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.
Showing posts with label Key Trends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Key Trends. Show all posts
Monday, October 4, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
Black Swans and The Fifth Megatrend.
I've just finished reading Nassim Talebs book ' The Black Swan'. It's essential reading if you are thinking about forecasting, and a lucid and entertaining read as well..
The core idea is that many processes thought to be governed by Gaussian distributions are really governed by Power Law Distributions. For example, over a short term, much financial data looks like it clusters around an average value, in the same way as height or weight does. In fact it's a Power Law, where larger scale events are increasingly rare, but overpoweringly large. Over a short or selective term, a set of data like, say, the the size and frequency of bank collapses, drilling accidents or airline disruptions seems like a simple normal distribution, with the probability of severe events tiny and easily quantified. A day later, events make fools of us all.
This idea impacts on recents posts where I set out four key trends which I thought would drive the story or tertiary education through the 21st century: Demographics, Economics, Telepresence and Artificial Intelligence. In each of these trends I somewhat boldly extend a current trend in a broad swish across the century ahead and consider the effects. As Taleb would argue, I am like the Turkey extrapolating his ever increasing meals and weight gain to dream of the mighty bird he will be come spring - a simple inductive fallacy.
It's worth taking the time to consider the rationale behind each of those trends, and how much inertia they have. Are they indeed driven by fairly dull, Gaussian processes, where, for example economic growth generally flits around two or three percent a year, with the occasional wobble up or down a few percent, or are great surges over and back possible - Black Swans, in Talebs language.
Population growth seems to be at fairly low risk of a major shift. It's a consequence of many factors; how many children people want to have, how many they can have, and how long they live. The biological factors are well bounded, at the bottom (you can't have negative children) and at the top (It's really unlikely you'll have 14 children, or live to 200). The variables are driven by things with a lot of inertia - how many children you would like is keyed to economic factors and social expectations which change slowly. Infant mortality is keyed to economic wealth, and how long you live is usually driven by economics too, through the sum of your lifestyle and health from womb to tomb. So population forecasts have a lot of mass behind them. Given that uncertainties coming from basic factors like birth rates and so on amount to over a billion people either way, it would take a particularly vigorous pandemic, or an enthusiastically conducted nuclear war to make much of a difference.
Economic growth is the most interesting one. Predicting 10 fold increase in wealth feels bold in the current climate, but that's just 2.5% a year. Anything under 1% is declared a disaster by the media. Many developing economies scarcely felt the 'Global Financial Crisis' of 2009 and are still growing at rates well in excess of 2.5%. A lot of this growth is probably technologically driven, but given that a very sizeable minority of the worlds population have yet to benefit from the inventions of the 20th century, even if we invent nothing of note from now on, there is plenty of scope. There are limits to economic growth, particularly in the physical 'economy of stuff'. There is only so much physical stuff we can own or consume, and so much physical stuff we can make. The sustainable economics of information, with a marginal cost of zero, is still a subject of debate. It is bold, but not implausible, to suppose that whatever the overall level of growth in the 21st century, the regional inequalities that arose out of the industrial and colonial age will largely even out.
Good quality Telepresence seems like a no brainer - an engineering problem, with an obvious economic payoff for a solution. I can't see how it couldn't come to pass, all else being equal, although some forward advances in the affordability and speed of physical travel might delay it's adoption. Any kind of adverse system shock, like a high mortality pandemic or war, would hit transport nets more and promote telepresence.
Artificial Intelligence is probably the rockiest potential megatrend. Others might not even consider it - it will arrive as a Black Swan to many. Moore's law is a classic inductive case. The long established historical trend doesn't prove it will continue for one more day, no more than the Turkey feeding schedule does. That said, some of the worlds biggest R&D budgets are feeding this turkey and making ever more powerful chips. It's also noting that the law refers to the cost of a unit of processing power, not pure component density. Even if you hit physical wall on component density, as is frequently prophesied, there is still plenty mileage in making chips cheaper, and with better utilisation making the power cheaper at the desktop. Think of the difference between a chip on a desktop PC, spending most of it's life running screensavers and Freecell, and the same chip in a server farm, running at optimum 24/7/365. Granted it might be running Farmville, but you get the idea. If anything, the risk for Moores law is that something like Quantum Computing will come out of leftfield and rapidly accelerate the curve.
Raw processing power doesn't necessarily mean human like artificial intelligence, but it will chip away at it, until the differences seem pedantic. When the machines can answer the phone, read your x-ray, drive your car and write your essay for you, who cares whether it's 'real' or 'fake' AI.
Overall, Technology seems to be the most risky quarter, with the potential to pull out Black Swans like rabbits out of a hat. It seems likely that they would be 'positive' Black Swans - developments in unexpected places, rather than negative Black Swans, when expected things fail to happen. That said a negative black swan, like perhaps an elegantly tailored bioweapon, cannot be dismissed.
Of course, Taleb would no doubt argue that focusing on these four trends is missing the point. The key trend, the main event that will shape tertiary education in the next century isn't any of those - it's something we haven't -can't - imagine yet, some surprise out of left field that will change the narrative, for better or for worse - Fifth Megatrend, the Black Swan.
The core idea is that many processes thought to be governed by Gaussian distributions are really governed by Power Law Distributions. For example, over a short term, much financial data looks like it clusters around an average value, in the same way as height or weight does. In fact it's a Power Law, where larger scale events are increasingly rare, but overpoweringly large. Over a short or selective term, a set of data like, say, the the size and frequency of bank collapses, drilling accidents or airline disruptions seems like a simple normal distribution, with the probability of severe events tiny and easily quantified. A day later, events make fools of us all.
This idea impacts on recents posts where I set out four key trends which I thought would drive the story or tertiary education through the 21st century: Demographics, Economics, Telepresence and Artificial Intelligence. In each of these trends I somewhat boldly extend a current trend in a broad swish across the century ahead and consider the effects. As Taleb would argue, I am like the Turkey extrapolating his ever increasing meals and weight gain to dream of the mighty bird he will be come spring - a simple inductive fallacy.
It's worth taking the time to consider the rationale behind each of those trends, and how much inertia they have. Are they indeed driven by fairly dull, Gaussian processes, where, for example economic growth generally flits around two or three percent a year, with the occasional wobble up or down a few percent, or are great surges over and back possible - Black Swans, in Talebs language.
Population growth seems to be at fairly low risk of a major shift. It's a consequence of many factors; how many children people want to have, how many they can have, and how long they live. The biological factors are well bounded, at the bottom (you can't have negative children) and at the top (It's really unlikely you'll have 14 children, or live to 200). The variables are driven by things with a lot of inertia - how many children you would like is keyed to economic factors and social expectations which change slowly. Infant mortality is keyed to economic wealth, and how long you live is usually driven by economics too, through the sum of your lifestyle and health from womb to tomb. So population forecasts have a lot of mass behind them. Given that uncertainties coming from basic factors like birth rates and so on amount to over a billion people either way, it would take a particularly vigorous pandemic, or an enthusiastically conducted nuclear war to make much of a difference.
Economic growth is the most interesting one. Predicting 10 fold increase in wealth feels bold in the current climate, but that's just 2.5% a year. Anything under 1% is declared a disaster by the media. Many developing economies scarcely felt the 'Global Financial Crisis' of 2009 and are still growing at rates well in excess of 2.5%. A lot of this growth is probably technologically driven, but given that a very sizeable minority of the worlds population have yet to benefit from the inventions of the 20th century, even if we invent nothing of note from now on, there is plenty of scope. There are limits to economic growth, particularly in the physical 'economy of stuff'. There is only so much physical stuff we can own or consume, and so much physical stuff we can make. The sustainable economics of information, with a marginal cost of zero, is still a subject of debate. It is bold, but not implausible, to suppose that whatever the overall level of growth in the 21st century, the regional inequalities that arose out of the industrial and colonial age will largely even out.
Good quality Telepresence seems like a no brainer - an engineering problem, with an obvious economic payoff for a solution. I can't see how it couldn't come to pass, all else being equal, although some forward advances in the affordability and speed of physical travel might delay it's adoption. Any kind of adverse system shock, like a high mortality pandemic or war, would hit transport nets more and promote telepresence.
Artificial Intelligence is probably the rockiest potential megatrend. Others might not even consider it - it will arrive as a Black Swan to many. Moore's law is a classic inductive case. The long established historical trend doesn't prove it will continue for one more day, no more than the Turkey feeding schedule does. That said, some of the worlds biggest R&D budgets are feeding this turkey and making ever more powerful chips. It's also noting that the law refers to the cost of a unit of processing power, not pure component density. Even if you hit physical wall on component density, as is frequently prophesied, there is still plenty mileage in making chips cheaper, and with better utilisation making the power cheaper at the desktop. Think of the difference between a chip on a desktop PC, spending most of it's life running screensavers and Freecell, and the same chip in a server farm, running at optimum 24/7/365. Granted it might be running Farmville, but you get the idea. If anything, the risk for Moores law is that something like Quantum Computing will come out of leftfield and rapidly accelerate the curve.
Raw processing power doesn't necessarily mean human like artificial intelligence, but it will chip away at it, until the differences seem pedantic. When the machines can answer the phone, read your x-ray, drive your car and write your essay for you, who cares whether it's 'real' or 'fake' AI.
Overall, Technology seems to be the most risky quarter, with the potential to pull out Black Swans like rabbits out of a hat. It seems likely that they would be 'positive' Black Swans - developments in unexpected places, rather than negative Black Swans, when expected things fail to happen. That said a negative black swan, like perhaps an elegantly tailored bioweapon, cannot be dismissed.
Of course, Taleb would no doubt argue that focusing on these four trends is missing the point. The key trend, the main event that will shape tertiary education in the next century isn't any of those - it's something we haven't -can't - imagine yet, some surprise out of left field that will change the narrative, for better or for worse - Fifth Megatrend, the Black Swan.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
The New Centre of the World
"A special report on innovation in emerging markets: The world turned upside down." Adrian Woolridge The Economist, April 15th 2010.
This article attacks the conventional narrative of globalisation, and suggests that it is the 'emerging markets' and not the old core of developed world that is taking the lead on innovation. The old narrative was that we in the west did the smart, clever work, and places like India and China did the boring, donkey work. The iPod story is the textbook example, supposedly, of the total cost of an iPod made in China, only $4 worth is the actual assembly in China. The lions share of the cost is clever, western engineers and marketing people doing clever things that can't be done in China. Not surprisingly, it wasn't going to stay that way for long. The survey tells us how companies in 'emerging markets' driven by local problems of poverty, poor distribution and so on, are making better, cheaper and smarter products than we do in the West.
It's not in the least bit surprising. I always found the idea that the West somehow had an unassailable lead on cleverness was vaguely racist, and sloppy analysis to boot. It was dramatically disproved at Pearl Harbour (or Tsusima if you were a quick learner).
It's not in the least bit surprising. I always found the idea that the West somehow had an unassailable lead on cleverness was vaguely racist, and sloppy analysis to boot. It was dramatically disproved at Pearl Harbour (or Tsusima if you were a quick learner).
In Education the old core still has the advantage, it is alleged. The article notes that:
India and China see education as a strategic imperative, counting production of graduates as a measure of national power, as the Imperial states of Europe once counted production of Coal, Steel and Dreadnoughts. They have a steep hill to climb to build capacity, but will find workarounds. For example, article mentions the Infosys Campus in Mysore, the worlds largest corporate training facility, training 15,000 people a year. It's "harder than Harvard" notes Fortune magazine, taking only 1% of over 1 million applicants.
This kind of workaround is needed for employers to overcome poor quality and supply of graduates. The steady flow west to earn degrees in Europe or the US is another workaround for the wealthiest. I imagine there is a lot of other interesting approaches being taken on the ground - the scale of demand offers no alternatives. Places our parents generation associated with famine and poverty are now the worlds middle class, and in the next generation will transition from having a small minority of education to Tertiary level to majority, perhaps even universal tertiary education. Consider the effects of the (much smaller) scale of the GI Bill on tertiary education in the US as an clue of what it will bring.
Even inside the often freshly build walls of conventional universities, a radically different environment and set of drivers as this transition passes will surely create a model of tertiary education very different from what it might be in Harvard, or the Sorbonne.
The scale of the transition will define a new centre of the world in terms of Tertiary Education (and many other things). It is our first world model that will become the outlier - the unusual. Much like English has been adopted as a world language, and becomes a different, richer thing, so too in education. Innovations in practice from places like Mysore will be brought back to the old core. The language of degrees and credits will be taken up by the new, but beneath the names, built from scratch. Perhaps it will not be built as a parrot copy, but as a very different beast indeed.
The survey text is at economist.com and there is also interview with the Adrian Woolridge, who wrote the piece.
"McKinsey reckons that only 25% of India's engineering graduates...and 10% of those with degrees of any kind are qualified to work for a multinational company."But that apparent advantage will erode quickly. McKinsey might not think they're good enough, but they are young, hungry and cheap. The sheer volume of graduates being produced is intimidating:
"China produces 75,000 people with higher degrees in engineering or computer science and India produces 60,000 every year"
"Between them, these two counties produce twice as many people with advanced degrees in engineering or computer sciences as the United States every year (more if you allow for the fact the 50% of American engineering degrees are awarded to foreigners, most of them Indians of Chinese)"
India and China see education as a strategic imperative, counting production of graduates as a measure of national power, as the Imperial states of Europe once counted production of Coal, Steel and Dreadnoughts. They have a steep hill to climb to build capacity, but will find workarounds. For example, article mentions the Infosys Campus in Mysore, the worlds largest corporate training facility, training 15,000 people a year. It's "harder than Harvard" notes Fortune magazine, taking only 1% of over 1 million applicants.
This kind of workaround is needed for employers to overcome poor quality and supply of graduates. The steady flow west to earn degrees in Europe or the US is another workaround for the wealthiest. I imagine there is a lot of other interesting approaches being taken on the ground - the scale of demand offers no alternatives. Places our parents generation associated with famine and poverty are now the worlds middle class, and in the next generation will transition from having a small minority of education to Tertiary level to majority, perhaps even universal tertiary education. Consider the effects of the (much smaller) scale of the GI Bill on tertiary education in the US as an clue of what it will bring.
Even inside the often freshly build walls of conventional universities, a radically different environment and set of drivers as this transition passes will surely create a model of tertiary education very different from what it might be in Harvard, or the Sorbonne.
The scale of the transition will define a new centre of the world in terms of Tertiary Education (and many other things). It is our first world model that will become the outlier - the unusual. Much like English has been adopted as a world language, and becomes a different, richer thing, so too in education. Innovations in practice from places like Mysore will be brought back to the old core. The language of degrees and credits will be taken up by the new, but beneath the names, built from scratch. Perhaps it will not be built as a parrot copy, but as a very different beast indeed.
The survey text is at economist.com and there is also interview with the Adrian Woolridge, who wrote the piece.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
The Four Forces: Driving Change to 2100AD
Four great trends will drive change in Tertiary education to 2100. I've introduced them in previous posts, but let's take a minute to line them up:
Demographics: 10 billion, mostly old people. World population will stabilise at around 10 billion people, and they will be increasingly old. An average age of 55 is not unreasonable by 2100. Longer lifespans will bring more people back for second and third dips into tertiary education, or indeed continuous education. Overall, the sector might be ten times as large as it is today. It is not unreasonable to suppose that a large portion of the population over 18 might be engaged, in some form, in tertiary education.
Economics: The end of scarcity. A continuation of the 20th century trend would bring another tenfold increase in per capita GDP, making the world, on average, as rich as todays richest country (Norway). Only people at the very margins of society will be unable to afford tertiary education. In the first half of the century, vast cohorts in the old 'Third World' will want, and be able to afford, University educations.
Telepresence: The Death of Distance. Increasingly compelling, immersive and reliable telepresent environments will render the idea of bringing people together in one physical space for education or work a quaint anachronism. Teams or classes may come together once or twice a year, for novelties sake, but true telepresence will make geographic distance as old fashioned an idea as posting personal correspondence in physical mail..
Artificial Intelligence: Smarts too cheap to meter. The steady process of Moores law will create machines with processing power to match the human mind relatively early in the century. Distributed processing will allow systems to draw on immense processing power when needed, and present machines as cheaper alternatives to most jobs currently done by humans. User interfaces that can pass a Turing test will make machine staff indistinguishable from humans. Why hire a human receptionist to answer the phone when the phone comes a processor that can do the job, that doesn't need coffee. When a 1000 euro machine is smarter than anyone you can hire, why hire anyone? The consequences for economics and employment is staggering, and managing the transition will be a huge issue from mid century on.
These are simple extrapolations of well established trends, none of which have any major roadblocks in sight. It's difficult to make a compelling case against any of them. As of 2010, these trends have massive inertia behind them -it's difficult to imagine what scale of events could derail them.
That's not to say that nothing else will happen. Few in 1900 would have predicted the ubiquity of Automobiles, air travel or the Internet. But in 1900, the key trends that set the tone of the 20th century - population growth, economic growth and urbanisation, were in motion. Geopolitical events (like the world wars) could not have been forecast in detail, but the logic of industrialisation made it inevitable that great power wars would get bigger, and worse, until they became so destructive and expensive as to be not worth the risk. We could not have predicted the 747, but we could have predicted that economic growth would have made international travel relatively cheap and easy - we might have predicted a super Zeppelin.
Having mapped out these trends, the challenge now is to figure out what the consequences of these trends are for Tertiary Education, not just in isolation, but as these trends interact and interlock. The second challenge is that the future is not path independent. We don't just wake up in 2100, with institutions and people perfectly attuned to it, no more than our institutions and peopel in 2010 are perfect fits for the world today. As the century plays out, existing institutions will adapt, or maladapt to the changes. Peoples ideas and preconceptions will change, but only in generational slow time. The future is not a destination everyone arrives at once, it's kind of smeared out, as William Gibson said:
Demographics: 10 billion, mostly old people. World population will stabilise at around 10 billion people, and they will be increasingly old. An average age of 55 is not unreasonable by 2100. Longer lifespans will bring more people back for second and third dips into tertiary education, or indeed continuous education. Overall, the sector might be ten times as large as it is today. It is not unreasonable to suppose that a large portion of the population over 18 might be engaged, in some form, in tertiary education.
Economics: The end of scarcity. A continuation of the 20th century trend would bring another tenfold increase in per capita GDP, making the world, on average, as rich as todays richest country (Norway). Only people at the very margins of society will be unable to afford tertiary education. In the first half of the century, vast cohorts in the old 'Third World' will want, and be able to afford, University educations.
Telepresence: The Death of Distance. Increasingly compelling, immersive and reliable telepresent environments will render the idea of bringing people together in one physical space for education or work a quaint anachronism. Teams or classes may come together once or twice a year, for novelties sake, but true telepresence will make geographic distance as old fashioned an idea as posting personal correspondence in physical mail..
Artificial Intelligence: Smarts too cheap to meter. The steady process of Moores law will create machines with processing power to match the human mind relatively early in the century. Distributed processing will allow systems to draw on immense processing power when needed, and present machines as cheaper alternatives to most jobs currently done by humans. User interfaces that can pass a Turing test will make machine staff indistinguishable from humans. Why hire a human receptionist to answer the phone when the phone comes a processor that can do the job, that doesn't need coffee. When a 1000 euro machine is smarter than anyone you can hire, why hire anyone? The consequences for economics and employment is staggering, and managing the transition will be a huge issue from mid century on.
These are simple extrapolations of well established trends, none of which have any major roadblocks in sight. It's difficult to make a compelling case against any of them. As of 2010, these trends have massive inertia behind them -it's difficult to imagine what scale of events could derail them.
That's not to say that nothing else will happen. Few in 1900 would have predicted the ubiquity of Automobiles, air travel or the Internet. But in 1900, the key trends that set the tone of the 20th century - population growth, economic growth and urbanisation, were in motion. Geopolitical events (like the world wars) could not have been forecast in detail, but the logic of industrialisation made it inevitable that great power wars would get bigger, and worse, until they became so destructive and expensive as to be not worth the risk. We could not have predicted the 747, but we could have predicted that economic growth would have made international travel relatively cheap and easy - we might have predicted a super Zeppelin.
Having mapped out these trends, the challenge now is to figure out what the consequences of these trends are for Tertiary Education, not just in isolation, but as these trends interact and interlock. The second challenge is that the future is not path independent. We don't just wake up in 2100, with institutions and people perfectly attuned to it, no more than our institutions and peopel in 2010 are perfect fits for the world today. As the century plays out, existing institutions will adapt, or maladapt to the changes. Peoples ideas and preconceptions will change, but only in generational slow time. The future is not a destination everyone arrives at once, it's kind of smeared out, as William Gibson said:
"The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed"
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
The Collapse of Universities? Not so fast.
"The Collapse of Complex Business Models" Clay Shirky, www.shirky.com Accessed April 12th 2010
Much talk on the web about Clay Shirky's recent blog post. Shirky draws on Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies to make inferences for complex business models. The idea goes that societies get more and more complex, and the benefit of each added complexity reduces until eventually a break point is reached. The layers of complexity make the society inflexible and incapable of change, so when confronted with external strains, it collapses. I haven't read Tainter's work, but Shirky, as ever, provides a sharp précis, and draws inferences for the future of conventional, complex, media organisations.
This was widely praised and argued across the web. While Harold Jarche talks about the differences between 'Complex' and 'Complicated' , Christopher Sessums draws the inference over into the educational space, moving on to argue that
"The affordances of social media and open educational resources are making the time and space used for formal education nearly worthless. "
Steady on there.
While to many commentators working within the walls of a University, it may seem that the University, their University, is in fact a Complex Society, in the same sense as Ancient Rome, Maya, etc. and is thus doomed.
This is not the case. Universities are closer or organisms in an ecosystem than a self contained and isolated society. An organisation, or an organism exists in an ecosystem, as one of many. A society, almost by definition, occupies an entire ecosystem, and has limited interaction, if any, with other societies. Most of the collapsed societies on History (and I think of those listed in Jared Diamond's work 'Collapse') existed in near isolation.
As organisms in a system, universities evolve. They eat up smaller institutions to dominate a niche, or split of side campuses to enter new spaces. They relentlessly share their DNA, as Universities heads look over their shoulders and shamelessly copy the innovations of others. Universities fight for resources, funding, students among themselves, where a Society usually co-opts all of the resources in it's zone of control and operates without competitive challenge.
Make no mistake, Universities are dinosaurs. They can crush you, outrun you and outbreed you. They dominate their ecosystem to the exclusions of all others, existing in astonishing diversity, and repeatedly adapting to environmental change. What it took to get rid of the dinosaurs wiped out almost everything else as well. The same is true here. If Universities become non viable institutions, then their collapse will be the least of our worries.
Universities are not going to go gently into the night. They won't wave their hands in the air, cry that it's all to complicated (or was it complex?) and shut their doors. Some will no doubt go under, but most will adapt and survive, ruthlessly ripping out the DNA from models that work and re-engineering themselves for Internet Age. They will do it in University Time, not Internet time, but they have enough inertia for that not to matter. In fact, a slower response to change will insulate them from short timescale fads (Would you wish you had bet the farm on CD-ROMS? WAP?).
It may not seem so from this blog, but overall I'm bullish about the likelihood of Universities surviving the next century. So long as there is a need for people to be educated to a high level, beyond what can be learned in a self directed way, Universities will be doing that business.
Monday, March 29, 2010
True Telepresence and the end of space
Telepresence has to be the most obvious technological shift that will break into the mainstream, probably in the next decace, certainly before my daughter enrolls in University.
It's been a long time coming. Conference calls have been around for a long time, and with tools like Skype and various low cost commercial tools for virtual seminars, have begun to creep into the educational mainstream. At the other end of the market, top end vendors sell specialist conferenceing suites at price points to compete with the corporate jet. Affordable systems are improving fast, but they're not ready for primetime. The first 10 minutes of any session goes like this:
"Hello Galway. Are you there?"
"Yes, I can hear you, but I can't see you."
"OK Let me check the camera"
"Is Dublin on?"
"No They txted me. There's some problem. They are looking for the technician"
Once the session is rolling and everyone is logged on, it's still hard going. Participants complain it lacks the immediacy of a physical session. People at a distance can be easily tuned out as humans in the room take precedence over the lost little faces on the screen. Bandwidth bogeymen can drop people without warning. Technophiles will no doubt argue that it all works fine, you just have to woggle the transmogrifier. If it worked well, they wouldn't have to argue at all.
Forget all that, for a moment, and close your eyes. Imagine true telepresence. Imagine your seminar in classical history, given in the Roman Arena at Arles. At your feet, an ant labours busily in the dust. The sound and vision is perfect. Only the light summer breeze is missing. You see perhaps two dozen students from all over the world sitting on the dusty benches. Really, there are thousands, but no one sees that, each student only sees their peer group and you. When one student wishes to ask a question, the system artfully shifts them into the front row in everyone's illusion, gently and unnoticed, like a magician, they are just there. Only sometimes, in dialogue, does a tiny timelag betray them as from Honolulu, or Auckland. After a few minutes of introductory remarks, it's off to Actium. The class will fly as seagulls and watch the battle unfold below as the Triremes clash. Then off to breakout session in the Taverns of Athens, to discuss the outcome and argue the strategy with, it always seems, just enough bread and wine on the table to rearrange and demonstrate how it should have been fought, if only.
It's lovely, but what does it mean? Most importantly, just like Actium, winner takes all. No longer does a student need to put up with an incoherent lecturer in their local college who doesn't know a Trireme from a Bireme, and is only teaching this module because the Head of Department used to do it, but he's on sabbatical in Istanbul. If the best lecturer on the topic in the world can teach any number of telepresent students at so many euros a head, they will. They will be able to afford the splendid simulations, and they attract enough excellent postgraduates to run the small group sessions that are long the means of the your local, increasingly impoverished history department ("Or perhaps we should take on some of those new Virtual Instructors, they're very cheap nowadays"). Where once the material might have been taught in a thousand universities, now it will be taught in ten. The best teachers will command rock star salaries and draw thousands of students. The Simon Schamas and Niall Fergusons of today are in many ways like Caruso and McCormack, the first 'Stars' of opera a century ago. Back then, recordings were expensive. If you wanted to hear opera, you had to get in a room with a singer. There was work for plenty of tenors. Before recordings, they could, like lecturers, only earn their living one audience at a time. Now Carreras and a half dozen others command the lions share of the money, all the recording work, the sellout tours in 5000 seat venues. For anyone outside the top 10, it's a lean line of business, sung for love. When you can watch a top 10 performer live in 3D, in your living room, in full surround sound, it'll be leaner yet.
So it shall be for the teachers, in the age of the Superstar Professors.
What about the University? Where does that fit into all this?
Nowhere, much.
It's been a long time coming. Conference calls have been around for a long time, and with tools like Skype and various low cost commercial tools for virtual seminars, have begun to creep into the educational mainstream. At the other end of the market, top end vendors sell specialist conferenceing suites at price points to compete with the corporate jet. Affordable systems are improving fast, but they're not ready for primetime. The first 10 minutes of any session goes like this:
"Hello Galway. Are you there?"
"Yes, I can hear you, but I can't see you."
"OK Let me check the camera"
"Is Dublin on?"
"No They txted me. There's some problem. They are looking for the technician"
Once the session is rolling and everyone is logged on, it's still hard going. Participants complain it lacks the immediacy of a physical session. People at a distance can be easily tuned out as humans in the room take precedence over the lost little faces on the screen. Bandwidth bogeymen can drop people without warning. Technophiles will no doubt argue that it all works fine, you just have to woggle the transmogrifier. If it worked well, they wouldn't have to argue at all.
Forget all that, for a moment, and close your eyes. Imagine true telepresence. Imagine your seminar in classical history, given in the Roman Arena at Arles. At your feet, an ant labours busily in the dust. The sound and vision is perfect. Only the light summer breeze is missing. You see perhaps two dozen students from all over the world sitting on the dusty benches. Really, there are thousands, but no one sees that, each student only sees their peer group and you. When one student wishes to ask a question, the system artfully shifts them into the front row in everyone's illusion, gently and unnoticed, like a magician, they are just there. Only sometimes, in dialogue, does a tiny timelag betray them as from Honolulu, or Auckland. After a few minutes of introductory remarks, it's off to Actium. The class will fly as seagulls and watch the battle unfold below as the Triremes clash. Then off to breakout session in the Taverns of Athens, to discuss the outcome and argue the strategy with, it always seems, just enough bread and wine on the table to rearrange and demonstrate how it should have been fought, if only.
It's lovely, but what does it mean? Most importantly, just like Actium, winner takes all. No longer does a student need to put up with an incoherent lecturer in their local college who doesn't know a Trireme from a Bireme, and is only teaching this module because the Head of Department used to do it, but he's on sabbatical in Istanbul. If the best lecturer on the topic in the world can teach any number of telepresent students at so many euros a head, they will. They will be able to afford the splendid simulations, and they attract enough excellent postgraduates to run the small group sessions that are long the means of the your local, increasingly impoverished history department ("Or perhaps we should take on some of those new Virtual Instructors, they're very cheap nowadays"). Where once the material might have been taught in a thousand universities, now it will be taught in ten. The best teachers will command rock star salaries and draw thousands of students. The Simon Schamas and Niall Fergusons of today are in many ways like Caruso and McCormack, the first 'Stars' of opera a century ago. Back then, recordings were expensive. If you wanted to hear opera, you had to get in a room with a singer. There was work for plenty of tenors. Before recordings, they could, like lecturers, only earn their living one audience at a time. Now Carreras and a half dozen others command the lions share of the money, all the recording work, the sellout tours in 5000 seat venues. For anyone outside the top 10, it's a lean line of business, sung for love. When you can watch a top 10 performer live in 3D, in your living room, in full surround sound, it'll be leaner yet.
So it shall be for the teachers, in the age of the Superstar Professors.
What about the University? Where does that fit into all this?
Nowhere, much.
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