Brainstorm in Progress: change

Showing posts with label change. Show all posts

Monday, October 15, 2012

From Abelard to Apple with Richard DeMillo

Richard DeMillo (Wikipedia)

Today's presentation in our MOOC, "The Current and Future State of Higher Education" featured Rich DeMillo, according to his introduction, he is "a Distinguished Professor of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the seventh ranked public university in the U.S. He also currently serves as the Director of the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U). He returned to academia in 2002 as the John P. Imlay Jr. Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech, after a career as an executive in industry and government. He was Chief Technology Officer for Hewlett-Packard, where he had worldwide responsibility for technology and technology strategy. Prior to joining HP, he was Vice President and General Manager in charge of Information and Computer Sciences Research at Telcordia Technologies in Morristown, New Jersey, where he oversaw the development of many internet and web-based innovations. He has also directed the Computer and Computation Research Division of the National Science Foundation. During his twenty-year academic career, he has also held academic positions at Purdue University, The University of Wisconsin and the University of Padua (Italy)."

Apple II Plus computer. (Wikipedia)

He is the author of the book Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities (MIT Press 2011). This is the book description from Amazon: "The vast majority of American college students attend two thousand or so private and public institutions that might be described as the Middle--reputable educational institutions, but not considered equal to the elite and entrenched upper echelon of the Ivy League and other prestigious schools. Richard DeMillo has a warning for these colleges and universities in the Middle: If you do not change, you are heading for irrelevance and marginalization. In Abelard to Apple, DeMillo argues that these institutions, clinging precariously to a centuries-old model of higher education, are ignoring the social, historical, and economic forces at work in today's world. In the age of iTunes, open source software, and for-profit online universities, there are new rules for higher education. DeMillo, who has spent years in both academia andin industry, explains how higher education arrived at its current parlous state and offers a road map for the twenty-first century. He describes the evolving model for higher education, from European universities based on a medieval model to American land-grant colleges to Apple's iTunes U and MIT's OpenCourseWare. He offers ten rules to help colleges reinvent themselves (including "Don't romanticize your weaknesses") and argues for a focus on teaching undergraduates. DeMillo's message--for colleges and universities, students, alumni, parents, employers, and politicians--is that any college or university can change course if it defines a compelling value proposition (one not based in "institutional envy" of Harvard and Berkeley) and imagines an institution that delivers it."

He started out by saying that "Traditional American universities are no longer the gatekeepers." I loved hearing this because most of the hand wringing I hear and read about MOOCs are about getting the model to work in such a way that traditional colleges don't have to change. Or how to redefine MOOCs to preserve the gatekeeper function. "Traditional universities are the incumbents.." He compares where universities are with newspapers. We are still using a 100 year old model of higher education that was created for a different population with different needs. He says that experiments in higher ed stopped 50 years ago. There has only been one new research university since the turn of the century.

He discussed "Three Tiers" of education institutions - Elite (70 - 75), Middle (1000's), Proprietary (100's). This model has been keeping the costs up for education. Pew found that the current model is non-sustainable. The economic realities include:

Higher education is a multi-sided market (many stake-holders with competing needs, portfolio of services, they are a platform)
Bypass economies (Services are desired by many, affordable by few.)
In a marketplace with many alternatives, the only way to survive is to have

Unassailable brand (only the Elites have global brands)
Best price (the Middle wastes money)
Best value proposition (the Middle has misjudged its value)

He discussed who will succeed over the next 100 years: defining value and architecting form. Architecting means changing your institution to balance faculty and student centrism; create the best technology; cut costs in have; meaningful measures of success; societal success.

How do the Middle colleges waste money?

Sponsored research is usually viewed as a way to expand the bottom line. A research university often spends two dollars for every one they get in sponsored research.
The way that we view capital plants - spending a million dollars on climbing walls in dorms
Intercollegiate athletics saps the moral and financial strength of the institution.

I think the cost of textbooks should be thrown in here too.

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Innovation: Of Tide Mills and TED Talks

Tide mills, along with riverine ship mills, were a major early medieval technological advance, allowing to tap the tidal power along the Atlantic Coast for milling. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Watching TED Talks this morning made me think about how different the cultures of innovation are now and a thousand years ago. The TED Talks tend to promote the myth of the lone, gifted super genius entrepreneur. Nothing particularly wrong about that but it is a cultural construct and myth that rarely acknowledges the past work of others, graduate students, adjuncts, the labor or the laborers, the dead ends that others went down so you didn't have to, and positions of privilege. I would like to see a "TED Talk" of a 6th Century Irish monk from the west coast of Ireland to talk about alternative sustainable energy and if they did that, we would notice a lot of really familiar ideas and "innovations" such as tide mills.

Tidal mills were used since Roman times for grinding mills for cereals (wheat flour) and salt. They have existed for centuries (possibly millennia in some places) along the European Atlantic coast (Ireland, Holland, Britain, Belgium, France, Portugal and Spain), located mainly in pipes, canals and rivers, where the potential energy of the tides was maximal, which allowed them to run for about six hours by flood-tide cycle. They basically existed where ever the Romans built roads. And they were also picked up later by the monasteries who were often headed up by missionaries from Rome.

I don't know if our star monk could bring in a Powerpoint presentation - maybe he could tell the highlights of the story in stained glass or in an illustrated parchment. But notice that we don't have a record of that particular monk. We don't because they tended not to see themselves as tenure track wunderkind but as a part of a community and, for good or ill, part of the "Great Chain of Being." I think if your innovations survive a thousand years, you should at least get rewarded with a sabbatical or something. We know of very few Roman or monastic innovators by their names. There was learning, apprenticeship, and mastery but it was for a community and tended to not be for any one person's particular gain. No one copyrighted or patented the aqueduct. These were truly, in the best sense of the word, civic works.

The TED Talk I listened to this morning was with David Sadoway who is developing liquid metal batteries. I loved that he gave a shout out to Volta, and his graduate students and assistants - that happens rarely in these talks, mostly because they are so pressed for time and they have to get the ideas out there in that small amount of time.

Which brings me to my next point about cultures of innovation: I love hearing that the Chinese can't innovate: they invented the compass, gunpowder, paper, and the printing press to go with it. What they don't have is a culture of mentorship, entrepreneurship, and creativity that David Sadoway talks about. When they get that, Silicon Valley will seem like a pretty quaint little place.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Education and the Scientific Method

It is interesting to me that education is one of those fields where everyone has a tenaciously held opinion about what it is, how it works, or why it doesn't despite not having any training or background in the field beyond having been educated. For myself, that is like saying "Of course I can sew my own jacket, I have been wearing one for years" or "I can fix your car; I have been driving since I was a kid." Pronouncements on the credibility or the veracity of learning theories or tools come fast and furious from people who do not engage in education as a discipline in itself or its research. This is why we still get teachers that tell us "they don't let" their students use Wikipedia, quote from blogs, or will ever consider using Second Life, etc. I mean, insert whatever-it-is-they-do-not-quite-understand here. These are the same students, when sent to the library to research geology or anthropology do not come back with citations from "Chariots of the Gods," hollow earth literature, or other non-academically viable sources. The students have the critical thinking skills required to go into a library, and despite the library containing books on astrology or conspiracy theories, that sort of thing tends not to be cited by students. Why can't instructors have the same faith in students on the internet? Who said it was our job to "let" or not let the students do anything? I won't harp on Wikipedia further because there is already enough actual research from journals like Nature that say that Wikipedia articles were shown to be just as accurate as anything in peer reviewed articles. The problem with things like Wikipedia or learning online in any form is that it is new. Books and traditional journals safely fit into the framework of traditional teaching. The increasing amount of available information, the users ability to participate in the creation of that information, and the myriad ways of accessing and aggregating that information are all shaking that traditional framework to its 1200 year-old foundation. All of a sudden it is very difficult for traditional teachers to evaluate online sources, information and tools because their sources of peer-reviewed information are always printed one to two years late with sources that are three to four years old - an eternity on the internet. And here we introduce fear. The last thing you do when you are afraid is ask questions: you certainly aren't going to bother with research, create an hypothesis, test it, and analyze data. You are going to run straight to drawing your conclusions and broadcasting your "results" because you feel threatened. This has never been about whether something is a good teaching tool or not but about our ability to adapt to change. Good teachers are often good communicators and when good communicators connect with tools that facilitate communication and interaction, good teaching happens whether that tool is a clay tablet and a stylus or a virtual world.