From the Chronicle of Higher Education issue dated December 14, 2001
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i16/16b01401.htm
Unplanned Obsolescence and the New Network Culture
By MARK C. TAYLOR
Although the Internet has been around for a few decades, widespread
debate about online education has coincided with the rise and fall of
the dot-com economy. As the dot-com frenzy spread, many institutions
rushed to find ways to participate in that "new" economy. Yet their
decision to develop online-education initiatives was usually the result
of a fear of being left behind or losing competitive advantage --
financial or educational -- rather than a coherent educational
philosophy and carefully crafted business strategy.
Furthermore, educators had little understanding of the implications of
the relevant social and economic changes occurring beyond the academy
and the radical implications of new technologies for teaching and
research. All too often, they saw the World Wide Web as a way to do
differently what they had always done, rather than to do something
significantly different. When the dot-com bubble eventually burst, many
members of the educational establishment took smug satisfaction in what
they regarded as the inevitable demise of "e-Ed."
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the dot-com meltdown
marks the end of online education. Fundamental and irreversible change
has occurred; we are in the midst of an extraordinary transition that
will affect every aspect of higher education. While such developments
can be described in many ways, they might best be understood as the
emergence of a new network culture.
The networks creating our altered situation include but surpass the
Internet. In the past several decades, the evolution of digital
capitalism along with multimedia conglomerates has created an
information-entertainment complex with unprecedented global power.
Information circulating in worldwide webs has become the "substance" of
new social, political, economic, and even biological processes. Such
networks harbor both creative and destructive possibilities. ....
Whether operating for good or ill within such expanding global networks,
walls, which once seemed secure, become permeable webs that both allow
and require new communication systems, circulation patterns, and
organizational structures.
To appreciate the scope of the changes, we should recognize that the
current organization of the university and structure of the curriculum
have remained remarkably consistent for more than 200 years. When Kant
formulated the blueprint for the modern university in "The Conflict of
the Faculties" [Der Streit der Fakultäten] (1798), he took the
industrial factory, organized for mass production, as his model.
Academic divisions and departments, Kant suggested, reflected the
division of labor necessary for efficient production. Courses, rolling
off the assembly line, were prepackaged like homogeneous products for
mass consumption.
Not that Kant extended the economic logic of the market to the entire
university. To the contrary, he divided the university into the "higher
faculties" (law, medicine, and theology), which were practically
oriented, and the "lower faculty" (consisting of most of what is now
included in the arts, humanities, and sciences), whose responsibility
for criticism required their protection from market forces and practical
concerns. Although we have seen numerous variations, modifications, and
extensions of the model Kant defined, his logic still informs the basic
structure of knowledge and the organization of the university today.
With the advent of network culture, however, that logic is obsolete. We
must rethink the entire educational process, including:
Teaching and research. For higher-education institutions and companies
interested in long-term benefits rather than short-term gains, the
dot-com crash created the opportunity to explore online education more
patiently and carefully. In the Internet world, the time from conception
to launch for start-ups has generally been no more than 18 months --
simply not long enough to devise new pedagogical strategies necessary
for online education. With the meltdown, things have slowed down, and we
can now establish processes for producing courses that take full
advantage of new media.
As colleges and universities are discovering, however, creating viable
online courses is difficult and expensive. Effective online education is
not, as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology proposes, simply
streaming video and putting course material online. New hardware and
software technologies combine with multimedia -- from graphics, audio,
and video to complex models, simulations, and animation -- to create
novel pedagogical resources and possibilities. Online education, in
other words, does not replicate the classroom; nor is it an alternative
form of the traditional book. When bits become your "ink," it is
necessary to write and teach with words, sounds, and images.
While the transformation of content is important, e-Ed alters the
structure of instruction and learning even more radically. Online
courses no longer have to be organized linearly or sequentially but can
be set up to allow multiple paths through the materials and remain
open-ended in ways that permit links with other online courses and
educational resources.
Consider, for example, a course on money. While exploring traditional
economic issues, the course might also include the historical
development of money, from its primitive forms through precious metals
and paper to electronic currency and derivatives. Literature (texts like
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug," Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man,
André Gide's The Counterfeiters, and William Gaddis's JR), art (the work
of Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, J.S.G. Boggs, and Jeff Koons), and
philosophy (the writings of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Georg Simmel)
could be used to broaden and enrich the subject. With the expansive
resources of the World Wide Web, one can cross and crisscross
traditional disciplinary boundaries in ways that generate new insights.
As more courses go online, it will also be possible to move between and
among different courses. People who need to review calculus to
understand economic analysis could click on the relevant mathematics
course. In a curriculum without walls, all courses form one complex
course that permits immediate access. As students become more Internet-
and media-savvy, they will demand such courses.
As elsewhere in e-commerce, mass production in education will give way
to mass customization. Instead of being homogeneous products, courses
could be crafted and modified to meet the needs of different
individuals. Students will be able to assemble their own courses from
the offerings of different professors; they will have more control over
not only when and where they learn, but also how and what they learn.
While traditional classrooms can no more replicate e-Ed than e-Ed can
replace the "real presence" of teachers and students, course content and
pedagogical strategies in bricks-and-mortar institutions will have to be
modified to reflect the changing structure of knowledge and new ways of
learning.
Similarly, in research, the World Wide Web transforms not only the form
of research and communication but also the content of what is
investigated. Both the extent and the speed of scholarly exchange are
increasing in ways that erode old disciplinary boundaries and promote
new areas of investigation.
...
The acceleration of communication renders traditional print media
inadequate and significantly alters the hierarchy of teaching and
research. The products of authors and instructors who take advantage of
the possibilities created by new software will become increasingly
indistinguishable. If online teaching is, in effect, publication, the
long-standing privilege of publication in hiring, promotion, and
institutional prestige will have to be re-evaluated. As e-education
becomes more sophisticated, colleges and universities will be under
increasing pressure to give professional credit for online courses
similar to that for traditional published materials. Which is more
valuable to an institution or society -- a book or an article read by 75
like-minded specialists in a subfield or a course taken by 10,000
students of all ages around the world?
Curriculum....One way to think about the difference between industrial
and network organization is as the contrast between modules and nodes.
The module is separate, distinct, and linear; the node is relational,
connected, and nonlinear. Instead of divisions and departments
comprising courses hierarchically ordered and sequentially arranged,
imagine multiple nodes organized nonhierarchically with manifold
connections to other nodes in a curriculum, which is constantly
changing. Each node is formed by the intersection of many lines of
investigation.
During this transitional period, trajectories of inquiry will emerge
from established divisions and departments. The trend is evident in the
growing popularity of interdepartmental courses and interdisciplinary
approaches. While those initiatives are an improvement on the
hyper-specialized approaches of the past, they are just the beginning.
Technological changes will eventually call into question the very nature
and structure of disciplines and departments.
As the webs in which we are entangled become more complex, it becomes
more productive to think of nodes in terms of problems, themes, or
issues rather than disciplines. Take, for example, the important area of
complexity studies. A node devoted to complexity would bring together
people working in the natural and social sciences as well as the arts
and humanities to explore theoretical questions and consider practical
problems.
... Since nothing is permanent in the evolving ecology of knowledge, a
curriculum that is hypertextual can adapt to shifts occurring both
within and beyond the university. As the rate of curricular change
accelerates, the question of what is worth teaching and learning
constantly must be rethought.
Internal organization and governance. Once the lines that separate
divisions and departments are permeable, the internal organization of
traditional colleges and universities must become much more fluid. The
gradual decline of established disciplines and increasingly rapid
faculty turnover will have a significant impact on university
governance.
...
The administrative changes will also have financial implications. With
the cost of education growing and the trend toward privatization
continuing, more faculty members will become engaged in fund raising.
Since government and foundations cannot provide necessary resources,
virtually everyone involved in the education business will have to
become entrepreneurs.
...
External collaboration. Moreover, to survive in the network culture,
competitors will increasingly have to cooperate. ...
It is no longer possible or perhaps even desirable for all institutions
to offer every subject. New technologies enable colleges, universities,
and cultural institutions to work together regionally, nationally, and
internationally. Such cooperation can range from outsourcing particular
courses or subjects to formal interinstitutional arrangements. In
addition to an initiative like Western Governors University, we should
explore the creation of more hybrids of virtual and traditional
education at the regional level.
When formal and informal arrangements extend beyond geographical regions
to national and international networks, both human resources and
curricular possibilities expand exponentially. Because any subject can
now be taught by any faculty member anywhere and anytime, in education,
as in industry, the possibility of "offshore" production will lead to a
decrease in the power of the local work force.
For example, more-sophisticated software now makes it unnecessary for
all teaching assistants to be on-site. Graduate students and younger
faculty members in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America now can
assist professors in the United States, and vice versa. The growing
pressure to unionize teaching assistants creates the likelihood that
colleges and universities will collaborate by forming pools of online
teaching assistants who can work with faculty members and students from
remote locations. (Any such arrangements would have to be fashioned in
ways to avoid monopolistic practices.) Or they will outsource ancillary
instructional responsibilities to for-profit companies, which can
provide and manage high-quality assistants more effectively and
economically without the threat of labor disruption.
As educational collaboration becomes more global, it will also be
necessary to devise new systems of credit and accreditation. Just as
students will be able to customize particular courses, so they will be
able to tailor their entire education by selecting from a globally
networked curriculum. Is an education in which students are required to
take the majority of their courses at Harvard University or Williams
College better than an education in which students can take some courses
from resident faculty members but most of their courses from the best
faculty members and artists at the University of Copenhagen, the
University of Oxford, Keio University, Qinghua University, the
University of San Marcos, or the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra?
In education, as in currency markets, floating exchange rates will allow
for adjustments in credit among competing institutions. Although many
students will continue to take most of their courses at one institution,
the pressure for the liberalization of credit policies will grow as it
becomes easier to study "abroad" while remaining at home. In all
likelihood, some institutions will enter into multilateral exchange
agreements and others will rely on for-profit international credit
brokers.
...
Contractual agreements among faculty members, universities, and private
industry, which are, of course, already well established in the natural
and some social sciences, will extend to the entire faculty. When
working in a digital environment, artists and humanists can produce
materials for the media and entertainment industries. Is a video game on
Las Vegas, or an interactive computer animation of the battles of
Alexander the Great, scholarship or entertainment? Is a multimedia
program in art history developed for the AARP more or less valuable than
a similar lecture course for 18-year-olds? New products like these can
be either created by faculty members and sold or commissioned by
business for specific markets.
The more that educational institutions learn about online education,
however, the more they realize that they face a difficult dilemma. They
cannot afford to ignore the new market, yet they also cannot afford the
high cost of producing state-of-the-art online courses -- which is often
less like streaming videos of lectures than it is like producing
full-length PBS documentaries. Again, collaboration will be required:
Colleges and universities should, and will, form partnerships and
alliances among themselves, as well as with responsible companies
committed to both educational excellence and economic viability.
Peril and opportunity are always intertwined, and never more so than in
today's world of higher education. Within and beyond the academy,
committed traditionalists confidently argue that the dot-com meltdown
shows that the opposition between the "old" and "new" economies was
specious from the outset. Yet the technologies enabling the new economy
are changing the old economy so thoroughly that the distinction between
old and new is misleading. Just as there is no part of the economy that
is not transformed by new technologies, so there is no aspect of
education that will not change significantly in network culture.
Although the transformations I have described seem inevitable to me, my
experience over the past decade on the local, national, and
international levels leaves me with no illusions about the difficulty of
implementing them. Too many educators and educational institutions
continue to oppose fundamental change and remain committed to outdated
models of, and strategies for, higher education. The resulting inertia
will be difficult to overcome. Yet those with eyes to see and the
imagination to understand the changes now occurring can look forward to
unprecedented opportunities; those who ignore or resist these changes
unwittingly court their own unplanned obsolescence.
Mark C. Taylor is a professor of humanities at Williams College and a
co-founder of the Global Education Network, a company that works with
colleges and professors to create online courses. He is the author of
The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, published this month
by the University of Chicago Press.
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