“Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.”

“The Detroit of higher learning.”

Eisenwalzwerk (Moderne Cyklopen) - Adolf Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel

In a NY Times editorial, Columbia professor Mark Taylor said that universities are becoming obsolete because they:
- produce a product for which there is no market (teaching positions)
- develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields /publication in journals)
- rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)

This “industrial model” of education goes back to Kant, who said universities need to “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

This is a problem because…

Kids These Days (are Thinking Differently)

“But young people who have grown up digital are abandoning one-way TV for the higher stimulus of interactive communication they find on the Internet.”

They’re used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle the information overload. They expect a two-way conversation. What’s more, growing up digital has encouraged this generation to be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting for a trusted professor to tell them what’s going on, they find out on their own on everything from Google to Wikipedia.

The professors who remain relevant will have to:

collaboration

1. Abandon the traditional lecture, and start listening and conversing with the students — shifting from a broadcast style and adopting an interactive one.
2. They should encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the professor’s store of information.
3. They need to encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the university.
4. They need to tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.

How Learning Should Be: Discovery / Context

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 child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.”

John Seely Brown – learning should be like learning language, “based on social context,” in which individuals are “highly motivated to engage in learning this new, amazingly complex system”

“once you start going to school, in some ways you start to learn much slower because you are being taught, rather than what happens if you’re learning in order to do things that you yourself care about…”

“Learning starts as you leave the classroom, when you start discussing with people around you what was just said. It is in conversation that you start to internalize what some piece of information meant to you.”

Keeping Universities Relevant with Digital Interactive Courses

“If all that the big universities have to offer to students are lectures that you can get online for free — from other professors — why pay the tuition fees? If universities want to survive the arrival of free university-level education online, they need to change the way professors and students interact on campus.”

Example: MIT offers free courses online (OpenCourseWare)

If universities want to stay relevant, they need to offer more interactive classes.

“Today the tools on the Net make it a great way to teach and free up the teacher to design the learning experience and converse with the students on an individual and more meaningful basis.”

One technique is just-in-time teaching: ‘warm-up questions, written by the students, are due a few hours before class, giving the teacher an opportunity to adjust the lesson “just in time,” so that classroom time can be focused on the parts of the assignments that students struggled with.’

According to the 1997 Educom review article “>”From theory to implementation: The Mediated Learning approach to computer-mediated instruction, learning and assessment” by Warren Baker, Thomas Hale, and Bernard R. Gifford:
“students who use well-crafted computer-mediated instruction … generally achieve higher scores on summary examinations, learn their lessons in less time, like their classes more, and develop more positive attitudes towards the subject matter they’re learning”

Challenging the Credentialing System

One argument for Universities is that they provide a credentialling system – as proof of hard workers’ discipline (and weeding out inferior students). Presumably, “those who graduate — better still with distinction — have a credential, to get the most desirable jobs or entrance to graduate programs. They have proven they have a degree of discipline and that they’re prepared to play by the rules.”

But, Tapscott writes, if large, lecture-based universities are proven to inferior to smaller schools with new, more interactive programs, then this model will change – because credentials are based on effectiveness.

Improving the Campus Experience

Is there a point to going to a University if lectures are available for free online? The campus can provide an opportunity for interaction, enhancing learning (going back to Brown’s point above… and Sunstein’s points below).

“The experience has shown MIT that the real value of what they offer is not the lecture per se, but rather the whole package — the content tied to the human learning experience on campus, plus the certification. Universities, in other words, cannot survive on lectures alone.

Videotaping lectures can free up intellectual capital — on the part of both professors and students — to spend their on-campus time thinking and inquiring and challenging each other, rather than just absorbing information.”

Global Academy

Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron: “Why should a university student be restricted to learning from the professors at the university he or she is attending?”

“…Universities should use the Internet to create a global centre of excellence… choose the best courses you have and link them with the best at a handful of universities around the world to create an unquestionably best-in-class program for students. Students would get to learn from the world’s greatest minds in their area of interest — either in the physical classroom, or online. This global academy would be also be open to anyone online.”

Why not?

“New paradigms cause dislocation, disruption, confusion, uncertainty. They are nearly always received with coolness or hostility. Vested interests fight change. And leaders of old paradigms are often the last to embrace the new.”

- “The problem is funds,” one president said. “We just don’t have the money to reinvent the model of pedagogy.”
- “Models of learning that go back decades are hard to change.”
- “I think the problem is the faculty — their average age is 57 and they’re teaching in a ‘post-Gutenberg’ mode.” (or even pre-Gutenberg)

As Proenza says, “There are a lot of sacred cows,” he said. Why, for example, are universities judged by the number of students they exclude, or by how much they spend? Why aren’t they judged by how well they teach, and at what price?”

Conclusion

Students need to be agents of change: ‘If students turn away from a traditional university education, this will erode the value of the credentials universities award, their position as centers of learning and research, and as campuses where young people get a chance to “grow up.”‘

Tapscott calls for a revolutionary, new educational system based on interactive communication.

Sunstein – “Personalized Education and Personalized News”

“Is the power of personalization a wonderful development? For institutions of higher education? For democracy? Should we celebrate complete freedom of choice with respect to the content of education and the content of news” Personalization is the power to “filter” what you see, but education should be “prescribed’ (chosen in advance) for students.

The big question is the “extent to which students should be allowed to exclude what they dislike and include what they like.”

“…institutions of higher learning, like democracy itself, require something other than free, or publicly unrestricted, individual choices” because…

1. “…people should be exposed to materials they would not have chosen in advance. Unanticipated encounters, involving topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating, are central to education, democracy, and even to freedom itself.
2. “Many or most citizens… should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences, members of a heterogeneous society will have a difficult time addressing social problems, since people will find it increasingly hard to understand one another.”

People have always had some amount of choice in their education/media content. But the internet dramatically increases “individual control over content.” Correspondingly, the power of general-interest intermediaries – the newspapers, magazines, television broadcasters, and educational administrations” has decreased. This is a problem because traditional media allow you to be exposed to content you might not normally choose.

“A well-designed campus will ensure such [chance/unwanted] encounters, as students meet people engaged in very different activities and concerned with very different issues.” This allows students to “discover topics that can alter interests/attentions” or change their lives. “One risk with a system of perfect individual control is that it can reduce the importance of the ‘public sphere’ and of common spaces in general.”

Constitutional Principle of Free Speech

“Public Forum Doctrine” adopted by the Supreme Court says streets and parks must be kept open to the public for expressive activity. This implies a belief that governments are obliged to allow speech to occur freely in public.

1. Ensures speakers can have access to a wide array of people
2. Allows speakers to have general access to specific people/institutions with whom they have a complaint
3. Increases the likelihood that citizens will be exposed to a wide variety of people or views

While the internet breaks monopoly of general-interest intermediaries (such as newspapers, magazines, television broadcasters, educational administrations) on public forums, the traditional intermediaries do “expose people to a wide range of topics and views at the same time they provide shared experiences for a heterogeneous public.”

Wider Choices = More Exclusion

“Selecting can produce narrowness, not breadth. The wider range of choices is likely, in many cases, to mean that people will try to find material that makes them feel comfortable or that is created by and for people like themselves.”

This leads to group polarization. “After deliberating with one another, people in a group are likely to move toward a more extreme point in the direction to which they were previously inclined, as indicated by the median of their predeliberation judgments.”

Sunstein says “…the likely result of personalization is that groups with distinctive identities will increasingly engage in within-group discussion” or balkanization.

This harms the educational experience itself (which involves exposure to many different viewpoints), AND it endangers democracy by degrading the wide experiences one receives in an education.

1. “ A good system of education should counteract this risk [group polarization] by exposing people to a wide variety of perspectives.” … “Education is not an ordinary commodity, in part because it should shape preferences and values, not merely cater to them.”
2. “A well-functioning democracy and a well-functioning system of higher education require that people be exposed to unanticipated, unchosen encounters and that people share a range of common experiences.”

Sunstein’s Talk at the University of Michigan’s 18th Annual Davis Market Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Free Expression

In this talk, Sunstein mainly elaborated on points made in his article… here are some of the things he brings up to support his point about the necessity of directed education, shared experiences and democracy.

3 Studies

Sunstein tapped the Rockies for his experiment.

1. Sunstein and other researchers performed an experiment with groups in Colorado Springs (mainly Republican) and Boulder (mainly Democrat). Before the experiment started, the participants were asked questions designed to gauge how strongly they felt about certain polarizing political issues. Then they were allowed time to deliberate on those issues with other participants in their group (the members of each group had the same political leaning). After deliberation, the average group viewpoint on the political issues was more extreme than those of the individual viewpoints measured before deliberation. Additionally, individual views measured after deliberation became more extreme.

The research shows that within ideologically uniform groups, internal diversity is squelched and diversion from the median becomes much more dramatic.

2. US Courts of Appeals have 3 members and they can be 3 Republican appointees (RRR), 3 Democratic appointees (DDD), RRD, or DDR. A study of the outcome of labor law cases showed that RRR or DDD decisions were more extreme than the decisions of mixed courts (RRD or DDR). At the same time, in mixed courts the dissenting decision was far less ideologically extreme.

3. In a study of 1000 Texan jury-eligible people, participants were asked to rank corporate misconduct cases from 1-6 on their moral severity and then to assign a dollar amount to how much the company should pay to make up for it.

While moral judgments were strikingly uniform across the board, the dollar amounts were very unpredictable.

In a second step for the experiment, the participants were given the chance to deliberate about their moral judgments and dollar amounts… after deliberation, moral judgments became more extreme (whether extremely severe or extremely lenient). At the same time, the dollar amounts for each case increased (whether the moral judgment moved up or down).

All three studies showed examples of group polarization, where after deliberation with like-minded people, viewpoints grow more extreme.

Social Architecture

Sunstein theorizes two kinds of freedom enabled by social architectures:

1. Control – characterized by self-sorting and convenience
2. Serendipity – characterized by unanticipated, unchosen encounters or shared experiences with others

He favors serendipity – saying shared experiences are the foundation of liberal democracy and academic freedom. He goes on to review what he says in the article about the Public Forum Doctrine and remarks upon Jane Jacobs’s work on American Cities, showing the “criticalness” of public spaces for creating unimaginable, unexpected encounters… which lead to tolerance.

While cities nowadays are lacking those locations, television, newspapers, and universities are picking up the slack – providing opportunities for people to learn things they wouldn’t normally be interested in or changing their minds about critical issues.

He says that this:
1. Provides social glue to a diverse population (by creating a shared information source)
2. Allows people to encounter diverse topics even if they wouldn’t normally see them.

As a technological analogue… Political blogging allows like-minded groups to stick together… and links to unlike-minded people usually point out “the contemptuous or ridiculous nature” of those other sites.

In groups, people try to present themselves as a certain type of person – not a moderate or boring person. Brain scan studies show that when people’s views are corroborated with another, they:

1. like the other person better, and
2. like themselves better too.

The polarization machine / echo chamber effect impairs education literally and impairs the type of education required by democracy.

Importance of a Free and Widely-Read Press

1. No nation every with a democratically elected government and a free press has ever experienced a famine.
2. A famine is a measure of how governments respond to food scarcity.
3. Pressure provided by a free press requires the government to do something under these conditions.

Sunstein says this shows the importance of the ability of information to flow from one person to another – people can’t be “cocooned” and receptive only to info they like – there needs to be a permeable membrane.

Cell Membranes are semipermeable. I know this because of general education requirements. Directed education at work!

Educational institutions need to protect against group polarization and provide space for serendipity and work against self-sorting – not just for the sake of learning but also for interpersonal understanding.

Technology!

1. Allows for new kinds of public spaces with unrealized possibilities and deliberative forums.
2. But we need to recognize the importance of respectful links between blogs – a “civic tip of the hat” to other viewpoints.

Points brought up in question and answer session:
1. Polarization isn’t always bad (sometimes the “center is lousy” – i.e. Nazis).
2. Large scale polarization is possible, it is not just represented small group behavior.Similar Posts:

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We’ve heard a lot about how Google is making us dumber and more distracted and lazier. We’ve heard less about how it’s making us—maybe even forcing us to be—funnier. For today, thanks to the digital hive mind, comedy is colloquy, everything is “material,” and life is one big writer’s room, a massive clusterchuckle of witty one- upsmanship—on blogs, on social-networking sites, in tweets, in funny video shorts, in Lolcats and talkbacks. Humor saturates the infosphere, for at least two reasons: First, a successful joke implies insight, and insight, especially if it’s pithy and self-explanatory, is the basic currency of a high-speed information economy. Second, the fundamental tools and techniques of that economy—memory, annotation, contrast, collage—are also the fundamental tools of comedy.

At first I was completely on board with his idea, then I started thinking more critically about the kind of claim he is making – that a particular media environment can not only engender, but enforce a certain style of discourse…

I wasn’t entirely convinced by Postman’s discussion of television’s detrimental effect on civic/reasoned discourse (although I still find it valuable), and I’m not entirely convinced by Brown. But I am interested in investigating his hypothesis – that the web is making us funnier.

I’d also like to find out how humor on the web might effect civic/reasoned discourse. I was talking to Professor Moran (from the MCC department) this summer, and he said that he and his friends used to have a “no jokes” rule – because you can’t get anything done if all you’re doing is laughing. I disagree. I like jokes. And hopefully I’ll have more rationale for this in the next post.

For this travelogue, I’d like to examine humor on the web – looking at different places where comedy pops up (and where it doesn’t) and what use people get out of it.

I’m definitely more of a text-biased gal, but since we’re supposed to experiment with rich media this week, hey, take a look at this funny video that had no effect whatsoever on politics.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Those respondents under the age of 30 or those working jobs with a computer in front of view Booker’s use of Facebook as valuable to them. They believe that it gives them an inside look into what the Mayor is doing/thinking on daily basis. It helps them stay up on what is happening in the city and what some of the current issues are. Additionally, these respondents mentioned that since they were already on Facebook a lot, the FB platform was a convenient way to stay informed.

When I asked about whether or not they felt that the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter made them feel closer to the Mayor, almost all respondents answered yes with the exception of one. This standout said that if the mayor is not replying to every person, then it is not really creating a closer relationship. When I told them that they were the only one to answer “no” they jokingly replied that they must just be old fashioned in the way they view relationships.

So what does this tell us? What is it really that the social media platforms like Facebook and twitter provide to constituents versus television and newspapers?

What it comes down to is convenience. One respondent mentioned that people her age (she is 23) are not inclined to follow politics in the newspapers or TV. However, when the mayor is sending out information via Facebook and twitter about important city issues or opportunities for community engagement, it is a far more effective way for getting people of her generation politically involved/aware.

Another respondent mentioned that Facebook was a great way to know about other ways to communicate with the mayor. For instance, had the announcement not been made on Facebook, this newark resident would not have known about a call in radio show with the mayor. She used the call in show as an opportunity to voice her concern about certain issues which lead to her getting a personal call from the mayor.

So what about the Mayor, what is it about the technology that allows him to reach his audience in a way thats different from TV or newspapers?

Social media has been defined by some as giving people the ability to self publish. It provides a broadcast channel to content that will not make it on a TV network or local newspaper. Additionally, it is instantaneous in its turn around. Given that Booker is one of those rare public servants who really wants to connect with his constituents, the platforms of Facebook and twitter give him the ability to do that all the time. If he were to depend strictly on TV, radio, or newspapers, he would be confined to their limitations which would not give him the ability to connect in the ways that he likes. The content of his weekly youtube updates might make it on local access TV, but even here contributors must meet certain guidelines which would be a production requirement that might slow him down.

Overall, the social media platform that Booker uses is really just a more efficient way of broadcasting his message. The social aspect of it is the conversation that takes place between the fans after he posts information or quotes. This, in my opinion, is a good thing. It generates political/civic conversation which to me is an indicator of people being concerned for their community. As far as anything social taking place between the constituents and the mayor on the platforms, that is more of an imagined relationship. But compared to the imagined relationship that the social networking tools used by obama’s campaign generated, the difference here is that Booker is a local character. If you like booker and participate in a civic activity, chance are you will see him and get to, at the very least, shake his hand, whereas with obama, you’ll be lucky to see him at any point in your lifetime.

It is for this reason that while the political use of social media to connect constituents with representatives may be illusory, I think that this illusion is of great benefit when applied to the local politics.

Special thanks to all the Booker fans who replied to my request for interviews!!Similar Posts:

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1.    Members that engage face-to-face are your most dedicated customers
2.    Your most dedicated customers are most engaged
3.    Your most engaged members contribute content (this is, by far, a minority, of your users)

“Converting the weak ties of users that know each other only as avatars and nicknames to     strong ties (friendships) means your highly-engaged users return to your site to be with their friends, and these friendships make more effective/ relevant the other engagement mechanisms in place (point systems, for example).”

This information was backed up by my findings in Randal Pinkett’s dissertation on the Camfield Estates network where his team drove participation to the network by offering classes on how to use the network.

“One of the early challenges was the “chicken-and-egg” phenomenon of building an online community: community members won’t join if there isn’t a critical mass online, and there won’t be a critical mass online until community members join. To overcome this hurdle, at least initially, we had residents register for the site as part of the introductory course. This ensured that once they received their computers and Internet connections that there would be other community members and classmates who were already on the site. In doing so, we hoped to create an immediate audience by registering as many people as possible in a relatively short period of time, as opposed to creating an audience gradually as a result of intermittent or sporadic registrations over a long period of time.” p.167-168

The third and final finding was on the idea of social objects. The idea of social objects in the world of social networking has to do with establishing a common point of interest within the community, a point of convergence that, going along with the party starter theme, gets everyone onto the dance floor.

“The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That’s why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about ’socio-material networks’, or just ‘activities’ or ‘practices’ (as I do) instead of social networks…Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs.” -http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html

So what can we take from this when thinking about ways to encourage participation on the NfN network? I think that NfN should incorporate all three components.

1) While I think they have done this in the past, they need to hold regular meetup events in each neighborhood to encourage the creation of a community both online and offline.
2) Offer classes. Already they have discussions around ways in which to organize for action. I think that they should have classes on this in each neighborhood that focus on the general concept and show up to use NfN as a tool
3) And I think this is the most important point, generate focus on the site by generating topics in the forums and blogs so as to promote a point of convergence to promote activity. While I am aware that this runs more or less counter to Pinkett’s point in my last post regarding social constructionism where he advocates for letting the users set the tone, I do think that we are confronted with the chicken and the egg issue with regards to user activity here. So to deal with that I think it best for NfN to take survey of issues facing the community and, in so many words, get the party started by generating the conversation.Similar Posts:

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The social networking site Neighbors for Neighbors provides individual networks for each neighborhood in Boston. The idea is to improve civic engagement in each community as well as increase visibility of social service resources. In my research, I will focus on two of the neighborhoods, look at how the sites are being used, and ask some of the users about their experience on the site. From there I will explore the concept of community based social networking through the lens of community informatics to learn more about the benchmarks for a successful network. I will also use the field of community informatics as a point of departure for learning about other such networks and their successes and challenges.

From this research I hope to get an idea of the what design and implementation methods have led to improved civic engagement and visibility of resources. I would also like to get an idea of how people see these networks as supplementing local government services.Similar Posts:

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