In other words, my theory is: Cheating (on a systematic level) happens because students try to get an edge over their peers/competitors. Even top-notch students cheat, in order to ensure a perfect grade. Fighting cheating is not something that professors can do well in the long run, and it is counterproductive by itself. By channeling this competitive energy into creative activities, in which you cannot cheat, everyone is better off.

Panos Ipeirotis — Why I will never pursue cheating again. A computer scientist teaching in a business school details a year of trying to combat cheating on assignments. Overall, he spent 45 hours addressing the problem during a 32 hour lecture course, and 22 of 108 enrolled students admitted cheating. Solutions could include:

• Public projects – All of the work ends up public, so embarrassment is the deterring factor.
• Peer review – Students have to present their work in class, and are judged by others.
• Competitions – Grades are performance-based (e.g. students build websites to attract the greatest number of unique visitors).

Takeaway: If plagiarism is your biggest worry, you’re doing it wrong.

In it, we identify the historical context for the issues that a number of print publications are having today, and lay the groundwork for why innovation is critical for the transmogrification and survival of these organizations. Innovation, in our world, is about experimenting and taking risks. It’s “trying what’s radically new” with the hope that some ideas will be good learning experiences while others will be tremendous successes.

It’s critically important that journalism schools experiment as well, and I look forward to a productive conversation about approaches they can take to create an environment that fosters innovation.

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.

Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Big takeaway: using the creative and intellectual capacity of universities to work collaboratively towards solving society’s biggest challenges. I’d go back to school.

Designing a News Startup From Scratch in 60 Minutes

The goal would be to rapidly prototype what a news organization of the future might look like by walking the hypothetical startup from concept to a year after launch and covering things such as:

• Identifying the community
• Speculating on the ideal number and composition of staff
• Brainstorming the technology behind the website, and what sort of functionality the news organization would offer
• Proposing revenue models
• Designing the newsroom (the balance between working virtually and in physical space)
• Listing out all of the information your community might need, and the resources required to cover it (this could even be a session on its own)

This would be a very proactive activity for those in newsrooms currently, and might even bootstrap a few projects from people in the room.

J School in 2020

In regards to journalism education, much of the discussion has been focused on whether or not J schools are adequately preparing their students for the reality of the newspaper industry and, from this, how they might change their curriculum incrementally to address the needs of today. This isn’t good enough. Instead of playing catchup, as the New York Time states the obvious, I think it would be far more powerful to apply the concept of scenario planning to the future of journalism education, and the university system as well. The education industry should be learning from the newspaper industry.

From my view, there are three roles of the university in the 21st century. One, provide the basic foundation in any subject matter for a person to be able to then grow from. In journalism, this might be ethics, media, etc. I wouldn’t teach any tools in these core classes, but the classes would be evening supplements to internships and work experience. Two, teach how to learn. In a world changing at an exponential pace, the ability to quickly understand and act upon information is paramount. The kicker to approaching this in the university setting? The subject material would be completely random and change from term to term. Three, be a sandbox. Be the place where people of any age can go to learn more about the world and their role within it. Let them experiment and play with reality, but let the university be the place where learners can experiment and fail gracefully. The university system almost does the first of these three at the moment. That’s not good enough.

Discussion in this session would lead to actionable takeaways. If I were the Dean of a J school right now, these are several of the things I would consider doing:

• Start blogging more regularly about how the J school is changing and what your vision for it. As the leader of any organization, facilitating vision is critical. Blogging makes it open, two-way, and more approachable. Create different scenarios for journalism in 2020, and discuss how the J school will support that.
• Launch a series of skills-based evening or weekend classes (i.e. Flash, editing audio, etc.) that are open to anyone. Make them free. Create demand for your product.
• Make regular blogging (and maybe tweeting) a requirement of anyone in the journalism school. I’m personally trying to blog more often because I know writing regularly will improve my abilities. Same concept applies. Have an online space that aggregates these blog posts by topic. Propose blog topics over the list serv, have students write on them, and then have a forum to continue the discussion in person.
• Establish a startup seed fund. A lot of good journalists aren’t going to be getting newspaper jobs after they graduate this year. They’ll think a lot higher of the university if it funds innovation and competition.

I’m also planning on bringing audio and video recording equipment. Hopefully not a moment of this weekend will go uncaptured. Also, if anyone is down for a run around Philly on Sunday morning, ping me up.

I had the opportunity to get lunch today with Ryan Knutson (@UOknutson), a former colleague at the Daily Emerald that I respect and consider a friend. He’s several weeks away from graduating with a double major at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. Given the current state of the newspaper industry, and thus the education industry that feeds it, I thought it might be interesting to ask him about his perspective on the situation, where his felt his J school was successful and where it needs to improve, and why he’s optimistic about the future of news.

When he discusses the journalism school, I think there’s an important note to be made: most of the value in the education he obtained was from the skills he learned, not necessarily the academic side of journalism. As the tools and methods needed to do journalism change at a greater and greater pace, the four year approach of the university becomes an inappropriate and ineffective mechanism for delivering knowledge. I think this is a large root cause reason for why J schools are having such difficulty in trying to figure out what to teach. They have an idea of what will be applicable today, but not four years down the road. On the plus side, though, there will be more and more demand for weekend or short-term workshops to learn special skills such as Flash, database design, Final Cut Pro, and the basics of editing audio.

America’s colleges and universities, says Wiley, have been acting as if what they offer — access to educational materials, a venue for socializing, the awarding of a credential — can’t be obtained anywhere else. By and large, campus-based universities haven’t been innovative, he says, because they’ve been a monopoly.

If you’d wanted to be really disruptive, you’d design the rapid accreditation system that offers more variable certification.