Lear as a metaphor for something or other. It all sounds clever, but like King Lear, I have three daughters. Being thus driven mad already, I didn't follow it. Perhaps on a second reading it would become clear, but there are 100 million books, and life is short. No second chances. His prose assumes an easy familiarity with folk like Kant and Heidigger which will put a some of the book out of reach for many. Some writers bring the reader along on a journey and make them feel clever. McLuhan just makes me feel dumb. And yet, when I approach a point of giving up the book for a bad job he trots out a line like "As the book market expands, the division between intellect and commerce ends". As clever, thought provoking and quotable a sentence as any I've read. That's a whole book right there in twelve worlds. It's a shame about all the other ones. It's telling that his insightful ideas on how printing created authors didn't mention how it created editors too.
Would I recommend it? If you're a humanities wonk who eats Kant and Derrida for breakfast, knock yourself out. Please. Otherwise no. He has great ideas but save yourself the time and just read the Cliff notes.
Showing posts with label Book Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book Review. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Book Review: A University for the 21st Century
"A University for the 21st Century" is a thoughtful and thorough book, detailed and well considered, although it let's itself down by making a fascinating topic seem somewhat dull.
I had high hopes for this book. The author, was President of the University of Michigan for 12 years, and has clearly thought and researched deeply on the subject.
In terms of content, the book did not disappoint. While focused very much on the top end research University, Duderstadt had a clear grasp of the big issues. Even technological trends which had not yet taken form when he wrote (like Personal Learning Environments and the importance of online social networks) he seems to have been able to smell coming in the wind. His writing is detailed and thorough - the author is an Engineer by training, and it shows. The work feels like a textbook. The issues are dissected with considerable clarity - his chapter on resources and funding is a particularly clear primer on this currently hot topic.
I found the picture he presented of a high end US university interesting. From a European perspective it's easy to miss the fact that many US institutions own and operate substantial teaching hospitals, which are often themselves as large as the University itself, and are very significant health care providers. On the other side, they also operate football and basketball teams which attach huge followings and media attention. For Irish readers, imagine if University College Cork (my local) owned and operated the Cork University Hospital (currently, the connection is nominal, the hospital is state run despite the name) while also managing the Cork Senior Hurling and Football teams. The diversity and complexity of the task is daunting.
For a book written a decade ago, it's aged well. Even the technology chapter, which you might expect to be weak given the time it was written, clearly maps the same kinds of longer term trends I've written about here. Other trends, like the idea of Open Content, he certainly grasped as a general implication of the internet, even if he did not predict them in any detail (who could).
Duderstadt, alas let's himself down in the writing. Perhaps my limited attention span has simply atrophied beyond use, but the book to me reads too much like a textbook. In his forward, the author expressed the hope that the book would interest a mass audience. It will not. There are fairly well established ways of making non fiction compelling and accessible (use of narrative, personal anecdote and so forth), and Duderstadt employs none of them. Something about his writing gave me a compelling urge to get up and make tea a paragraph in. There is never a good reason to start a paragraph with 'Furthermore', as he often does. It's a pity, as it made it harder work than it needed to be, and will have greatly narrowed his readership and influence.
If your library has it, I'd recommend taking a look at it, but it will be a book to lean forward and study with coffee, rather than lean back to read with a Christmas drink. If your interest is casual, you might skip it, but if you are involved in the management of higher education at any level, the book is mandatory and will repay careful study.
I had high hopes for this book. The author, was President of the University of Michigan for 12 years, and has clearly thought and researched deeply on the subject.
In terms of content, the book did not disappoint. While focused very much on the top end research University, Duderstadt had a clear grasp of the big issues. Even technological trends which had not yet taken form when he wrote (like Personal Learning Environments and the importance of online social networks) he seems to have been able to smell coming in the wind. His writing is detailed and thorough - the author is an Engineer by training, and it shows. The work feels like a textbook. The issues are dissected with considerable clarity - his chapter on resources and funding is a particularly clear primer on this currently hot topic.
I found the picture he presented of a high end US university interesting. From a European perspective it's easy to miss the fact that many US institutions own and operate substantial teaching hospitals, which are often themselves as large as the University itself, and are very significant health care providers. On the other side, they also operate football and basketball teams which attach huge followings and media attention. For Irish readers, imagine if University College Cork (my local) owned and operated the Cork University Hospital (currently, the connection is nominal, the hospital is state run despite the name) while also managing the Cork Senior Hurling and Football teams. The diversity and complexity of the task is daunting.
For a book written a decade ago, it's aged well. Even the technology chapter, which you might expect to be weak given the time it was written, clearly maps the same kinds of longer term trends I've written about here. Other trends, like the idea of Open Content, he certainly grasped as a general implication of the internet, even if he did not predict them in any detail (who could).
Duderstadt, alas let's himself down in the writing. Perhaps my limited attention span has simply atrophied beyond use, but the book to me reads too much like a textbook. In his forward, the author expressed the hope that the book would interest a mass audience. It will not. There are fairly well established ways of making non fiction compelling and accessible (use of narrative, personal anecdote and so forth), and Duderstadt employs none of them. Something about his writing gave me a compelling urge to get up and make tea a paragraph in. There is never a good reason to start a paragraph with 'Furthermore', as he often does. It's a pity, as it made it harder work than it needed to be, and will have greatly narrowed his readership and influence.
If your library has it, I'd recommend taking a look at it, but it will be a book to lean forward and study with coffee, rather than lean back to read with a Christmas drink. If your interest is casual, you might skip it, but if you are involved in the management of higher education at any level, the book is mandatory and will repay careful study.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Book Review: Deschooling Society
"Classics" wrote Mark Twain, "are something everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to read". Judging by the number of copies in the library, I'm obviously the last person with an interest in Education to have read this book, and it is a real classic. As you may have noticed, I make it a rule* never to conceal my ignorance, so I'm going to review it anyway.
As you might gather from the title, the book is highly critical of the modern educational institutions. The opening sections are a strong, and now familiar critique of the educational system as a means of institutionalising society. The criticisms are not so different from those of Ken Robinson, although Illich is intellectually a much heavier hitter, and Ken Robinson has better jokes. Perhaps the criticisms were radical when he wrote the book in 1970, but, alas, not anymore. Illich takes the critique a step further by observing that the current system convinces people that all education must come from a school (or University). This it tend to make people expect that everything must come from a bureacratic institutions - he talks about '"HEW (Health Education Welfare)Pollution". Politically, it's all fairly left wing stuff, but Illich never slides into sloppy polemic. It's all well written and coherently argued, and he is as quick to jab at the Marxists as anyone.
The book really starts to sizzle about halfway, and I note from the markings in the library copy, most readers had given up by then (Highlighter Pen only managed chapter 1, The Underliner left me after chapter 3). Unlike many critics, Illich goes on to propose an alternative model for education, and, for something written in 1970, it's remarkably prescient in terms of where learning is really going in the 21st century.
Illich outlines a system where people connect directly, on a one to one basis, with people who have skills and are willing to teach them. He couldn't foresee the web as an enabling framework, but the system he describes is uncannily close to the Web 2.0 model of education, where deep social networks can easily connect learners into peer groups, or with experts in the field. He talks about the need for shifting education from a funnel based model, where people are given the learning that the institution thinks they need, to a web (his word, in 1970!) where people sought the learning they needed across a network, directly from experts, not necessarily teachers. He talks about giving people access to learning objects, and letting them get on with it, which reminds me of Sugata Mitras experiments enabling children in India to learn with fairly unregulated access to a computer.
The accuracy of his vision is uncanny, and does much to explain his popularity with the connectivist/web 2.0 set. He was a Catholic priest, and such men have been canonised for lesser visions than his.
The book is full of other ideas ahead of their time. Social networks, Government 2.0, appropriate technology and hacker culture are all in there, imagined as they might be without the enabling medium of the internet I feel I aught to read it again very carefully, to see if I can pick out The Next Big Thing.
Style wise, it's not at all heavy going, and at 116 pages it isn't an intimidating read, a couple of bus journeys, you have no excuse. If you don't have time to dig it out of the library, there's even a free eBook (all formats) you can download this very instant from http://www.feedbooks.com/newspaper/6810 and, funnily enough given the book, there's also discussion forum on Wikiversity, which is a example of exactly the kind of learning web he was talking about http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich:_Deschooling_Society.
His lefty/anarchist perspective might put some readers off, but if you can put up with my writing, his will present no challenge. If you are interested in a fresh view of education in society, this is an important book.
Read it.
I'll tip my cap to Steve Wheeler at this point, who brought Illich to my attention in a talk he gave to us in UCC in late 2008.
* More of a guideline, to be honest.
As you might gather from the title, the book is highly critical of the modern educational institutions. The opening sections are a strong, and now familiar critique of the educational system as a means of institutionalising society. The criticisms are not so different from those of Ken Robinson, although Illich is intellectually a much heavier hitter, and Ken Robinson has better jokes. Perhaps the criticisms were radical when he wrote the book in 1970, but, alas, not anymore. Illich takes the critique a step further by observing that the current system convinces people that all education must come from a school (or University). This it tend to make people expect that everything must come from a bureacratic institutions - he talks about '"HEW (Health Education Welfare)Pollution". Politically, it's all fairly left wing stuff, but Illich never slides into sloppy polemic. It's all well written and coherently argued, and he is as quick to jab at the Marxists as anyone.
The book really starts to sizzle about halfway, and I note from the markings in the library copy, most readers had given up by then (Highlighter Pen only managed chapter 1, The Underliner left me after chapter 3). Unlike many critics, Illich goes on to propose an alternative model for education, and, for something written in 1970, it's remarkably prescient in terms of where learning is really going in the 21st century.
Illich outlines a system where people connect directly, on a one to one basis, with people who have skills and are willing to teach them. He couldn't foresee the web as an enabling framework, but the system he describes is uncannily close to the Web 2.0 model of education, where deep social networks can easily connect learners into peer groups, or with experts in the field. He talks about the need for shifting education from a funnel based model, where people are given the learning that the institution thinks they need, to a web (his word, in 1970!) where people sought the learning they needed across a network, directly from experts, not necessarily teachers. He talks about giving people access to learning objects, and letting them get on with it, which reminds me of Sugata Mitras experiments enabling children in India to learn with fairly unregulated access to a computer.
The accuracy of his vision is uncanny, and does much to explain his popularity with the connectivist/web 2.0 set. He was a Catholic priest, and such men have been canonised for lesser visions than his.
The book is full of other ideas ahead of their time. Social networks, Government 2.0, appropriate technology and hacker culture are all in there, imagined as they might be without the enabling medium of the internet I feel I aught to read it again very carefully, to see if I can pick out The Next Big Thing.
Style wise, it's not at all heavy going, and at 116 pages it isn't an intimidating read, a couple of bus journeys, you have no excuse. If you don't have time to dig it out of the library, there's even a free eBook (all formats) you can download this very instant from http://www.feedbooks.com/newspaper/6810 and, funnily enough given the book, there's also discussion forum on Wikiversity, which is a example of exactly the kind of learning web he was talking about http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich:_Deschooling_Society.
His lefty/anarchist perspective might put some readers off, but if you can put up with my writing, his will present no challenge. If you are interested in a fresh view of education in society, this is an important book.
Read it.
I'll tip my cap to Steve Wheeler at this point, who brought Illich to my attention in a talk he gave to us in UCC in late 2008.
* More of a guideline, to be honest.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Book Review: The Great Brain Race
Ben Wildavsky's book 'The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World' is well worth reading. Wildavsky places international education firmly in the context of globalisation. He makes the case for international education as free trade in minds and ideas and as a key piller of globalisation. In the long run, it's more important and more beneficial than the free movement of goods and money that have been the icons of globalisation so far.
The early chapters, looking at the growth of overseas satellite campusus felt a little weak to me. It's largely a story of elite institutions leveraging their powerful brands to draw in the elites of the developing world. It felt like a tale of the top tenth of a percent, globalised institutions training the next generation of Davos Man, which isn't something that I find all that relevant to the longer term future of the sector as a whole. Counterpointing the western institutions reaching out are new institutions rising in "emerging markets". Some, like Saudi Arabias KAUST, seem like towers of gold build on sand. Others, in India and China, have emerged to be real competitors to the first world institutions they in part emulate.
I found the book really found it's stride in the chapter on for profit tertiary education. Much of what is written about the for profit field is either by conventional academics, who are, on principle against it, or business writers, who are equally for it. It's rare to read a more nuanced view. Wildavsky doesn't shy from the critiques of the industry, quality and so on, but makes a strong argument that for profit higher education is filling a gap for people who cannot otherwise access conventional higher education. This is especially the case in places like Mexico, where the higher education system simply can't accommodate the demand. It's also potentially true anywhere the demand for tertiary education exceeds supply. Any academic in a non profit University who isn't seriously concerned about the growth of for profit tertiary education doesn't grasp it's implications, or perhaps is in a field where they can make the jump when the time comes.
My only gripe with the book is the style. In common with many journalists who go on to write full length book's the story is told with a shock and awe bombardment of quote, statistic and anecdote, rather than by boots on the ground narration. Every opinion seemed to be someone else's, and the the clear narrative of the authors own voice and views was hidden until the end. It seems to be a journalism thing, they are locked into the model of reportage rather than storytelling, painting the picture with little dots of fact rather than the impressionistic brush of a more narrative storyteller or a big thinker like Clay Shirky or Neil Postman. The book feels like a collection of in depth feature articles, rather than a coherent book. Nevertheless, they are good feature articles, so it's more of a personal pet peeve than a deep flaw. While I think it could have been a much better book, it's still well worth reading if you, or your institution is really thinking about dabbling your toes into the world of international education.
If you don't fancy buying the book, there's good video material from the author online at the book website and on the facebook page. There's also audio of his talk at the LSE online and on iTunesU.
The early chapters, looking at the growth of overseas satellite campusus felt a little weak to me. It's largely a story of elite institutions leveraging their powerful brands to draw in the elites of the developing world. It felt like a tale of the top tenth of a percent, globalised institutions training the next generation of Davos Man, which isn't something that I find all that relevant to the longer term future of the sector as a whole. Counterpointing the western institutions reaching out are new institutions rising in "emerging markets". Some, like Saudi Arabias KAUST, seem like towers of gold build on sand. Others, in India and China, have emerged to be real competitors to the first world institutions they in part emulate.
I found the book really found it's stride in the chapter on for profit tertiary education. Much of what is written about the for profit field is either by conventional academics, who are, on principle against it, or business writers, who are equally for it. It's rare to read a more nuanced view. Wildavsky doesn't shy from the critiques of the industry, quality and so on, but makes a strong argument that for profit higher education is filling a gap for people who cannot otherwise access conventional higher education. This is especially the case in places like Mexico, where the higher education system simply can't accommodate the demand. It's also potentially true anywhere the demand for tertiary education exceeds supply. Any academic in a non profit University who isn't seriously concerned about the growth of for profit tertiary education doesn't grasp it's implications, or perhaps is in a field where they can make the jump when the time comes.
My only gripe with the book is the style. In common with many journalists who go on to write full length book's the story is told with a shock and awe bombardment of quote, statistic and anecdote, rather than by boots on the ground narration. Every opinion seemed to be someone else's, and the the clear narrative of the authors own voice and views was hidden until the end. It seems to be a journalism thing, they are locked into the model of reportage rather than storytelling, painting the picture with little dots of fact rather than the impressionistic brush of a more narrative storyteller or a big thinker like Clay Shirky or Neil Postman. The book feels like a collection of in depth feature articles, rather than a coherent book. Nevertheless, they are good feature articles, so it's more of a personal pet peeve than a deep flaw. While I think it could have been a much better book, it's still well worth reading if you, or your institution is really thinking about dabbling your toes into the world of international education.
If you don't fancy buying the book, there's good video material from the author online at the book website and on the facebook page. There's also audio of his talk at the LSE online and on iTunesU.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Book Review: Cognitive Surplus
Clay Shirky is one of the best communicators around when it comes to how the web influences and changes society. Because the web is at the sharp end of a wedge of disruptive forces working to remodel Tertiary Education, Shirky is a must read.
The basic premise of the book is that we have heaps to leasure time in the first world, most of which we spent watching TV, because there wasn't much else to do with it. Now we have the web, and by connecting up this time, even a tiny amount of it can create extremely useful things. Wikipedia is the poster boy for this. It took about 100 million person hours to create, estimates Shirky, which is about as much time as the US spends watching TV ads. Such a tiny proportion of the available human 'down time' connected up by the web, can achieve remarkable things.
Shirky also talks about the end of what he calls 'Gutenberg Economics', where content is produced by a small number of professionals to a high standard and pumped out, one way to the masses. Everything from the Bible to Survivor is like this. Much of what we assume is a given (like newspapers being big sheets produced each day, or degrees taking four years) are simply accidents of history, structuring content to suit the producers. We are now entering a post Gutenberg model, where anybody can produce content. It's not as good overall, but there is a lot more of it. He cites Lolcats (funny cat pictures with captions) as the entry level here. They aren't very good, but they put people over the threshold from being passive consumers on the sofa, to creating something they can share with the world. Some of them will work their way up to better things, and overall the bar is raised.
The consequences for education are obvious enough. Even poor quality content, right here and now - Lolcat Education - is better than great stuff that is not accessible, locked away in a 20 credit hour course. Creating and sharing something - anything - is better than simply consuming lectures. The good stuff will rise to the top. The conventional University system, where professionals produce education content in a capital intensive fashion and push it out in degree sized chunks is textbook Gutenberg economics, and has no special claim to be able to resist the changes than anything else.
Overall, this is an excellent read, well worth buying, especially if you haven't thought or read much on the area. Having read 'Here Comes Everybody', Shirky's earlier work, seen the TED talks and being fairly up with the play in the field, nothing in the book blew me away, but it was still worth reading to help draw together the ideas. It's a fairly light read. Shirky is a skilled narrator in start contrast to much of the overweening verbosity retched out by many academic 'writers'. If you aren't interested in his content, it's worth reading for a lesson on how real pros right non fiction for a mass market.
The basic premise of the book is that we have heaps to leasure time in the first world, most of which we spent watching TV, because there wasn't much else to do with it. Now we have the web, and by connecting up this time, even a tiny amount of it can create extremely useful things. Wikipedia is the poster boy for this. It took about 100 million person hours to create, estimates Shirky, which is about as much time as the US spends watching TV ads. Such a tiny proportion of the available human 'down time' connected up by the web, can achieve remarkable things.
Shirky also talks about the end of what he calls 'Gutenberg Economics', where content is produced by a small number of professionals to a high standard and pumped out, one way to the masses. Everything from the Bible to Survivor is like this. Much of what we assume is a given (like newspapers being big sheets produced each day, or degrees taking four years) are simply accidents of history, structuring content to suit the producers. We are now entering a post Gutenberg model, where anybody can produce content. It's not as good overall, but there is a lot more of it. He cites Lolcats (funny cat pictures with captions) as the entry level here. They aren't very good, but they put people over the threshold from being passive consumers on the sofa, to creating something they can share with the world. Some of them will work their way up to better things, and overall the bar is raised.
The consequences for education are obvious enough. Even poor quality content, right here and now - Lolcat Education - is better than great stuff that is not accessible, locked away in a 20 credit hour course. Creating and sharing something - anything - is better than simply consuming lectures. The good stuff will rise to the top. The conventional University system, where professionals produce education content in a capital intensive fashion and push it out in degree sized chunks is textbook Gutenberg economics, and has no special claim to be able to resist the changes than anything else.
Overall, this is an excellent read, well worth buying, especially if you haven't thought or read much on the area. Having read 'Here Comes Everybody', Shirky's earlier work, seen the TED talks and being fairly up with the play in the field, nothing in the book blew me away, but it was still worth reading to help draw together the ideas. It's a fairly light read. Shirky is a skilled narrator in start contrast to much of the overweening verbosity retched out by many academic 'writers'. If you aren't interested in his content, it's worth reading for a lesson on how real pros right non fiction for a mass market.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Book Review: A History of the University in Europe Vol 1
You must know the past to see the future, so to the library I went. I've been reading Volume 1. of "A History of the University in Europe" edited by Walter Ruegg. For completeness sake, I'm posting a short review here, if you'll forgive me for going off piste a little, both in topic and style.
The Book is dull, scholarly and thorough.
It paints a richly detailed picture (or, perhaps, collection of jigsaw pieces) of the emergence of the European University in the high middle ages, describing how they emerged from the fog and assumed their more modern form. Chapters by different authors provide a fairly high level of detail about what is known on the subject. Sometimes it's too much detail, and because of that, and the multi author nature of the book, no grand narrative emerges to keep the pages turning. In fairness to the authors, it probably wasn't intended to be a page turner. I'd been hoping to get an idea of why Universities spread and survived so well in the period, but that picture isn't drawn, although there are clues. I'll have read the other three volumes in time, but I'm not looking forward to it.
Interestingly, the book views the University as a distinctly European institution, and dismisses any precursors from outside out of hand. I'm not an expert on medieval history, but that seems rash and Eurocentric, given that as European institutions were coming out of the murk, some fairly sophisticated institutions of higher learning existing on the other side of the Mediterranean in the Islamic world. Strangely, the very old institution in Constantinople, unarguably in Europe, and a University in all but name, is not mentioned at all. It seems improbable that European developments were not informed by those places. I suspect that the operating definition of a University was very much framed by form rather than function, which excluded other matters of importance.
To be fair, the book notes that little is really known about the ecosystem in which the universities fitted into. What came before? How did they relate to the cathedral schools? Before attending, what kind of education did students have? There is a survivor bias here, Universities survived and kept their records, and bred scholars interested in researching their origins. Other institutions did not survive, and left little trace.
Other issues, significant factors, like the Medieval Warm Period and population increase, which drove European society forward to the point where the Universities could grow, get scarcely a mention. The High medieval period was an exciting time, you could call it 'Europe's false start' - cut short by the Great Famine and Black Death in the 14th century, but the book doesn't really give a good sense of the historical context. It's very much a fact basket book.
Nevertheless, the book is full of fascinating titbits and snippets, which illustrate how little has changed. For example, the tendency of lecturers to simply read through a body of notes and have students write them down, it seems, came from a time before printing when getting a book copies was an expensive proposition. Thus, students preferred lecturers to read the text so they could write it down.
Other insights show how little has changed in 800 Years:
Overall, a detailed and thorough work, full of tantalising snippets of information, but weak on context and big picture. Worth reading if you are interested and your local library has it, but I wouldn't have rushed out to buy it, or keenly read it if my interest was only casual.
The Book is dull, scholarly and thorough.
It paints a richly detailed picture (or, perhaps, collection of jigsaw pieces) of the emergence of the European University in the high middle ages, describing how they emerged from the fog and assumed their more modern form. Chapters by different authors provide a fairly high level of detail about what is known on the subject. Sometimes it's too much detail, and because of that, and the multi author nature of the book, no grand narrative emerges to keep the pages turning. In fairness to the authors, it probably wasn't intended to be a page turner. I'd been hoping to get an idea of why Universities spread and survived so well in the period, but that picture isn't drawn, although there are clues. I'll have read the other three volumes in time, but I'm not looking forward to it.
Interestingly, the book views the University as a distinctly European institution, and dismisses any precursors from outside out of hand. I'm not an expert on medieval history, but that seems rash and Eurocentric, given that as European institutions were coming out of the murk, some fairly sophisticated institutions of higher learning existing on the other side of the Mediterranean in the Islamic world. Strangely, the very old institution in Constantinople, unarguably in Europe, and a University in all but name, is not mentioned at all. It seems improbable that European developments were not informed by those places. I suspect that the operating definition of a University was very much framed by form rather than function, which excluded other matters of importance.
To be fair, the book notes that little is really known about the ecosystem in which the universities fitted into. What came before? How did they relate to the cathedral schools? Before attending, what kind of education did students have? There is a survivor bias here, Universities survived and kept their records, and bred scholars interested in researching their origins. Other institutions did not survive, and left little trace.
Other issues, significant factors, like the Medieval Warm Period and population increase, which drove European society forward to the point where the Universities could grow, get scarcely a mention. The High medieval period was an exciting time, you could call it 'Europe's false start' - cut short by the Great Famine and Black Death in the 14th century, but the book doesn't really give a good sense of the historical context. It's very much a fact basket book.
Nevertheless, the book is full of fascinating titbits and snippets, which illustrate how little has changed. For example, the tendency of lecturers to simply read through a body of notes and have students write them down, it seems, came from a time before printing when getting a book copies was an expensive proposition. Thus, students preferred lecturers to read the text so they could write it down.
Other insights show how little has changed in 800 Years:
- On Meetings: "Little is learnt and the time needed for study is wasted in meetings and discussions" Phillippus de Grevia, on the new Universities, c1220AD.
- On Student/Landlord disputes: Some of the earliest church documents pertaining to Universities relate to bishops laying down the law to limit sharp practices by landlords gouging students.
- On Fees: "Science is a gift from God, and cannot be sold" argued the medieval church. Teachers disagreed. The fees/no fees debate clearly goes back a long way.
Overall, a detailed and thorough work, full of tantalising snippets of information, but weak on context and big picture. Worth reading if you are interested and your local library has it, but I wouldn't have rushed out to buy it, or keenly read it if my interest was only casual.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Review: DIY U by Anya Kamenetz
"DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education", by Anya Kamenetz, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010.
This is good introduction to the current state of tertiary education in the United States, the Open Education movement and the potential for technology driven disruption to the sector.
The book is tightly focused on the US situation, the rest of the world gets an honourable mention.
The first half is a fairly critical overview of the state of Tertiary Education in the US. It's interesting, but the issues are not as valid for Europe where the costs are lower, and social inequality less severe. The Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) for the US is currently around 47, about the same as places like Kenya, and Jamaica, compared to 35 in Ireland, where I write, or 24 in egalitarian Denmark. The extent of the problems in the US system are alarming, and a good warning for those who might ape the American system.
Kamenetz takes the view that much of higher education in the US is a racket. High cost enforces scarcity of space at elite institutions, and filters out students from advantaged backgrounds. The Graduates from elite institutions, filtered by class and economics before their first day on campus, then proceed to do well and form the next generation of the elite. They even promote themselves on the basis of their selectivity:
"It's like Weight watchers advertising that they only take skinny people."The system excludes many on grounds of costs, and many more enter the system, incur student debt and yet fail to graduate to reap the marginal benefits of a degree at a lesser college. She is critical of a system where everyone aspires to go to college, when not everyone needs to, and every college aspires to compete with Harvard. The cheap credit of the 00's drove massive expansion of student debt as people borrowed vast amounts of easy money for degrees they often never completed, driving spiralling fees as people equated cost with exclusivity and quality.
In the second half of the book she moves on to talk about solutions, driven by technology, and the Open Education movement. Why pay fees when you can get the knowledge for free? Why go to such expense to build social networks when we can build networks of people with a common interests faster and cheaper online? She correctly identifies assessment and accreditation as the critical points not easily solved online, and raises the question of whether in the internet age, online portfolios of work could replace conventional accreditation. She cites the idea of open source projects in Software, where a potential hire can be checked out in advance by the quality of their work in open source software projects. Ideas like 'Whuffie' and smart assessments get a mention too.
It's a good overview of the topic. All the main events, players and ideas, from The MIT Open Courseware through to Personal Learning Environments, The University of the People and Massive Open Online Courses are covered in brief. If you've been following thinkers like Stephen Downes, David Wiley and George Siemens online, there won't be much here that is new to you, but if you've only heard the terms Edupunk and Open Educational Resources, then it's an quick primer on what going on in the sector, and what changes it could bring.
It's short, clear and to the point. The author is a journalist not an academic, and it shows. Few academics write so clearly, most would drag it out to 400 pages to little extra effect. Even if you are familiar with the ground, it's probably worth a read. If you are not, and have an interest, it's a good starting point.
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