25/04/2010 23:40Edge: THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY By Don Tapscott

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In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is thebroadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of informationfrom transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is thetransmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formulagoes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student,you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goalis to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice andrepetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me whenI test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in whichthe notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without goingthrough the brains of either.

THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY [6.4.09]

By Don Tapscott

Introduction

In his Edge feature "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus", Clay Shirkynoted that after WWII we were faced with something new: "free time. Lotsand lots of free time. The amount of unstructured time among the educatedpopulation ballooned, accounting for billions of hours a year. And what didwe do with that time? Mostly, we watched TV."

In "The End of Universal Rationality", Yochai Benkler explored the socialimplications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s.Benkler has been looking at the social implications of the Internet andnetwork societies since the early 90s. He saw the end of an era:

For those of us like me who have been working on the Internetfor years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free softwareand you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn'tencounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that peoplecreate and exchange, and the valuable actual software thatpeople create, without an understanding that something much

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more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of thelast 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there,because we were used in the industrial system to think in theseterms.

Benkler believes that these "phenomena on the Net are not ephemeral".And he has spent the last 20 years trying to get his head around theprocess of understanding what is transpiring.

In a Reality Club discussion "On 'Is Google Making Us Stupid' By NicholasCarr" W. Daniel Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, DouglasRushkoff and others explored the future of the printed book.

And Shirky, in his recent piece "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable",(with comments from Nicholas Carr, Martin Wattenberg and FernandaViégas, Marc Frons) wrote:

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sicknessin an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, whileemployees who have the temerity to suggest that what seemsto be happening is in fact happening are herded into InnovationDepartments, where they can be ignored en masse. Thisshunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists hasdifferent effects on different industries at different times. Oneof the effects on the newspapers is that many of their mostpassionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a worldin which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

Enter Don Tapscott, who is looking at the challenges the digital revolutionposes to the fundamental aspects of the University.

"Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning", he writes."There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of theUniversity — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gapbetween the model of learning offered by many big universities and thenatural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn."

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podiumin front of a large group of students, is still a fixture ofuniversity life on many campuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated inthe learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up inan interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled onGoogle and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on theprofessor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animatedconversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education,not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for theIndustrial Age, or even for boomers. These students aremaking new demands of universities, and if the universities tryto ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

Contrary to Nicholas Carr's proposition that Google is making us stupid,Tapscott counters with the following:

My research suggests these critics are wrong. Growing updigital has changed the way their minds work in a manner thatwill help them handle the challenges of the digital age. They're

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used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle theinformation overload. They expect a two-way conversation.What's more, growing up digital has encouraged this generationto be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting fora trusted professor to tell them what's going on, they find outon their own on everything from Google to Wikipedia.

This is a topic that is worthy of a serious conversation by the Edgecommunity and I hope to present comments from contributors in futureEdge editions.

— John Brockman

DON TAPSCOTT is the author of 13 books on new technology in society,most recently Grown Up Digital. He recently completed a $4 million dollarinvestigation of the Net Generation. He is Chairman of the think tanknGenera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School ofManagement, University of Toronto.

Don Tapscott's Edge Bio Page

REALITY CLUB: James O'Donnell, Marc D. Hauser

THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY

For fifteen years, I've been arguing that the digital revolution will challengemany fundamental aspects of the University. I've not been alone. In 1998,none other than, Peter Drucker predicted that big universities would be"relics" within 30 years.

Flash forward to today and you'd be reasonable to think that we have beenquite wrong. University attendance is at an all time high. The percentage ofyoung people enrolling in degree granting institutions rose over 115% from1969-1970 to 2005-2007, while the percentage of 25- to 29-year-oldAmericans with a college degree doubled. The competition to get into thegreatest universities has never been fiercer. At first blush the universityseems to be in greater demand than ever.

Yet there are troubling indicators that the picture is not so rosy. And I'mnot just talking about the decimation of university endowments by thecurrent financial meltdown.

Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the webinexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving bothas a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange betweenpeople.

Meanwhile on campus, there is fundamental challenge to the foundationalmodus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically,there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big

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universities and the natural way that young people who have grown updigital best learn.

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front ofa large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on manycampuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-alland the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, whohave grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled onGoogle and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for adetailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. Theywant an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have beenperfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These studentsare making new demands of universities, and if the universities try toignore them, they will do so at their peril.

The model of pedagogy, of course, is only one target of criticism directedtoward universities.

The Many Challenges to the University

Most resources of large universities are directed towards research, notlearning. The universities are not primarily institutes of higher learning, butinstitutes for science and research. In his book Rethinking Science, MichaelGibbons developed a scathing critique of the current model science asconducted in the university.

Recently the questioning has heated up on other fronts. In the New YorkTimes last month, Mark Taylor, chairman of Columbia University's religiondepartment, whipped up a storm of academic controversy with aprovocative OpEd page article called "The End of University as We Know It".

"Graduate education," he began, "is the Detroit of higher learning. Mostgraduate programs in American universities produce a product for whichthere is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) anddevelop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfieldswithin subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a fewlike-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over$100,000 in student loans)." The key problem, he noted, began with Kantin his 1798 work, "The Conflict of the Faculties." Kant argued thatuniversities should "handle the entire content of learning by massproduction, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch ofthe sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as itstrustee."

Taylor argued that graduate education must be restructured at afundamental level to move away from the ultra-narrow scholarship. Amongother things, he called for more cross-disciplinary inquiry, the creation ofproblem-focused programs, with a sunset clause, as well as morecollaboration between all educational institutions, and the abolition oftenure. One week later, the outcry from fellow academics filled the entireletters page on the Sunday New York Times. One of his own colleagues atColumbia said it was "alarming and embarrassing" to hear "crass anti-intellectualism" emerge from his own institution. Another academic accusedTaylor of "poisoning the waters of higher education."

The Model of Pedagogy

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Whatever the merits of Taylor's call to restructure higher education, I thinkhe is right to call for a deep debate on how universities function in anetworked society. Yet I think he misses the most fundamental challenge tothe university as we know it. The basic model of pedagogy is broken."Broadcast learning" as I've called it is no longer appropriate for the digitalage and for a new generation of students who represent the future oflearning.

In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is thebroadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of informationfrom transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is thetransmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formulagoes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a studentyou're an empty vassal and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goalis to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice andrepetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me whenI test you."

The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of theteacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains ofeither.

As someone who gives many lectures a year, I appreciate the irony of thisview. But I understand that my lectures are not a good way of learning.They play a limited role of interesting an audience, changing their view orpossibly motivating them to do something different. But I dare say that 90percent of what I've said is lost.

True, this broadcast model is enhanced in some disciplines through essays,labs and even seminar discussions. And of course many professors areworking hard to move beyond this model. However, it remains dominantoverall.

Technology and the web provide an important element of a new model, butso far few have adopted it. If someone frozen 300 years ago miraculouslycame alive today and looked at the professions — a physician in anoperating theater, a pilot in a jumbo cockpit, a engineer designing anautomobile in a CAD system — they would surely marvel at howtechnologies had transformed the knowledge work. But if they walked intoa university lecture hall, they would no doubt be comforted that somethings have not changed.

The New Generation of Students

The broadcast model might have been perfectly adequate for the baby-boomers, who grew up in broadcast mode, watching 24 hours a week oftelevision (not to mention being broadcast to as children by parents, asstudents by teachers, as citizens by politicians, and when then entered theworkforce as employees by bosses). But young people who have grown updigital are abandoning one-way TV for the higher stimulus of interactivecommunication they find on the Internet. In fact television viewing isdropping and TV has become nothing more than ambient media for youth— akin to Muzak. Sitting mutely in front of a TV set — or a professor —doesn't appeal to or work for this generation. They learn differently bestthrough non-sequential, interactive, asynchronous, multi-tasked andcollaborative

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Young Americans under 30 are the first to have grown up digital. Growingup at a time when cell phones, the Internet, texting and Facebook are asnormal as the refrigerator. This interactive media immersion at a formativestage of life has affected their brain development and consequently the waythey think and learn.

Some writers, of course, think that Google makes you stupid; it's so hard toconcentrate and think deeply amid the overwhelming amounts of bits ofinformation online, they contend. Mark Bauerlein, an English professor atEmory University, even calls them the "dumbest generation" in his recentbook on the topic.

My research suggests these critics are wrong. Growing up digital haschanged the way their minds work in a manner that will help them handlethe challenges of the digital age. They're used to multi-tasking, and havelearned to handle the information overload. They expect a two-wayconversation. What's more, growing up digital has encouraged thisgeneration to be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting for atrusted professor to tell them what's going on, they find out on their ownon everything from Google to Wikipedia.

If universities want to adapt the teaching techniques to their currentaudience, they should, as I've been saying for years, make significantchanges to the pedagogy. And the new model of learning is not onlyappropriate for youth — but increasingly for all of us. In this generation'sculture is the new culture of learning.

The professors who remain relevant will have to abandon the traditionallecture, and start listening and conversing with the students — shiftingfrom a broadcast style and adopting an interactive one. Second, they shouldencourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process ofdiscovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the professor'sstore of information. Third, they need to encourage students to collaborateamong themselves and with others outside the university. Finally, theyneed to tailor the style of education to their students' individual learningstyles.

Because of technology this is now possible. But this is not fundamentallyabout technology per se. Rather it represents a change in the relationshipbetween students and teachers in the learning process.

The Most Vulnerable Universities

The ability to engage young people at university obviously depends on theinstitution, and the individual professor. The great liberal arts colleges aredoing a wonderful job of stimulating young minds because with bigendowments and small class sizes students can have more of a customizedcollaborative experience. My son Alex graduated from Amherst College, asmall undergraduate university with a student teacher ratio of 8-1. Histeachers included a Pulitzer prize winner, Nobel Laureate and overallprofessors who live to work with students who enable them to learn.

But the same cannot be said of many of the big universities that regardtheir prime role to be a centre for research, with teaching as aninconvenient afterthought, and class sizes so large that they only want to"teach" is through lectures.

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These universities are vulnerable, especially at a time when students canwatch lectures online for free by some of the world's leading professors onsites like Academic Earth. They can even take the entire course online, forcredit. According to the Sloan Consortium, a recent article in Chronicle ofHigher Education tells us, "nearly 20 per cent of college students — some3.9 million people — took an online course in 2007, and their numbers aregrowing by hundreds of thousands each year. The University of Phoenixenrolls over 200,000 each year."

The New Model

Some leading educators are calling for this kind of massive change; one ofthese is Richard Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute ofTechnology. He says the education model has to change to suit thisgeneration of students. Smart but impatient, they like to collaborate andthey reject one-way lectures, he notes. While some educators view this aspandering to a generation, Sweeney is firm: "They want to learn, but theywant to learn only from what they have to learn, and they want to learn itin a style that is best for them."

There are shining examples of interactive education, though. Dr. MariaTerrell, who teaches calculus at Cornell University, used an interactivemethod that's part of a program called "Good Questions," which is fundedby the National Science Foundation.

One strategy being used in this program is called just-in-time teaching; it isa teaching and learning strategy that combines the benefits of Web-basedassignments and an active-learner classroom where courses are customizedto the particular needs of the class. Warm-up questions, written by thestudents, are typically due a few hours before class, giving the teacher anopportunity to adjust the lesson "just in time," so that classroom time canbe focused on the parts of the assignments that students struggled with.Harvard professor Eric Mazur, who uses this approach in his physics class,puts it this way: "Education is so much more than the mere transfer ofinformation. The information has to be assimilated. Students have toconnect the information to what they already know, develop mentalmodels, learn how to apply the new knowledge, and how to adapt thisknowledge to new and unfamiliar situations.

This technique produces real results. An evaluation study of 350 Cornellstudents found that those who were asked "deep questions" (that elicithigher-order thinking) with frequent peer discussion scored noticeablyhigher on their math exams than students who were not asked deepquestions or who had little to no chance for peer discussion. Dr. Terrellexplains: "It's when the students talk about what they think is going onand why, that's where the biggest learning occurs for them…. You can hearpeople sort of saying, 'Oh I see, I get it.' … And then they're explaining tosomebody else … and there's an authentic understanding of what's goingon. So much better than what would happen if I, as the teacher person,explain it. There's something that happens with this peer instruction."

Interactive education enables students to learn at their own pace. I sawthis myself back in the mid-1970s when I was taking a statistics course formy graduate degree in educational psychology at the University of Albertain Canada. It was one of the first classes conducted online — aneducational groundbreaker from Dr. Steve Hunka, a visionary in computer-mediated education. This was before PCs, so we sat down in front of a

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computer terminal that was connected to a computer-controlled slidedisplay. I could stop at any time and review, and test myself to see how Iwas doing. The exam was online too.

There were no lectures. Just as well: the statistics lecture is by definition abust. There is no "one-size-fits-all" for statistics – everyone in the lecturehall is either bored or doesn't get it. Instead, we got face-to-face time withDr. Hunka, who was freed up from being a transmitter of data to someonewho customized a learning experience for each of us, one on one.

Back then, online learning was expensive, but today the tools on the Netmake it a great way to teach and free up the teacher to design the learningexperience and converse with the students on an individual and moremeaningful basis. It works. The research evidence is very strong and datesback years: "Compared with students enrolled in conventionally taughtcourses, students who use well-crafted computer-mediated instruction ...generally achieve higher scores on summary examinations, learn theirlessons in less time, like their classes more, and develop more positiveattitudes towards the subject matter they're learning," according to anarticle as long ago as 1997 called "Technology in the Classroom: fromTheory to Practice," which appeared in Educom Review. "These results holdfor a broad range of students stretching elementary to college students,studying across a broad range of disciplines, from mathematics to the socialsciences to the humanities."

Challenging the Purpose of the University

The issue of pedagogy raises a deeper issue — the purpose of theuniversity. In the old model, teachers taught and students were expectedto absorb vast quantities of content. Education was about absorbingcontent and being able to recall it on exams. You graduated and you wereset for life — just "keeping" up in your chosen field. Today when yougraduate you're set for say, 15 minutes. If you took a technical course halfof what you learned in the first year may be obsolete by the 4th year. Whatcounts is your capacity to learn lifelong, to think, research, find information,analyze, synthesize, contextualize, critically evaluate it; to apply researchto solving problems; to collaborate and communicate.

But now that students can obviously find the information they're looking forin an instant online in the crania of others online, this old model doesn'tmake any sense. It's not only what you know that really counts when yougraduate; it's how you navigate in the digital world, and what you do withthe information you discover. This new style of learning, I believe, will suitthem.

Universities should be places to learn, not to teach.

Net Geners, immersed in digital technology, are keen to try new things,often at high speed. They want university to be fun and interesting. Sothey should enjoy the delight of discovering things for themselves. AsSeymour Papert, one of the world's foremost experts on how technologycan provide new ways to learn put it: "The scandal of education is thatevery time you teach something, you deprive a child of the pleasure andbenefit of discovery."

A Challenge to Teaching

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John Seely Brown is director emeritus of Xerox PARC and a visiting scholarat USC. He noticed that when a child first learns how to speak, she or he istotally immersed in a social context and highly motivated to engage inlearning this new, amazingly complex system of language. It got him tothinking that "once you start going to school, in some ways you start tolearn much slower because you are being taught, rather than what happensif you're learning in order to do things that you yourself care about…. Veryoften just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about letsyou appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to honor themysteries of the world, you're kind of always willing to probe things … youcan actually be joyful about discovering something you didn't know … andyou can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stagefor lifelong inquiry."

Another fixture of old-style learning is the assumption that students shouldlearn on their own. Sharing notes in an exam hall, or collaborating on someof the essays and homework assignments, was strictly forbidden. Yet theindividual learning model is foreign territory for most Net Geners, who havegrown up collaborating, sharing, and creating together online. Progressiveeducators are recognizing this. Students start internalizing what they'velearned in class only once they start talking to each other, says SeelyBrown: "The whole notion of passively sitting and receiving information hasalmost nothing to do with how you internalize information into somethingthat makes sense to you. Learning starts as you leave the classroom, whenyou start discussing with people around you what was just said. It is inconversation that you start to internalize what some piece of informationmeant to you."

The lecture hall is a prime example of mass education. It came along withmass production, mass marketing, and the mass media. Schooling, saysHoward Gardner, is a mass-production idea. "You teach the same thing tostudents in the same way and assess them all in the same way." Pedagogyis based on the questionable idea that optimal learning experiences can beconstructed for groups of learners at the same chronological age. In thisview, a curriculum is developed based on predigested information andstructured for optimal transmission. If the curriculum is well structured andinteresting, then large proportions of students at any given grade level will"tune in" and get engaged with the information. But too often, it doesn'twork out that way.

Consider one of the smash hits on YouTube last year, a short video called"A Vision of Students Today".

Created by Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropologyat Kansas State University, it is a stinging indictment of the educationdelivered by standard large-scale American university. Wesch recruited 200student collaborators to describe their view of the education they'rereceiving. Their verdict: Nothing much has changed since the earlynineteenth century, when the blackboard was introduced as a brilliant newway to help students visualize information. They painted a grim picture ofuniversity life — huge classes, teachers who didn't know the students'names, students who didn't complete the assigned readings, multiple-choiceexams that were a waste of intellectual capital.

I know many bright students who feel the same way. The big thing thesedays is to get an "A" without ever having gone to a lecture. When thecrème de la crème of an entire generation is boycotting the formal model of

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pedagogy in our educational institutions, the writing is on the wall.

A Challenge of the Revenue Model

As the model of pedagogy is challenged it's inevitable that the revenuemodel of universities will be too. The arrival of online education raises thequestion: If all that the big universities have to offer to students arelectures that you can get online for free — from other professors — whypay the tuition fees? If universities want to survive the arrival of freeuniversity-level education online, they need to change the way professorsand students interact on campus. Some are taking bold steps to reinventthemselves, with help from the Internet. Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, for example, is offering free lecture notes, exams andvideotaped lectures by MIT professors to the online world.

Anyone in the world can watch the entire series of lectures for some 30courses, such as Walter Lewin's ever-popular introductory physics course,which gets viewed by over 40,000 people a month on OpenCourseWare,MIT's version of intellectual philanthropy. Universities worldwide have joinedthe movement.

A Challenge to Credentialing

Of course, universities play an important role in the sorting of individuals insociety, through the admissions process and the awarding of degrees. Oneof the most important roles of the university is to screen human capital forfuture employers, and more broadly stratifying society. Those who get goodmarks in high school and on their SATs, who are proven to be hardworkers and have other talents, get into the best universities. Those whograduate — better still with distinction — have a credential, to get the mostdesirable jobs or entrance to graduate programs. They have proven theyhave a degree of discipline and that they're prepared to play by the rules.

But a credential and even the prestige of a university is rooted in itseffectiveness as a learning institution. If these institutions are shown to beinferior learning environments to other alternatives their capacity tocredential will surely diminish.

How much longer will, say, a Harvard undergraduate degree, taught inlarge class sizes by teaching assistants, largely through lectures, be able tocompete in status to the small class size liberal arts colleges or superiordelivery systems that harness the new models of learning. Surely the proofbeing in the pudding will change the status for various recipes for learning.

A Challenge to the Campus

The university campus has been "a wonderful place for young people to gofor four years to get older", as Princeton sociologist Marvin Dressler told mea decade ago. "While they're there they're bound to learn something" hesaid.

But if campuses are seen as places where learning is inferior to othermodels, or worse places where learning is restricted and stifled, the role ofthe campus experience will be undermined as well.

Campuses that embrace the new models become more effective learningenvironments and more desirable places. Even something as simple as

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online lectures do not undermine the value of on-campus education, theyhave enhanced it. The video lectures allow students to absorb the coursecontent online — whenever it's convenient — and then get together totinker, invent new things, or discuss the material. The experience hasshown MIT that real value of what they offer is not the lecture per se, butrather the whole package — the content tied to the human learningexperience on campus, plus the certification. Universities, in other words,cannot survive on lectures alone.

Videotaping lectures can free up intellectual capital — on the part of bothprofessors and students — to spend their on-campus time thinking andinquiring and challenging each other, rather than just absorbinginformation.

A Challenge to the Relationship of the University to Other Institutions

"The time has come for some far reaching changes to the university, ourmodel of pedagogy, how we operate, and our relationship to the rest of theworld," says Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron.

He asks a provocative question: Why should a university student berestricted to learning from the professors at the university he or she isattending. True, students can obviously learn from intellectuals around theworld through books, or via the Internet. Yet in a digital world, whyshouldn't a student be able to take a course from a professor at anotheruniversity? Proenza thinks universities should use the Internet to create aglobal centre of excellence. In other words, choose the best courses youhave and link them with the best at a handful of universities around theworld to create an unquestionably best-in-class program for students.Students would get to learn from the world's greatest minds in their area ofinterest — either in the physical classroom, or online. This global academywould be also be open to anyone online. This is a beautiful example of thecollaboration I described in the book I co-authored, Wikinomics.

So why hasn't it happened yet? "It's the legacy of established human andeducational infrastructure," says Proenza. The analogy is not the newspaperbusiness, which has been weakened by the distribution of knowledge on theInternet, he notes. "We're more like health care. We're challenged byobstructive, non-market-based business models. We're also burdened by asense that doctor knows best, or professor knows best."

"There are a lot of sacred cows," he said. Why, for example, areuniversities judged by the number of students they exclude, or by howmuch they spend? Why aren't they judged by how well they teach, and atwhat price?

The digital world, which has trained young minds to inquire and collaborate,is challenging not only the lecture-driven teaching traditions of theuniversity, but also the very notion of a walled-in institution that excludeslarge numbers of people. Why not allow a brilliant grade 9 student to takefirst-year math, without abandoning the social life of his high school? Whynot deploy the interactive power of the internet to transform the universityinto a place of life-long learning, not just a place to grow up?

Old Paradigms Die Hard

Yet the Industrial Age model of education is hard to change. New

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paradigms cause dislocation, disruption, confusion, uncertainty. They arenearly always received with coolness or hostility. Vested interests fightchange. And leaders of old paradigms are often the last to embrace thenew.

Back in 1997 I presented my views to a group of about 100 Universitypresidents at a dinner hosted by Ameritech in Chicago. After the talk I satdown at my table and asked the smaller group what they thought about myremarks. They responded positively. So I said to them "why is this takingso long?" "The problem is funds," one president said. "We just don't havethe money to reinvent the model of pedagogy." Another educator put it thisway: "Models of learning that go back decades are hard to change."Another got a chuckle around the table when he said, "I think the problemis the faculty — their average age is 57 and they're teaching in a 'post-Gutenberg' mode."

A very thoughtful man named Jeffery Bannister, who at the time waspresident of Butler College, was seated next to me. "Post-Gutenberg?" hesaid. "I don't think so! At least not at Butler. Our model of learning is pre-Gutenberg! We've got a bunch of professors reading from handwrittennotes, writing on blackboards, and the students are writing down what theysay. This is a pre-Gutenberg model — the printing press is not even animportant part of the learning paradigm." He added, "Wait till thesestudents who are 14 and have grown up learning on the Net hit the[college] classrooms — sparks are going to fly."

Bannister was right. A powerful force to change the university is thestudents. And sparks are flying today. There is a huge generational clashemerging in these institutions. It turns out that the critique of theuniversity from years ago were ideas in waiting — waiting for the new weband a new generation of digital natives who could effectively challenge theold model.

Changing the model of pedagogy for this generation is crucial for thesurvival of the university. If students turn away from a traditional universityeducation, this will erode the value of the credentials universities award,their position as centers of learning and research, and as campuses whereyoung people get a change to "grow up."

REALITY CLUB: James O'Donnell, Marc D. Hauser

AVAILABLE IN BOOKSTORES AND ONLINE

WHAT'S NEXT?Dispatches on the Future of ScienceEdited By Max Brockman

25/04/2010 23:40Edge: THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY By Don Tapscott

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If these authors are the future of science, then the science of the futurewill be one exciting ride! Find out what the best minds of the newgeneration are thinking before the Nobel Committee does. A fascinatingchronicle of the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up atnight. — Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness

"A preview of the ideas you're going to be reading about in ten years." —Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought

"Brockman has a nose for talent." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author TheBlack Swan

"Capaciously accessible, these writings project a curiosity to which followersof science news will gravitate." — Booklist

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