I rely on Nicholas Carr to be the fly in the ointment to all things hailed as utopian about the Internet. The critic's view of the online learning “revolution”.
Online vesion of college courses are attracting hundreds of thousands of students, millions of dollars in funding, and accolades from university administrators. Is this a fad, or is higher education about to get the overhaul it needs?
Nicholar Carr
MIT Technology Review, 27 September 2012
Phi Beta Iota: This is a better overview article than those previously posted here.
Publishing, music, shopping, journalism – all revolutionised by the internet. Next in line? Education. Now US academics are offering world-class tuition – free – to anyone who can log on, anywhere in the world, is this the end of campus life?
Two years ago, I sat in the back seat of a Toyota Prius in a rooftop car park in California and gripped the door handle as the car roared away from the kerb, headed straight towards the roof's edge and then at the last second sped around a corner without slowing down. There was no one in the driver's seat.
It was the prototype of Google's self-driving car and it felt a bit like being Buck Rogers and catapulted into another century. Later, I listened to Sebastian Thrun, a German-born professor of artificial intelligence at Stanford University, explain how he'd built it, how it had already clocked up 200,000 miles driving around California, and how one day he believed it would mean that there would be no traffic accidents.
A few months later, the New York Times revealed that Thrun was the head of Google's top-secret experimental laboratory Google X, and was developing, among other things, Google Glasses – augmented reality spectacles. And then, a few months after that, I came across Thrun again.
The self-driving car, the glasses, Google X, his prestigious university position – they'd all gone. He'd resigned his tenure from Stanford, and was working just a day a week at Google. He had a new project. Though he didn't call it a project. “It's my mission now,” he said. “This is the future. I'm absolutely convinced of it.”
The future that Thrun believes in, that has excited him more than self-driving cars, or sci-fi-style gadgets, is education. Specifically, massive online education free to all. The music industry, publishing, transportation, retail – they've all experienced the great technological disruption. Now, says Thrun, it's education's turn.
Truly disruptive innovation — the kind that creates new markets, opens up new ways of looking at problems, and greatly expands wealth — is in short supply, and that is what is dragging the current economy. There isn’t enough innovation because business leaders and managers have become too focused on short-term gains.
That’s the view of disruptive innovation guru and Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, who, in a New York Timeseditorial, explains why America’s innovation system has gone off the tracks.
Basically, the economy has long been driven by three types of innovation that all industries cycle through: empowering innovations, which transform complicated and costly products available to a few into simpler, cheaper products available to the many (think Ford’s Model T); sustaining innovations, in which old products are replaced with new models (think Toyota’s Prius); and efficiency innovations, which reduce the cost of making and distributing existing products and services (think Geico in online insurance underwriting).
The problem these days, Christensen says, is that instead of cycling through these three phases, businesses are stuck on efficiency innovations — streamlining, paring, cutting and squeezing. While efficiency innovations liberate capital, there isn’t enough energy and resources going to empowering innovations — which generates new wealth and opportunity within underserved or unserved parts of markets.
Only an expert case officer with deep contacts can hope to be able to respond to the wide variety of requests for information. In today's fast moving, crisis-of-the-day type world, the question becomes “Where can I find good sources of information … on this particular topic … quickly?”
(NOTE: In this essay I intentionally subsume the thinking processes of official decision-makers into the thinking processes of the citizenry as a whole. I realize that official decision-makers can and do make decisions independently of the will of the people, unless that public will is united and organized. But elite decisions made independently of the public do not qualify as “public thinking” – at least in any democratic sense – and in this essay I am attempting to explore the nature of public thinking so that it can be upgraded and empowered to impact public policy. So here we will look at the thinking processes of the entire population and mini-publics thereof as they go about living a relatively democratic life.)
How can we think clearly about the collective thinking processes of a whole population in a democracy? How do populations reflect on public issues and come to conclusions about collective action and public policy? What follows is one framework for sorting out the different dimensions of public thinking and the quality of that thinking process.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The most basic form of public thinking is, of course, what goes on in the minds of individual citizens as they think about public affairs. We see manifestations of this – commonly called “public opinion” – in polls, in voting, in online “citizen input” sites, and in various other visible forms of citizenship that reflect the opinions of individual citizens in the population as a whole.
Public opinion evolves in a message-rich environment that includes – at the next higher level of public thinking – news media and commentaries from pundits and partisans, on talk shows and blogs, and in online forums, letters to the editor, and public hearings. This public thinking often takes the form of mediated or witnessed conversations: Diverse (often polarized) voices express their views to each other while being directly or indirectly witnessed by the public. Our society depends heavily on this kind of media-driven interaction to collectively reflect on its public issues and shape the views of its citizens and decision-makers.
