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 Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Monday, October 4, 2010
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Can MOOCs make learning scale?
One of the big challenges of education is that it doesn't really scale well. At primary and secondary level, pupil teacher ratios are political hot potatoes with good reason. At big ratios students don't get individual attention. Bump classes up beyond any small number and the teacher can't keep a handle on who is or isn't up with the play, can't dip down and interact one to one with the students to work through a difficulty. They can't teach, basically. They fall back on lecturing and crowd control.
Lecturing now, is a different story. Lecturing scales really well. You can lecture a million almost as easily as 10. People (usually lecturers, as you would imagine) often mix up lecturing, as the signature pedagogy of the University, with teaching. Ideas like iTunesU and Youtube.com.edu are great for disseminating lectures, but that isn't teaching and learning. It should be called iTunesLectures, not iTunesUniversity.
Technology has not, so far, been able to solve this problem. People in technology circles who have never taught anything, and evidently, haven't learned much either, often miss this point. The same webtech wheezes that have ripped up conventional media can't rip up Education. Education isn't media.
MOOC, or Massively Open Online Courses, are one fair effort at leveraging technology to make education scale. There's a good paper about the format and the issues involved online now "The Ideals and reality of participating in a MOOC" which gives a good overview of the model, and the issues encountered. It's worth a read. Basically in a MOOC the course is online, it's somewhat unstructured, the format uses pretty much any kind of web tool you can think of to facilitate a big networked conversation on the topic. Courses can have thousands of participants, some for credit, other not, some engaging, some not. The first instance ran in 2008, led by Stephen Downes and George Siemens, key thought leaders in the field.
Personally, I found the format hard to engage with and commit to, but that's probably more to do with me than it. I'm slow to pan the format, because it's early days, and only a handful of MOOCs have run, but the paper linked above seems to resonate with my concerns about it. I don't think it's going to solve the problem as it stands, but it's probably as close as we've gotten.
Learning comes, in part from a dialogue. That dialogue is one to one, between someone who knows a lot about it, and someone who wants to know a lot about it. Lecturing (or reading) is only half of it, it's a monologue. It's often hard to ask questions in a lecture, impossible in a book.
A core part of the concept of a MOOC is peer to peer learning, through dialogue. But it's a dialogue between 2000 people who all know a little bit about the topic, with the course leaders piping in from time to time. It's as likely to confuse as enlighten. A big online course, with some lecture/readings, some student chats is a good effort at a fusion, but even the most hyperactive educator isn't going to be able to run around and engage with more than a few dozen students, or have any clear idea of who knows what.
I think perhaps the MOOC a stronger model for the humanities, where there is often no single clear answer (I squandered my college years in the hard sciences, where we pretend there is). It's certainly a better model than everyone sitting in a lecture hall taking notes. On balance, until something new comes out on the technology side, it's probably one of the best models around for mega scale cost effective learning. If you teach in University, get on one if you have a chance, and see how they work. If I hear of another coming up I'll let you know.
Learning comes, in part from a dialogue. That dialogue is one to one, between someone who knows a lot about it, and someone who wants to know a lot about it. Lecturing (or reading) is only half of it, it's a monologue. It's often hard to ask questions in a lecture, impossible in a book.
A core part of the concept of a MOOC is peer to peer learning, through dialogue. But it's a dialogue between 2000 people who all know a little bit about the topic, with the course leaders piping in from time to time. It's as likely to confuse as enlighten. A big online course, with some lecture/readings, some student chats is a good effort at a fusion, but even the most hyperactive educator isn't going to be able to run around and engage with more than a few dozen students, or have any clear idea of who knows what.
I think perhaps the MOOC a stronger model for the humanities, where there is often no single clear answer (I squandered my college years in the hard sciences, where we pretend there is). It's certainly a better model than everyone sitting in a lecture hall taking notes. On balance, until something new comes out on the technology side, it's probably one of the best models around for mega scale cost effective learning. If you teach in University, get on one if you have a chance, and see how they work. If I hear of another coming up I'll let you know.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Why Learning Technology is like Prno.
Learning Technology is like Prno.
A small number of people are in it.
They are usually professionals, doing it for show. The same half dozen things we've had for years keep coming up, dressed up differently and pitched to look new. After a while, you realise it's the same old faces, same old moves.
A lot of people are watching, wishing they were doing it.
They work alone. They feel they should be doing more. It's exciting to watch at the conference, but it's all over so quickly, and so unsatisfying. They have all the gear, but can't seem to convince others to join in.
Most people aren't in it, and aren't watching.
They'd love to be doing it, really. They're all for it, but they haven't the time, the energy or the resource. By the time they get through all the lectures and get scripts marked, it October and the whole ding dong has started again. Really, all they have the energy for once the must doos are done is a cup of hot cocoa and a leaf through the Times Higher Ed.
A small number of people are in it.
They are usually professionals, doing it for show. The same half dozen things we've had for years keep coming up, dressed up differently and pitched to look new. After a while, you realise it's the same old faces, same old moves.
A lot of people are watching, wishing they were doing it.
They work alone. They feel they should be doing more. It's exciting to watch at the conference, but it's all over so quickly, and so unsatisfying. They have all the gear, but can't seem to convince others to join in.
Most people aren't in it, and aren't watching.
They'd love to be doing it, really. They're all for it, but they haven't the time, the energy or the resource. By the time they get through all the lectures and get scripts marked, it October and the whole ding dong has started again. Really, all they have the energy for once the must doos are done is a cup of hot cocoa and a leaf through the Times Higher Ed.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Statistics.com: The thin end of the wedge
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."The Specialists" by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, April 5 2010.
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...
Sunday, April 4, 2010
21st Century Assessment: The University of Farmville
Carnegie Mellon University Professor Jesse Schell's talk on the future of gaming is thought provoking. It gives some interesting insights into what educational assessment might look like by mid 21st Century.
The core idea is that games will become pervasive in our society. In an environment where everything we buy, everything we read or watch, eat of drink can be easily logged and tracked, games will pervade life, as we seek to accumulate points - eating and exercising to get discount points from our health insurers, taking the bus to get tax credits and so forth. Watch the presentation, you'll get the idea.
In the talk Schell cites the examples of a Professor (in Game Design) who replaced the grade system in his course with an Experience Points (XP's) system, very familiar to anyone who has played any kind of non trivial game invented since about 1980. Points are accumulated for attendance, completion of exercises, contributions and so forth. It's easy to fast forward and imagine automated systems recording and tracking your efforts in a course. Did you actually read the text (eyeball tracking on your eBook), did you ask a question in class and so on. The idea would push strongly towards formative assessment, as students work to accumulate XP's over the course, and away from old fashioned summative assessment, which largely exists because it is (relatively) easy for humans to grade.
Humans love slow, incremental reward, it's a bug/feature in our psychology. Games like Farmville and Mafia wars, (check out the wonderful parody 'Progress Wars') offer steady accumulation of points, and the promise of 'levelling up' in just another few clicks exploit this bug and enjoy massive success, despite gameplay that would not challenge a pigeon. It's a whole lot more compelling that slogging away for a year and then rolling the dice in a big summative exam. It's not a radical or new discovery. Anyone who has tried to work their way up the Tennis or Chess ladder, earned martial arts belts, or gone to Weight Watchers knows the psychology of earning points and levels and getting ahead of someone else. Outfits like Scientology do very well out of the idea of levelling up. The Freemasons have done it since the 1700's (there's always another degree) although the levels in Farmville are smaller and better sized for the Attention Deficit Era. It just takes a few hundred years for new innovations to work their way over into education.
The idea of gathering points for an educational outcome isn't new. Continuous Professional Development programmes have done this for years, requiring a certain number of points to retain professional accreditation. Schnell points out that once professional game designers, well versed on what kind of behaviour and reward systems compell people, get their hands on systems like this, it will make them vastly more engaging and motivate the students. They'll be running down College Road on monday morning, keen to crack those Quantum Physics problems so they can level up before Johnny down the road. Two more levels and they open up the Quantum Cryptography level, and win a free pass into Gorbys. It's not the rewards though, it's the winning.
Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) is another area that technology driven monitoring and points accumulation will be a breakthrough tool for RPL. Imagine a world where everything you do at work is logged and captured in some way. Management systems map your progress towards outcomes, targets hit and goals achieved. Or perhaps it's more like a Twitter feed where your colleagues, customers, students authenticate your achievements and professional development, they can be tagged with discipline areas, points weightings and recommendations.
Project Evaluation: 120 points
Technical Writing: 150 points
View Details?
Report Writing, 30 points,
View details?
It's a hybrid mutant of peer assessment and social networking, the grandchild of the Recommendations feature in LinkedIn.
Pretty easy to imagine an App that mines this kind of data, and the details of the negotiation behind it and tell me I've got half the points I need for a MA in Public Sector Project Evaluation at The University of Z. Better talk to the boss about how best to fill in those blanks, except I'm only a hundred points in Statistics short for a H.Dip at University of Y, and I can do those online by playing 20 levels to Statsville. Decisions decisions...
Of course, the recruitment system will cut right through to the details anyway, regardless of whether the points add up to a Degree or not. Sure I can still earn points by turn up in old fashioned classes, but everybody knows professional experience is worth much more. After all, why pay a University good money or 'Recognise' my experience learning is in a big enough chunk of the right shape to be one of those Degree things like my Dad had.
Why indeed.
In the talk Schell cites the examples of a Professor (in Game Design) who replaced the grade system in his course with an Experience Points (XP's) system, very familiar to anyone who has played any kind of non trivial game invented since about 1980. Points are accumulated for attendance, completion of exercises, contributions and so forth. It's easy to fast forward and imagine automated systems recording and tracking your efforts in a course. Did you actually read the text (eyeball tracking on your eBook), did you ask a question in class and so on. The idea would push strongly towards formative assessment, as students work to accumulate XP's over the course, and away from old fashioned summative assessment, which largely exists because it is (relatively) easy for humans to grade.
Humans love slow, incremental reward, it's a bug/feature in our psychology. Games like Farmville and Mafia wars, (check out the wonderful parody 'Progress Wars') offer steady accumulation of points, and the promise of 'levelling up' in just another few clicks exploit this bug and enjoy massive success, despite gameplay that would not challenge a pigeon. It's a whole lot more compelling that slogging away for a year and then rolling the dice in a big summative exam. It's not a radical or new discovery. Anyone who has tried to work their way up the Tennis or Chess ladder, earned martial arts belts, or gone to Weight Watchers knows the psychology of earning points and levels and getting ahead of someone else. Outfits like Scientology do very well out of the idea of levelling up. The Freemasons have done it since the 1700's (there's always another degree) although the levels in Farmville are smaller and better sized for the Attention Deficit Era. It just takes a few hundred years for new innovations to work their way over into education.
The idea of gathering points for an educational outcome isn't new. Continuous Professional Development programmes have done this for years, requiring a certain number of points to retain professional accreditation. Schnell points out that once professional game designers, well versed on what kind of behaviour and reward systems compell people, get their hands on systems like this, it will make them vastly more engaging and motivate the students. They'll be running down College Road on monday morning, keen to crack those Quantum Physics problems so they can level up before Johnny down the road. Two more levels and they open up the Quantum Cryptography level, and win a free pass into Gorbys. It's not the rewards though, it's the winning.
Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) is another area that technology driven monitoring and points accumulation will be a breakthrough tool for RPL. Imagine a world where everything you do at work is logged and captured in some way. Management systems map your progress towards outcomes, targets hit and goals achieved. Or perhaps it's more like a Twitter feed where your colleagues, customers, students authenticate your achievements and professional development, they can be tagged with discipline areas, points weightings and recommendations.
"I got that report finished"
Data Analysis: 270 pointsProject Evaluation: 120 points
Technical Writing: 150 points
View Details?
"I convinced Treasury to sign off on that Report."
Negotiation, 80 points,Report Writing, 30 points,
View details?
It's a hybrid mutant of peer assessment and social networking, the grandchild of the Recommendations feature in LinkedIn.
Pretty easy to imagine an App that mines this kind of data, and the details of the negotiation behind it and tell me I've got half the points I need for a MA in Public Sector Project Evaluation at The University of Z. Better talk to the boss about how best to fill in those blanks, except I'm only a hundred points in Statistics short for a H.Dip at University of Y, and I can do those online by playing 20 levels to Statsville. Decisions decisions...
Of course, the recruitment system will cut right through to the details anyway, regardless of whether the points add up to a Degree or not. Sure I can still earn points by turn up in old fashioned classes, but everybody knows professional experience is worth much more. After all, why pay a University good money or 'Recognise' my experience learning is in a big enough chunk of the right shape to be one of those Degree things like my Dad had.
Why indeed.
Update:
I referred above to a spurious Statsville as spurious future online statistics game. Alternatively, if you are stuck in 2010, there is Statistics.com, featured today in Inside Higher Ed
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.
Friday, March 26, 2010
The Singular Future
There's a useful summary of Ray Kurzweil's predictions on Wikipedia. If you haven't heard of him, there's a TED talk where he presents his ideas. Kurzweil is a little over hyped (There's a movie - The Transcendant Man, and a University, in collaboration with Google and NASA), and widely criticised, but that doesn't make him wrong.
Kurzweil's basic idea is that technological change, in some key areas, is exponential, not linear. Moores law, that processing power per dollar doubles every 18 months is an example of this kind of technological rule of thumb that has held good for many years. Exponential processes, in their late stages, tend to get a little strange, and Kurzweils predictions, inferred from that, rapidly get wierd. That's trouble with exponential change. Humans can't intuitively grasp it. Our minds, evolved for counting bananas and holding grudges, tend to be unable to get a grip on it. The pond might be a quarter full of weed that doubles every day, but we still expect to be able to leave clearing it to next week.
Where Kurweil breaks from many other futurists is the prediction that computers will reach a point where they are smart enough to improve their own design. At this point, their development and intelligence will rapidly accelerate and exceed ours, and the chart of scientific development goes off the scale. Anything is possible at that point, and the machines will send us an eMail to tell us about it, if they have remembered to feed us. According to this picture, few, if any, of the institutions we know of would remain relevant, let along Universities.
Right or wrong in the long term, Kurzweil's predications in the nearer term are a useful cribsheet for the kinds of technological changes Universities must weather in the next century. True immersive virtual worlds and Artificial Intelligances smarter than us are not outrageous predictions for the 21st century, and will have serious implications for Universities as we know them. If you are a young academic, by the time you have fought your way up to a professorship, you'll be at the sharp end in dealing with these things in teaching. Just when you thought you were clever for mastering powerpoint animations and signing up to Twitter, it's going to get a whole lot harder and meaner.
The impact of technology on the structure of the University is a huge topic, and I'll return to it in coming posts where I'll be looking at the implications of specific potential technologies for the University in detail.
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