Collaborative learning redefines the information presentation model from that of broadcast, or one-way transmission from transmitter to receiver, to that of many to many. As discussed in the article, it defines how the culture of education process flattens and shifts. Given proper access to intellectual resources, also known as a wireless connection to the internet, students can assist in the role of teaching. More often than not, there are students who pick up any given material quicker than the others. With the established pedagogy, there is no advantage to being a quicker learner; with collaborative learning, being the quicker learner means that other opportunities arise to take a more active role in the teaching process and practice leadership skills. The responsibility of the professor is to be a curator, or act as a master guide to the learning process.

Collaborative learning also implies learning through practical application of knowledge, as opposed to simply being a static vassal to be filled. Choice quote:

As Seymour Papert, one of the world’s foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn, put it: “The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.” Students need to integrate new information with the information they already have — to “construct” new knowledge structures and meaning.

Collaborative knowledge production, however, articulates how the dynamics of the web can alter the traditional content production role of the university. Instead of an emphasis on scarcity, it would instead focus on abundance and universal access, and it describes how this might affect intellectual content from course material to academic research. To achieve this goal, however, you need effective tools for distributed collaboration:

What higher education desperately needs is a social network — a Facebook for faculty. But it shouldn’t be a standalone application; it should be integral to the Global Network for Higher Learning. One such project, part of the Portuguese education system, is creating an online community of teachers across the country. The system will use collaborative methods for creating, managing, sharing, and deploying curricula and for tracking the results via a sophisticated learning management system. There are many benefits, including much greater collaboration among teachers and a more consistent measurement of students’ progress.

The real world gives professors collaboration opportunities in their department and with whom they meet, but just think of the potential serendipities a people-indexer like Aardvark could produce.

Most importantly, however, is that all of these ideas are business opportunities, and innovations the efficiencies of the market will be able to capitalize upon a lot quicker than those invested in the ivory towers.

Thanks to Suzi Steffen for sharing this with me.

This Week in Rebooting the Ecosystem for Reinventing J school

Writer’s note (because there ain’t no editor): In all seriousness, the three of us love, like serious humanly love, This Week in Tech, Rebooting the News, and all people, podcasts, and/or cities we tease at in this episode. It’s only out of love that we jest. We have better technical difficulties too.

To frame the solutions to the problem, we begin by establishing some of the ways in which J school is a broken model for the 21st century. In most other fields, Joey Baker points out, academia is the research space. If that’s not the case, then it’s the military. The news industry is the only one where the industry leads and academia is behind.

Greg Linch points out another issue in that J schools, as institutions, are really slow to change. They have a critical inability to adapt quickly. This is a bigger issue in the 21st century because some of the tools journalists need to know how to use are changing at an exponential rate. As both Joey Baker and I point out, many of the tools taught in a four year undergraduate program are obsolete or nearing such a stage by graduation. J schools aren’t going to get back ahead by teaching “social media.” The problem isn’t with what they’re teaching, but rather how they’re teaching it. Another fundamental that needs to change.

A third issue is that the core curriculum is one size fits all. The class structure and material of 200-level courses is generally designed for the perceived average of 200 hundred students. As such, it doesn’t match any of them well and at least some of them are in the extreme ends of the bell curve where the class is completely worthless.

The grading system is broken because there’s no system of rewards for those who try experiments and learn from their failures. The list goes on.

It’s not the end of the world for journalism schools, the university system, or newspapers. There are just fundamental ways in which each need to change.

On a related note, I thought of two more parallels between J school and newspapers in the past 24 hours. One: all of the university lectures around the world are pretty much rewrites of the same thing. Two: students have very little say in the content of what they get from the professor.

The solutions aren’t unique and won’t be easy to implement, but all of the ideas we discussed would make us excited to be back in school (bootcamps, barcamps, testing out of classes, and experiential education ftw).

Our picks of the week are:

• Tynt Tracer, from Joey – If you turn off the annoying “feature” where it adds a link to the end of the bit of text you’ve copied, then it’s a tool that offers really cool analytics on what people are copy and pasting from your website including word clouds and all that jazz.
• Kaltura Community Edition, from Greg – open source video server you can host yourself.
• Skitch, from Daniel – Wickedly simple and fast way to communicate visually (Mac only).

Enjoy the podcast. It’s worth skipping the first nine minutes and then listening to the rest all of the way through. Greg has a brilliant point that we actually had to create an addendum for at the end.

Later: In my rush to get this post out, I missed two really great sets of ideas from earlier this year: “Remaking Journalism Education: Some Thoughts” from March and “Bring-a-Professor chat wrap-up” at CollegeJourn in February. Absorb those as well.

DJ has an idea for augmenting the traditional textbook or, as Max puts it, adding an “onion skin” on top of the text. Meta data and meta conversations to make studying a collaborative exercise. If you think of the textbook as a platform from which learning can take place, then there are digital tools that can be built to make information flow happen more organically (think commenting, videos of professor explanations, quizzes, etc.).

The physical, analog textbook has a specific information flow which offers design constraints. We started the conversation with the assumption the content was digital, and therefore flexible, but the hacking DJ would like to do would work under the consideration of augmenting the existing textbook. His solution would be a web service or application to co-exist with the physical book.

Many existing textbooks, or at least the ones in my experience, offer crappy websites with supplemental information. With DJ’s idea, the service would offer an iPhone application that would complement the analog book. We talked about specific deliverables and the consensus was that a collaborative sticky note application could offer immediate value. I think a company like Flat World Knowledge might even take the project under it’s wing. Students would use their existing social graph to identify the people in their class and, when they launched the application, they would have access to existing notes left by their classmates or teacher as well as the ability to leave their own. These notes would be specific to the page, which the student could either “flip” to or have it automatically progress by specific reading page. The class doesn’t just need to meet in the classroom.

We started the conversation, however, with a higher level discussion about the difference between analog and digital content, and opportunities that might present themselves five or ten years out. With a traditional textbook, there is what I’m calling a “flow of learning” that is defined by the author. There are a certain number of chapters with a certain number of pages and, overall, it sets a foundation for the learning experience. When that content is digital, however, the “flow of learning” doesn’t need to be defined (necessarily) by the author. They’re just bits that could be defined by the teacher or aggregate voting by the previous class. If the content is malleable, then the textbook can change from student to student.

Fred [Wilson] is suggesting that the education industry may soon face the same challenges that currently confront the music industry and the newspaper industry. Like those industries, education can be peer produced, delivered as bits, and curated by a community. Like the music and newspaper industries, the cost structures embedded in the education industry’s current business models may be very difficult to support in the face of competition from hyper-efficient, web native businesses.

As I’m reading this, a parallel between newspapers and the university system came to mind. Newspapers, as institutions with a business model rooted in a specific project, started uploading their content onto websites in the 1990′s without much concern as to how the Internet would fundamentally change their businesses. They treated their websites as side projects at the very most and minor annoyances most commonly. I think this is very much the case with universities. Progressive schools like MIT have started uploading their courseware, one critical component of their “business model”, to the web for anyone to download free of charge. At the moment, they still have natural monopolies on accreditation and physical space although part of me suspects that those too could change. Considering the newspaper industry isn’t failing gracefully right now, I’d like to think that there are lessons universities can learn from how newspapers dealt with the fundamentally transformative technology known as the Internet.

On a related note, David Wiley argues that OpenCourseWare initiatives are going to have to find a sustainable business model by 2012 or many will fail. To me this says that traditional educational structures that are attempting change will have to show signs of being able to successfully do so in the next few years, or else they will be destined to a downward spiral similar to many newspapers today. This timeframe seems a bit short to me, but I support the assumption.

Conversation from the entire day is up in four parts of video that I’m planning on listening to the entire way through. As someone said in the first hour, the value of the degree is becoming less and less while the cost is becoming more and more. There is a lot of space for this issue to be fixed.