Nigella Lawson: Electric Hyperteacher

Printing, McLuhan tells us, created Authors. Gutenberg's invention, by lowering the marginal cost of reproducing books changed them fundamentally. It became possible to write a bestseller, like "A Tale of Two Lovers' (a racy proto-romp printed in 1467 whose author went on to become Pope Pius II). and later, more serious writers like Desiderius Erasmus, who could actually make a living as a semi independent intellectual, respected in his own lifetime.

If printing created authors, what has the internet created? To see it clearly, we really need to step back from the Internet as one piece of the puzzle and think of the bigger picture, including all of what McLuhan would call 'The Electric Media' - Radio, TV, The Paperback and the Magazine.

We usually call them 'Historian/Chef/Economist, author and broadcaster'  - whatever their discipline is, with Author and Broadcaster tacked on. It's a clumsy name which implies that they do something we don't really have a name for yet. - I'll call them the Electric Hyperteachers, until a better neologism comes to mind. These are not conventional educators gunned up with new tools. Why should they be -  first authors weren't book copyists. Appropriately, Marshall McLuhan himself was one of the first of this breed, appearing on the relatively new TV medium, although not, perhaps, selling as well as Simon Schama or Alain de Botton. They are now abundant, from economists like David McWilliams here in Ireland, to highly visible academics like Niall Ferguson or Stephen Hawking. It is the chefs, however, who lead the way and show us total mastery of the discipline, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver and their kindred.

They educate by combined arms warfare - Blitzkrieg for learning. They use all available media, in a tightly integrated way, to put their message across. First, air assault, ten episodes in a good slot on the Autumn TV lineup. Then ground war - massed hardbacks surging out of the bookshops, every December. Book tours and syndicated columns bring the message to key target zones, iPhone apps provide mobile hitting power, and twitter allows them to get right on the front line, clearing out the misconceptions, tweet by tweet, room by room, mind by mind.

We can dismiss them as trivial, but in Gutenberg's time they said that about anything that wasn't theology.
We can dismiss them as mere entertainers, but being entertaining is just a psychological hack to keep our attention and get the knowledge past our ramparts of apathy.
We can dismiss them as shallow, but those that are reach wide, and open the way for others.
We can dismiss them for being unable to engage with students, as we go off to lecture to classes of hundreds.

These creatures can cross the research barrier too - and I don't just mean Heston Blumenthals culinary labs. Time Team, the British Archaeology show, not content with teaching my five year old more Saxon history than I ever wish to know, claims to have published more academic papers than all the Archaeology Departments in the UK combined.

These are new beasts, and they are genuinely new, but they can't do everything a Teacher does. Not yet. Three things are missing, that I can see, Assessment (formative or otherwise), Peer to Peer learning, and Accreditation.

Nigella Lawson, sadly, does not come to my kitchen to assess my roast potatoes, but she is on Twitter. I can see on Facebook which of my friends likes Jamie Oliver, I could, if I wished, organise a cook off among them, and tweet him to tell him how it went. The new forces of social media provide both the possibility (perhaps, the illusion) of engagement with the teacher, and a relatively easy avenue to find and interact with others interested in the same topic. It enables unstructured peer to peer learning and assessment. In practice, at any scale beyond the smallest of seminars, conventional assessment by the teacher doesn't scale, as anyone who has ever marked exams papers knows to their aching bones.

As for accreditation, I cannot, for now, earn any module credit from any culinary institution for competently turning out one of Nigella's Feasts (even if I could), but how long until one of them snaps a TV series / Book package into a franchised local cookery course model,  and if there was a paying interest, gives the attendees a certificate on completion? You may consider cooking trivial, but the model is easily applicable to any discipline, if an audience and a profit can be found for it.

Over the last half century, the profusion of new broadcast media created new gurus of transmission model education - mainly Chef's but Economists, Historians and Scientists too. The addition of social media might well give them to toolkits to step past that and become Educators in a much richer, truer sense. They will not be like the ones we have known before, no more than David Starkey is like Herodotus.

They are, of course, mainly in it for the money. The new media, for the first time, allows creates the possibility for educators to actually make large amounts of money. It's almost a thousand years since Peter Abelard taught from 'pecunie et laudis cupiditas' - Greed and Ambition, and now it seems that, if you have the knack, that might not be such a fanciful ambition after all, for the few.

And it will be for the few. A century ago, people could make a living as an opera singer. Not a great living, but a living. If you wanted to hear Opera, you had to get in a room with an Opera singer, and pay them. There were lots of them, and they made a living. Them came the Victor Talking Machine Company, Caruso and McCormack. Now Carreras and Ntrebco fly privately, and everyone else in the business takes the bus. The new media creates a long tail, to be sure, but it also creates a high peak - books created Bestsellers, and records created Rock stars. What will full contact transmission and social media do to our educators?

Interesting times.

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Statistics.com: The thin end of the wedge

"The Specialists" by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, April 5 2010.

Kolowich hits the nail on the head in this article on a number of themes, taking Statistics.com as an example of the type of entity that I think will be a central player in Education in the 21st century. The article is well worth a read.

Statistics.com seems to operate the Superstar model - I'll confess I don't know who the Superstars of Statistics are (it seems a strange idea!) but the Faculty looks grunty enough to make a land grab for the title. The course programme is comprehensive, and seems to have the relevant approvals and certifications. The Faculty is global, and grading is outsourced to India. One assumes that mentoring and synchronous tutorials are run from there too, or if not, they soon will be. Finally, and most importantly, the site operates by distance. It's in direct competition with every statistics department on earth.

Existing Universities will probably fight long and hard against this. It's Turkeys voting for Christmas. The article notes:

"Traditional institutions, however, have been hesitant to open the door to commercial ventures that sell higher education by the course or program."

Hesitant? No Kidding. Only a foolhardy or bankrupt University head would suggest downsizing the Stats department and contracting in a third party provider. It's also culturally incomprehensible and politically intractable. Most Universities think distance education is beneath contempt, unless it's their own  lecturers putting own Powerpoints on Blackboard, in which case it's a dynamic, innovative revenue stream. The idea of contracting out a core activity like teaching is politically impossible to institutions which just about manage to contract out the cleaning and catering.

The best new entrants like this can hope for is that a University might grant exemptions to students who have completed modules with them. It's tempting, would you lose out on fees for a potential MSc student because you won't recognise the modules, when the University of Down the Road will? The article suggests that is indeed the case:

"The [American Council for Education] says that it has never heard of a college refusing to accept credits earned in Statistics.com courses."

In the end though, the success of providers like this hinges on employers. If you were taking on a hire who needed stats and they had paper from Statistics.com, would you give them the time of day? If the market is tight, or the candidate is otherwise strong, you might think it worth the effort to get one of your existing Stats guys to check it out, or run some skill tests on the new hire. If there's twenty strong resumes in the pile, you might not bother and just hire the person who took their Stats from the same department you did. Even so, that's still progress. You probably have existing staff that need to be skilled up in Stats. You could send them down to the local college, but their lecture schedule is insane and won't gel at all with a working day. You could hire in a guy for some onsite training, but that's major expense and it won't wash for three people. Maybe you'll enroll them with Statistics.com, see how it works out...

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.