The End of the University as We Know It?

The hallowed halls of learning are no longer the place they used to be, exclusive enclaves of learning that allowed those fortunate enough to attend to gain the skill sets and make the social contacts to climb the social hierarchy.

In short, maintaining bricks and mortar institutions, tenured faculty, and financially exploitive publishing practices to deliver post-secondary education is economically inefficient and cannot compete with the Internet delivery model.

Throughout the centuries, universities have grown around a physically situated knowledge repository known as a library. It made sense to locate professors, researchers, and students in close proximity to the information resources. Moreover, these cathedrals of knowledge could charge exorbitant fees to students desirous of securing their futures, which in turn allowed them to expand.

As post-secondary education became part of the post war, publicly-funded panoply of social services offered to the population at large, enrollment in universities sky-rocketed. Universal accessibility became the mark of a developed country.

However, thirty plus years of neoliberal politics has brought the existing university business model to a precipice. Even with generous student aid programs in place, the cost of maintaining traditional universities has outstripped the state's capacity to guarantee universal access to post-secondary education.

The return to the user-payer model of university access is effectively reducing the numbers of lower and lower middle class students who can afford to attend university, especially when current economic conditions make it very difficult for recent graduates to find employment that generates sufficient income to repay their student loans.

Rather than accepting entry into a wage slave existence, increasing numbers of potential university students are deciding that they simply cannot afford to attend a traditional university.

Fortunately, their future need not be bleak.

In a wired world, higher education can be delivered to millions at a fraction of a cost as compared to the tradition model. For example, Stanford's recent experiment in delivering an undergraduate course on artificial intelligence simultaneously to the 200 Stanford university students on campus and to approximately 100,000 students on line demonstrated that advances in information and communications technology make the traditional practice of bringing together a group of students in a lecture hall to hear the words to wisdom delivered by a professor appear quaint.

What remains to be done is to develop an appropriate certification process that recognizes that courses delivered via the Internet possesses the same intrinsic value of those delivered in the hallowed halls. MIT and Harvard are working together to address this need.

In my opinion, what's missing in the debate surrounding the increase in student fees in Quebec and the rising levels of student debt in the US is the notion that affordable university education can be delivered to those who desire it if the university business model is altered to take greater advantage of the economies of scale that the Internet offers.

But this means a large scale re-engineering of the present model, which will likely mean the loss of a great number of teaching positions as more and more courses migrate to the Web and an end to the lucrative business of academic publishing in favor of open access models.

Imagine being able to choose courses for credit from renown universities like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, the London School of Economics, the Sorbonne and do the course work from the comfort of your home and the public library.

We have the technology. We just need the collective will.

Universities Under Siege

With all those smiling freshman returning to campus you might not know it, but there is something afoot that indicates that the traditional university model is about to give way.

Take for example the course given on artificial intelligence at Stanford by two heavyweights from Google. There are 200 students enrolled who will attend the lectures in person, and, at the time of writing, there are more than 100,000 people who will take the same course at the same time on line.

Imagine if you will a professor lecturing 200 students sitting on folding chairs at centre field of the Rose Bowl and over 100,000 sitting in the stands each with a laptop or smart phone following the same lecture.

Those sitting at centre field have each paid $40,000 to have the privilege of being there while those in the stands are receiving the same information for free.

To say the least, this is a remarkable turn of events. As well, it raises important questions about the future of post secondary education.

Those enrolled at Stanford will upon successful completion of the course get credit towards a degree from a prestigious university while those taking the course on line will receive a teacher's certificate saying that they have completed the course.

How is it that the value of the information transmitted is so much higher when it is in analog (live, face-to-face) than in digital format? The information is the same but the context in which the information is completely different.

Moreover, if the information is ostensibly similar why is the entry price so high to have the opportunity to receive it in person? In other words, if we have the technology to disseminate the information at a next-to-nothing cost why are students being charged exorbitant fees to get a higher education? Whose interests are being served? The society at large or those who have the means of sending their progeny to expensive finishing schools?

Have we not turned our universities into modern day debtor prisons by first filling our youth with images of conspicuous consumption, telling them that the way to participate in such a culture is by obtaining a post-secondary education, requiring them to take on a huge debt load to complete their studies, and then upon graduation offering them low-paying, precarious employment at best?

This scenario is just another version of the company store in a one industry town:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store.

As traditional post-secondary education is becoming less and less affordable, it is becoming more and more an issue of class and intergenerational social justice. Either state-funded universities move to embrace the economies that Information and Communications Technologies provide so to ensure that there is democratic access to higher education or, as we have seen recently in England, there will be riots in the streets.

There Is No Sense of Place in the Wiredarchy

Growing up we had the importance of place drilled into our psyche. First, it's the idea of "getting into" university. Second, it's knowing your place in the pecking order and acting accordingly. According to the received wisdom of the day, mastering the two aspects of sense of place would allow us to move up the ladder of success.

That was all fine and well in a hierarchical world. Life moved slowly and predictably. Sticking to a well thought out plan made sense.

Fortunately, those days are gone. The institutions that they spawned are still around, but they are either undergoing metamorphosis or going the way of the dinosaur.

Today, we live as nodes within multiple networks of information flows. Hierarchies have become less robust as people, information, and energy move dynamically, coalescing temporarily in discernible organizational patterns that quickly mutate into new and unexpected constellations.

In other words, our relationships are less enduring and the roles that we agree to assume are far less rigid and more apt to be negotiated. Yet, tradition still maintains its hold, often to the detriment of the realization of new possibilities that wired world now affords.

Increasingly, command and control control methods are being challenged. In education, the idea that we should be assembled into a shared physical space and learn en masse is making less and less sense with the rise of digital technologies. With a broadband Internet connection it doesn't matter where you are geographically if you want to participate in the production and consumption of knowledge. As a result, the question of having privileged access to information as is the case in academia is being hotly contested. More and more, universities and their research affiliates are turning towards open access methodologies that in effect push the pursuit of knowledge far beyond the hallowed halls of learning.

As this occurs, there is a marked transfer of power away from the campus that is dispersed across a global information resource network. Indeed, what is the value of being in close proximity to an information resource when the information is being made accessible in a ubiquitous digital network? In a wired world, "going" to the library or "attending" a lecture seems quaint.

As we would expect, this dematerialization of the exchange of information also impacts on the political economy, bringing about fundamental change to the both the market and those who would try to regulate its activities. For instance, commerce no longer respects international borders, which means that the political class is less and less able to control economic outcomes, which in turn means that one's affiliation to other citizens that share a geographic space is less important than one's affiliation to the flow of information and revenue from which one gains one's livelihood.

In this brave new world, the social architecture of hierarchy is obsolete. Regardless of the intelligence of those who occupy the privileged positions within the hierarchy, its limited information processing capabilities are maladapted to an environment fraught with dynamic change. An organization characterized by a predominantly top-down flow of information cannot compete with a complex network when the sheer volume of information that the organization needs to attend to overwhelms those at the top of the hierarchy.

Consequently, as the 21st century plays out, we will see hierarchy give way to the wiredarchy as organizations seek to leverage the gains that information resource networks bring about. Importantly, rank and privilege will give way to information value as the determining factor in which organizations will build their social architecture and those who create it will no longer be held or kept in their place by those who add little if anything to the organization.

Enhanced Human Intelligence: How My iPad Makes Me Smarter and Slimmer

Of course, the iPad by itself won't add points to your IQ or take inches off your waste. It depends on how you use it. In my case, I use my iPad as a point of departure to search for information, and I also use it to have information of personal interest pushed my way.

When it comes to processing information, in my opinion there is no question that when reading digital texts supported by a powerful application, I have become more intelligent. My favorite example is reading an ebook using the Kindle app.

Not only can you just tap on a word to find its meaning, two links appear on the bottom of the screen: one for Google, the other for Wikipedia. If you are unfamiliar with a term, a concept, or a context, tap on either link to begin your search. Serendipitous discovery awaits. You may return quickly to the original text or you may end your session exploring an entirely different train of thought.

The key point is that when you return to the original text, your cognitive frame from which you process the information has been enriched. Repeat the procedure over and over again and the number of dots that you are able to identify and link increases, which in turn increases the number of dots that you can connect. In other words, the web of information that your are aware of becomes thicker with connections and greater in volume.

With regard to my battle of the bulge, I finally have gained the upper hand as a result of the information that is pushed towards me by my personal magazine, Zite. Having chosen Health and Exercise as a section, I have indicated the articles that I liked and I continue to receive the latest articles having do to with fitness and diet, often supported by links to videos and research that has given me a better understanding of what works and why.

For example, I was stuck weighing more than I wanted to despite the fact that I train four to five times a week. As a result of finding out that weight loss is not simply a question of calories in and calories out -- all calories are not equal when it comes to your metabolism -- I was able to make the necessary changes to my diet and my exercise regime that enables me to drop the extra pounds.

Two key pieces of information were pushed towards me. The first is the effect added sugar on your metabolism that I stumbled upon from reading an article from the New York Times that had a link to the seminal YouTube video, Sugar the Bitter Truth. The second is that the key to weight loss is to manage your hormonal system, in particular the secretion and uptake of insulin, and not to imagine that you can simply burn off the calories that you consume by exercising.

Simply put, by modifying my diet so to avoid insulin spikes and changing my workouts so to include full-body, high intensity interval training so that I burn more calories while at rest, I am succeeding to get rid of the extra fat that I have been carrying on my body around for years because of the misinformation that I have been carrying around in my head.

This is where it gets spooky.

Left to my own resources, I was unable to access the information that I needed to bring about the changes that I wanted. However, once I became linked up to the algorithms driving my Zite application, I quickly accessed the new and pertinent information that is in the process of changing my appearance.

If we take the human form to be the result of the information encoded genetically that interacts with its environment, the change in the information flow brought about in my case by my iPad and my Zite application changed the manner in which I process information concerning my behavior, which in turn changes the flow of energy and information within my body.

By changing the flow of information, my physical form has been altered and this has occurred as a consequence of my intelligence both directing and being directed by a smart algorithm.

The effects of the change in the flow of information are rather easy to notice when it manifests immediate physical changes at the level of the individual.

What I find more interesting is how the changes in the flow of information affects societies at large. We now live in a time the can be best described as the the digital information revolution. As our information and communications technology evolves, it changes the social architecture that provides structure to our lives.

I look forward to blogging about this subject and sharing with you what I find to be joyful discoveries.