UtopicW1

The city is . . . a conscious work of art. . . .Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

     Conventional wisdom expects digital technologies to transform education by changing how learning takes place, improving it by using better cognitive strategies to transmit established curricular subjects. Upon realization, this expectation will be a happy eventuality. In the meantime, more certain but less noted – digital technologies change who provides what learning to whom. Information technology alters patterns of feasible study by facilitating activities that once were difficult. A new ecology of education emerges.

The ecology of utopic study

  •  To grasp what might emerge from obscurity, consider changes taking place globally over past and future decades. Five have significance, three in technology and two in demographics. The three technological changes envelop the world with interactive communications, digitizing humanity's cultural resources and affording any matter to any person, any place, any time. Demographic changes end once-in-a-lifetime education, confined primarily to schooling during childhood and adolescence. Instead, they make education continuous and ubiquitous, as each person reshapes, life-long, the skills and interests requisite for work and leisure. Further, the average lifespan lengthens, extending mature health and vigor, altering the characteristic stages in the experience of life. Let us observe more closely how these changes strengthen hitherto insignificant activities.

     With digital technologies, the power of "long tails" emerges, unexpected, and they potentially alter which pedagogical interactions will succeed. Capital costs of technology are high. With these invested, the incremental costs of human interactions through them plummet. This drop creates the long tail. Previously, advantage accrued when many parties executed a few standardized interactions. High-volume subjected costs to economies of scale — the best seller, the block-buster hit, mass production, endless measures of popularity. Now the low costs of digital transactions, whether frequent or occasional, undercut the economies achieved previously by top sellers. A huge back list, or its like, rises markedly in relative value. This big back list, in many different forms, the "long tail," comprises numerous possibilities, none of which need happen frequently, amounting in sum to a great buzz of productive activity. Clearinghouses that organize and exploit a long tail gain power, wealth, and influence: Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Wikipedia, and on. All thrive, offering many possibilities, each of interest to a very few.^[1] Phoenix University notwithstanding, no one yet works the long tail in higher education.

Social software on Web 2.0 creates educational opportunities. Once interactive communications seemed isolating, alienating, enclosing persons in a geekish cocoon, devoid of flesh and blood meaning. Virtual interaction via the telephone contradicts this appearance. Phones do not suppress human interaction; they supplement and facilitate a well-established human bond, namely conversation. On Web 2.0 people use multimedia and database technologies to engage in real social action – sharing interests, keeping up, introducing one friend to another, asking questions, giving help, kidding, organizing activity, explaining what, where, when, how, and why. People engaged in higher education extensively use social software, but their educational use of it has been sparse, having sunk excessive resources prematurely in packaging standard fare for delivery at a distance. Courses as such interest the bursar and registrar – the varied, complex activities engaging students and teachers have yet to adapt well to the Web. Third, open source! Unexpected, volunteer, decentralized, self-coordinating: the digital commons proves productive. Historically, the rural commons, so picturesque, was terribly tragic, unable to defend its finite fields from enclosure by legal sophisticates or from over-exploitation by pastoral beneficiaries. In contrast, the digital commons does not become tragic. Increasing use does not degrade it. Rather, the more people the digital commons, the more its resources expand and improve, the more people can employ them as holdings in common. And the digital commons can defend against enclosure and even encroach competitively on proprietary possessions. Open source production has become quickly prominent with Linux and dominant with Wikipedia. Peer production succeeds when many contributors can expand an initial core with numerous, well-specified additions. These production principles have yet to influence instructional design for higher education deeply.

Digital technologies are not encapsulated agents. They work in tandem with other conditions affecting the conduct of life. Since the mid 18th century, populations have flourished by making the human environment more organized, predictable, and manageable. Within self-made constraints, almost all have gained extensive opportunities for self-determination. The process continues, for it is far from complete.

A demography of ordered autonomy puts a high premium on education. As universal, compulsory schooling, followed by wide access to higher education, drove extensive cycles of change, a significant cultural lag resulted, isolating education in institutions that work for some and not for others. Several generations of critics have challenged the idea that education took place in the first fifth, or quarter, or even third of life, primarily through formal instruction. Reliance on early schooling alone would not meet the emerging uses for education, better understood. Life conditions required life-long learning situated, not apart from the rest of life, but deeply integrated in it. Neither schooling nor the higher learning has risen to this charge. Curricula, the scope and sequence of studies, pedagogical prescription and practice, and the whole architecture of education have remained what they long have been, made merely more consumerist at the margins. The collegiate program, developed for residential students, age 18 to 21, largely shapes expectations for different students, who early left the system and then return through postsecondary institutions to seek a skill or a degree. Home schooling, note the nomenclature, is not deschooling society. Initial online education has largely aped the forms and content of institutional pedagogy, as if Carnegie Units were the order of nature. While music, news, and entertainment have jumped spontaneously onto the Web, freely there, wherever, 24/7 for all, educators have yet to use media, new or old, to acquire a strong presence, continuous and ubiquitous in daily life.

Finally, consider consequences as people on average live longer, fully active lives, deeply affecting educational demographics. Many academics in their 60s, 70s, 80s, even 90s, are highly active, intellectually engaged, richly experienced, fully productive. Prevailing career patterns originated when scholars had usually spent their best energies by their mid-60s. A professor would normally finish advanced education by the early 30s; would then run the promotion ladder to tenure and full professor by the late 40s; and would conclude by working on a sustained plateau for some 20 years, retiring at 65. Now, with no mandatory retirement combined with prolonged longevity, the plateau can extend on and on, risking sclerotic self-repetition for the professor, programmatic obsolescence for the student, and a jam in recruitment, promotion, and tenure for the institution. Colleges and universities are trying to induce older professors into retirement, but at a financial cost, and with a loss of talent. A more creative extension of the academic career could put both to better use.

References

1. ↑ For a fuller discussion, see Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 2006).