What If We Ran Universities Like Wikipedia? 380
Pickens writes "Do university bureaucracies still make sense in the era of networks? At the recent Educause conference, David J. Staley laid out the findings of a focus group he conducted asking educators what a college would look like if it operated like Wikipedia. The 'Wiki-ized University' wouldn't have formal admissions, says Staley; people could enter and exit as they wished and the university would consist of voluntary and self-organizing associations of teachers and students 'not unlike the original idea for the university, in the Middle Ages.' In addition, the curriculum of the 'Wiki-ized University' would be intellectually fluid, and instead of tenure, professors' longevity 'would be determined by the community.' Staley predicts that a new form of academic organization is emerging that will be driven by volunteerism. 'We do see some idea today of how "volunteer teaching" might look: think of the faculty at a place like the University of Phoenix. Most teaching faculty have day jobs — and in fact are hired because they have day jobs — and teach at the university for a nominal stipend,' writes Staley. 'If something like the Phoenix model is what develops in a wiki-ized university setting, this would suggest that a new type of "professorate" will emerge, consisting of those who teach or publish or conduct research for their own personal or professional satisfaction or for some other nonmonetized benefit.'"
It already exists as Khana Academy (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.khanacademy.org/
That all said, parents want to watch their children dress up in funny hats, put on a dress.
Kids want to leave home, make new friends and get wasted.
Real jobs want to see you actually went somewhere with a reputation.
Will never work.
We can already start building this now... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is basically a model of public intellectualism, and popular education. It has three components: 1. Creating a culture of learning which is not dependent on structure, but which is interwoven into life's fabric. 2. Pushing access to information to everyone, with no prejudices about who it will benefit best or who should be prioritized. 3. Encouraging a culture of healthy debate, humility, and a collective struggle for answers, instead of an individual struggle for superiority.
We're already seeing this on some level: Wikipedia, Kahn Academy, Amateur Astronomy, Open Courseware, etc. But I think it's not enough to just keep doing what we're doing, I would advocate that we need to go further. There is no reason that, for instance, a university doing research, no matter how obscure, should not be pressured to put their work online in an accessible fashion. Videos of conferences and presentations, notes, theses, etc. Beyond that, we need to actively break down prejudices about who benefits from this information. We cannot claim to know how people will use information, and determining the importance of their access based on condition, geography, poverty, gender, etc. should not be tolerated. Someone who does studies alternative energies should not dismiss the notion that a teenager living in Nigeria might not want to pour over everything they know, either in order to use that knowledge to create a DIY solar or wind generator, or to create something they hadn't even considered. We cannot keep an international presentation on evolutionary biology within a circle of privileged academics, just because we hold to the myth that if you aren't in a university, you aren't interested in being an intellectual.
And once we have that, or maybe concurrently, we need public spaces, free of charge and open to anyone, that people get together to talk about what they've learned, and to learn more. Like a library where talking is encouraged, or a pub without beer.
This is something I feel very strongly about, that the delineation between the academic and the non-academic, the intellectual and the non-intellectual, must be broken down and done away with. Here, then, is an RSA animate which talks about the structure of the current education system, and touches on the stratification within it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U [youtube.com]
Uhhhhhhhh (Score:5, Interesting)
How would this be useful again? Let's remember that if the objective is to self educate, you can already do that quite well in this day and age. The Internet makes almost anything available to you, there are libraries (including the ones on Universities) open to the public, and indeed you can sit in on classes at some universities, even if you aren't a student (some have to allow that). Learning when and what you choose has never been easier.
However that's not the point of a university. A university is about providing a structured program, with some verification for people that complete it successfully. That has value above and beyond just the education received. This is by no means a complete list but some of the major things:
1) It provides some proof of what you've done. When someone is self taught, they could well be full of shit. You have no idea. If they have a degree, at least you know that they did well enough for the university to consider it ok. I'm not saying that is a guarantee of competence but it is a whole lot more than just "Trust me, I know what I'm talking about."
2) It shows the ability to stick with a lengthy, difficult, endeavor and succeed. That is a worthwhile personality trait to have.
3) It hopefully means you got a broad base of knowledge in the subject. When someone self teaches they often focus just on what interests them or is relevant to the task at hand. A university can mandate a broader range of study on things, and focus on theoretical backgrounds to practical items where the use might not be readily apparent, but important later on.
4) The accredited ones are held to some standards. Not only is the university itself examined, but individual programs are. It isn't just all up to whatever they feel like.
I can't see how such a "Do whatever you want," kind of university would be at all useful. Sure you could learn things, but as I said, if all you are going to do is learn what you want, attend the classes you want, then it really isn't any different than you just teaching your self, watching lectures online, etc.
This doesn't mean university is the be-all, end-all, but the point of the institution is more than just teaching people whatever they happen to be interested in.
Noooooooo! (Score:2, Interesting)
Certified as Clever (Score:5, Interesting)
It may be different in the USA, I'm not sure...
Re:Degrees (Score:3, Interesting)
Reminds me of the philosophy department at the University of Sydney which, during the heyday of the student movement split into two departments - General Philosophy (which was run as a little Communist collective, trying to live by the various French poststructuralist and postmodern theorists) and Traditional and Modern Philosophy (which taught mainstream Anglo-American philosophy in a normal way). From an article on the topic [unsw.edu.au]:
IIRC, they also ended up assessing political philosophy modules by counting attendance at various political protests. The 'Traditional and Modern' department eventually 'won' in the 90s after poaching various other top professors over, and Sydney has gone back to being a pretty good department.
(When I see people trying to take what works on the Internet and apply it back to offline society, I sort of want to shake them and say "yeah, there's a reason we started doing it this way online - because it's online, duh. The mechanics and economics of it might not really work out in the same way if you are doing it in real life.")
Re:Jaw-droppingly bad idea (Score:2, Interesting)
All jokes aside I think you are completely right. Universities are riddled with incompetence (a result of rampant bureaucracy IMO) and the text book industry may as well be controlled by the Mafia. I have a degree in Computer Engineering, and I must say my diploma is the last thing I cite as proof of my knowledge. Having a degree is simply stating, "I can put up with bullshit, fill out forms when needed, and listen to those with power," and really has nothing to do with actual, real-world ability. HR departments are starting to realize this (try finding a job with less than 3 years industry experience or some sort of certification being required) and the result is that having a college degree is as lucrative as just a GED a decade ago.
When it comes to learning: higher education < the Internet. I'm serious about this too, I've learned more from Wikipedia (no, not the sources... the actual wiki pages) than I could ever have lerned in college. If the information is out there, why pay for a professor to present it to you when we now have a machine that presents it to us for free?
Re:Phoenix is the model? (Score:5, Interesting)
Phoenix gets penalized for giving students like me an opportunity to try to be successful in the program, but having a high failure rate when those students don't cut it in a program that is comparable to a lot of state-school MBA programs.
Re:Missing The Point (Score:3, Interesting)
When is "used to be"? I know people in their 80s who went to college to get a job.
I also don't understand how you could learn most advanced subjects without a mentor to walk you through. Learning quantum mechanics without a teacher who can interact one on one with you is... probably very difficult. Learning how to write also requires interaction from what I've seen.
Re:Degrees (Score:1, Interesting)
Funny, we put so much faith in accreditation we don't even realize how bad it is. To the real world (for most degree programs, the top 1% ignored) they teach you how to operate their oldest equipment, with out of date methodlogies using theories that were sound 5+ years ago.
It'd give those of us with 10+ years of experience (and no paper) a way to teach.
I cannot reiterate my belief that the current education system overemphasises repetition while often overlooking, or outright ignoring, critical thinking and self directed research.
Or to put it another way: The best CS class I ever received was from a Borland Developer who had just gotten laid off, the best math class, an architect who got credentialed to supplement his pay in a bad economy, and the best History class a former District Attorney of the state of Indiana.
Teachers who go to school learning from teachers learn how to teach teachers, not professionals.
I'm a Phoenix (yay) (Score:4, Interesting)
I got my Masters in Education from Phoenix, so I'll share my experience. Bear in mind, I'm not in IT, I'm just a finance analyst, so my experience is going to be different than what true IT workers have encountered.
To be honest, I went in because I needed a Masters degree to move up the corporate ladder. In my opinion and experience, a Masters takes ten years off the advancement clock in the corporate non-IT world, and I didn't want to do the fifteen year Sales grind, or having to change careers at 30 and start at entry-level with entry-level pay yet again. I already have a Bachelor's degree, but chose to go out into the real world and get my teeth kicked in for five years rather than jump to grad school (I had too many friends going to grad school straight out of college, getting their Masters, and then ending up as grocery store clerks or waiters because MBAs and what-not weren't guarantees of jobs anymore- this was in 2000) So I decided to do a Masters in something I thought would be interesting: education. I chose Phoenix because I didn't have the time to go back to a traditional school for two years. I also didn't want to do the night school option for an MBA, as I believe those degrees are overvalued due to market saturation, and not worth the debt. Better to study something you're interested in than following the crowd.
My recruitment, in retrospect, was something out of a boiler-room. The difference was that I was ready to commit, and my recruiter was actually pretty cool (she wasn't Mormon, unlike the vast majority of them). Anyway, I jumped into the UoP online program and went in.
Several things became immediately apparent: The GRE, MAT, and other exams are there for a reason-to weed out people who shouldn't be in grad school. Some of the students I saw in my initial classes were atrocious-they should have been kicked straight back to grade school, their academic skills were so awful. The emphasis was more on producing volumes of writing initially than on quality; and the textbook resources were customized for Phoenix exclusively.
Basically, I experienced every horror story you've read about or heard. And my Master's thesis was a joke. But here's the difference. I only had two truly godawful teachers that made me question the integrity of the program: a teacher in a class about a year in, and the one who managed the end step of my thesis. The rest of my teachers (aside from those two) were highly trained educators who worked in the fields they taught in, and they knew their stuff. Wow, were they good. I learned developmental theory, organizational theory, curriculum design & instruction, statistics, educational psychology, etc from people who lived it every day. And by that point, most of my fellow students were also working teachers who knew what they were doing. So I had to pony up and put in mucho hours of study and work in order to be taken seriously by my classmates and my instructors. THOSE people are why I learned what I did about education.
When I found out about all the scandals with UoP, I was devastated. Here I was, a 'smart' guy, who'd been conned out of two years and $50K. It was one of the most traumatic moments of my life. I gritted it out and finished with my degree anyway, but I was convinced that my life was over. I'd done all that work for nothing - a tarnished degree worth nothing. But then my wife (who's a teacher herself) would talk with her fellow teachers about some pedagogical matter, and I not only knew what they were talking about, I could describe it and solve their issue better than they could. I knew what the big issues surrounding Education in the US and worldwide were. And, my company transferred me from sales into finance at a much higher salary and more secure position because I went through what I did.
To wit, the scandals are valid because there are huge problems with UoP.The media says Phoenix is trying to fix the problems, and I've seen their commercials, but I'll believe they've reformed when I see it. I got suckered, a
Re:Degrees (Score:5, Interesting)
What if the point of going to a university was to actually learn something rather than to get a piece of paper? How I see it, these kinds of changes would make colleges less useful for hiring decisions, but far FAR more interesting for people who actually want to learn something. I don't see that as a bad thing. Most degrees should mean very little anyway. The idea that having a degree means someone can do a specific job better than someone with it is popular but seems to be wrong in most cases. Why not get rid of the BS and make universities actually worth going to?
Re:Phoenix is the model? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a lot of very good schools that let lots of people in but still manage to graduate a decent proportion of their students. Mine was a pretty common story: at 18 I "went off to college" at my nearby Enormous State University (University of Colorado in my case) and partied all the time, ended up with a crappy GPA my first semester, dropped out and spent a few years in the service, then came back with a much more mature attitude and a determination to do better. The problem was that CU didn't want me back (I mean, my GPA was really bad.) So I did my BS at Metropolitan State College of Denver [mscd.edu], which admits just about anyone with a pulse, but still maintains high educational standards. It cost me a lot less than CU or CSU would have, too.
Did it work? Well, I'm back at CU now ... working on my PhD and supported by an NIH fellowship. It worked for most of my classmates, too, many of whom had hard-luck stories like mine. I don't know where we'd be if we'd decided to go the UofP route, but I'm guessing most of us would be a lot worse off, educationally and financially, than we are now.
UofP's problem isn't low admission standards. Its problem is that it's a moneymaking machine run by vultures who prey on desperate people.
Re:University tenure (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're paid by publish-or-perish and your undergraduate classes count for little, who is surprised if teaching suffers? It's amazing how many professors put effort into their classes even though it does nothing for them financially.
Actually, that's not entirely true. As you mention, most of the research that brings in the money is done by or together with grad students. So scouting for bright future grad students in the undergrad classes is something that pays off in the long run. And yeah, you better don't scare them away by delivering a shitty class.
Re:University tenure (Score:2, Interesting)
Nice history lesson, about the whole tenure thing i did not realize where it stemmed from but it is nice to know and too see how much it had changed.
On contrast my university's core CS courses are taught by people with papers but without a clue of practical application of the things they are teaching, This year I am in 2 core courses that are about practical technologies in todays world, Web Development and Databases, both subject I have been familiar with for a long time, and the shit they are teaching and forcing us to do through assignment is bad, from telling us to deploy a database schema with inconsistent naming conventions (for example using "no", "num" and "number" to denote a number for a element in a table), using SSN numbers as employee references, where each employee is tied to a supervisor who is linked by SSN just begging for identity thief if used in the real world, and potentially worse of all using the hidden html element to store vital information for the Servlet to process.
I would understand being out of touch with this stuff for a non-practical(more conceptual stuff) courses such as data structures and formal grammars but when they are teaching a course which will make people think they can add a resume items like "i know web development", or "i can design a mean SQL database" is just begging for a future of shitty programmers. This problem is directly created by this publish or perish problem you mentioned,
I cannot say much about other departments i know there is one chemistry prof here that does not teach anything in class and gets away with it because she is tenure.
Re:Middle ages university vs Wiki-University (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, we have those! We call them "tech schools" or, if you want to be fancy, polytechnics. They teach things like welding, power engineering, plumbing, electrical, etc. Programs are one or two years, or sometimes shorter.
The real problem is that so many of us are so rich that we can spend four years of our lives "finding ourselves" at university, but we're also so whiney we can't see it as a great triumph of modern civilization but rather complain that the university didn't teach us anything useful in the courses we chose.
Re:Jaw-droppingly bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Just don't apply that to college as a whole - I'm sure that you can learn just as much English Lit online as you can in school. However, there are many fields where that's simply not true.
I find this example quite puzzling. Learning Lit is not at all easy...it's easy to read a great book or play and have 90% of it go over your head without a teacher to act as a guide. A few years back I was in my college dropout phase and was reading a bit of Chaucer and some 19th century plays for kicks. They were very enjoyable but I wished I could understand them on a deeper level, and to that end I can't tell you what I would've given to have an instructor asking probing questions that inch me toward a coherent interpretation, rather than fragments of impressions. Once I got back to college, I got right into 17th-through-18th-century Brit lit and classical Chinese lit as soon as I could, and had a much better, more complete experience.
Next to that, I find learning math or science online to be downright easy. Different strokes, I guess, but I also think you may be taking a simplistic view of what "learning English Lit" means...reading the lit and perhaps some articles about it is not the same as learning it, anymore that watching Karate videos is the same as learning Karate.
Re:Uh... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd imagine you still wouldn't know the difference between a misspelling and a typographical error.
Re:Degrees (Score:1, Interesting)
Hey, Wikipedia didn't kill Britannica or OED. No one says the wiki uni has to supplant traditional universities. The brick and mortar, pay-the-mathematicians universities can continue to operate. I see this as a proposition for a sub-(community college) education system. Wikis introduce positive sum outcomes games, wherever they are introduced!
Second Life already has many universities that are informally wikified. The Ivory Tower of Primitives in Natoma, and the College of Scripting Music Science are two great examples of informal self correcting colleges. Admittedly, they are nowhere near the level of depth and complexity
I would love to see a school like this. I would attend classes. And if it works out, I would aspire to be a wiki_profesorate.
Wikipedia as a role model? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can you say "naive" and "idealistic"?
Sure, Wikipedia is a great resource for basic information on a lot of topics. However, behind the scenes, the "volunteer politics" get pretty ugly. The kind of people who would put up with this on a Wiki-University scale are not the kidn of people you want as professors.
Professors "longevity would be determined by the community"? Even tenured professors dare not say politically incorrect things - else their tenure is suddenly meaningless. Imagine if professors held their positions on the whim of the students!
Universities should be non-profit? Why exactly? Non-profit organizations do good work in some fields, but they are just as driven as corporations - just towards different goals.
Professors should "move back and forth between the 'real world' and the university? Sure, that sounds like the kind of career that lets you do long term planning, raise a family, etc.
To the credit of the author, TFA ends with: Mr. Staley "clearly understands Wikipedia about as well as he understands universities. That is, not very well."
Re:Degrees (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever spent entire months or years without working? It's quite boring. Rum drinks and beach babes only interest you because they're a break from the normal cycle of your life. Once doing nothing becomes the normal cycle of your life, the incentives will switch, and you'll also feel a lack of self-fulfillment that will drive you to accomplish something.
If you want proof that people take on burdens purely voluntarily, look at our fertility rate.
Re:Degrees (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually...YES.
The longest break I've had between contract gigs was about 7 months.
My routine, I'd get up about 8:30-9am. Take the dog for a long, leisurely walk around the neighborhood.
I'd come home, dress in gym clothes and hop on my motorcycle and ride to the gym. Do a workout there for 2-2.5 hours or so.
I'd ride home...do lunch, look on the internet for a job about an hour, shower, jump back on my motorcycle, and ride around New Orleans, looking around.....exploring things I'd not seen before, art museums, etc. Maybe I'd just go to the Quarter and have a drink and walk around. Around 4pm, I'd start calling friends that were working and find where to meet them for beers.
I'd get home about 7-ish...eat, hang with the dog, watch tv or whatever...crash.
Wash, Rinse , Repeat.
Honestly aside from the drain on the bank balance, I had NO problem doing this day after day after day. If I won the lottery this would likely be my normal life, and when I wanted to get away from it...I'd vacation to the Keys or somewhere in the Caribbean....or maybe board the dog, hop on my bike and ride around the US for a couple months or so.
No...I'd never work again...I frankly cannot understand people that say they can't avoid working if they had the means not to.