Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis. Good rebuttal by Clay Shirky to Dean Starkman’s piece. I’m in the Plan B camp.
Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis
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Tag Archives: Clay Shirky
College from scratch
Clay Shirky hosted an impromptu discussion section this evening on redesigning higher education. He’s put together a wiki page of the best responses, but I feel like I need to record a few too for posterity. The question was simple: If you were going to create a college from scratch, what would you do?
AFG85: @cshirky Classes would create wikis for specific topics and students would be graded on the quality of their contributions.
AFG85: @cshirky And the same wikis would be used year after year, so new students would have to add to the contributions of last year’s students.
digiphile: @cshirky Fund multidisciplinary labs for applied innovation & incubation. And learn from the example of PCU & “Accepted” http://j.mp/4LHTkG
sewsueme: @cshirky instead of having a college counselor you would have a concierge/ curator who would help you make sense of your education journey
sewsueme: @cshirky as @ccoletta & I were debating earlier in the evening: there would need to be a new accred system. Employer or performance based?
sewsueme: @cshirky learners cld collect “credits” (learnings) from anyplace–Apple store, a uni course, an apprenticeship as long as they cld prove
sewsueme: @cshirky there might be some new course creation but aggregation from multiple places wld be important
ricetopher: @cshirky Why build anything? College as aggregator, filter set, facilitator of networked learning better model in an age of ubiquitous info.
AFG85: @cshirky for professors, have a small full time staff supplemented with practitioners from different fields teaching for one semester
AFG85: @cshirky for students, go YCombinator style–systematic applications, then one weekend of ten minute interviews.
ekstasis: @cshirky single biggest failure of education is the focus on grades as a proxy for learning. they don’t always track. #CollegeFromScratch
I still think that accreditation is going to be the toughest nut to crack. All of the other pieces, distributed collaboration, access to learning materials, etc., are falling into place thanks to the disruptive tendencies of the web. People are learning, by golly, but the record of their learnings is all over the map. For any of these zany ideas for new universities to fly, the students will need to have an equally new method for articulating their accomplishments. Right now, this legitimacy comes from the accreditation board.
If you can convince employers that your new mechanism for accreditation is more accurate and effective than the standard college degree then, well, I think you might have a new college worth starting from scratch.
Reframing the conversation
There were two excellent posts published this weekend on the future of the news industry. They emphasize long-term scenario vision, and technological empowerment. The first, Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable“, I caught from a Twitter link sharing storm Friday evening. Although there were a number of money quotes, his perspective on disruptive technology as revolution stuck with me (emphasis mine):
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.
