Thinking the Unthinkable: What can we Learn in Higher Ed?

I've been meaning to post this for nearly a week, but I've been struggling with how to express all the thoughts in my head around these ideas. Not just the ideas themselves, but also the fact that what I'm going to say here is probably going to irritate some people. I don't like to make folks mad, but there are things that need to be discussed in higher education--and they need to be discussed by organizations, not just by students in classrooms. So I guess I should also do the little caveat that "the thoughts here are my own, and not necessarily reflective of my institution or any of its sub-units." ☺

Recently, David Parry (@academicdave) posted a link to a blog post by Clay Shirky with the following Tweet:

"Today's academic read: @cshirky on the future of newspapers and journalism-If you change a few words he is also talking about the university"

I like the way Shirky thinks, and I always find Dave's comments intriguing, so I read the blog post almost immediately--and nothing has really been the same since. (See "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable") The following section is a brief summary of his thoughts. Trust me, I will get to the education bit.

You see, Shirky's premise is that newspaper and media professionals saw the Web coming, but made the erroneous assumption that just giving themselves a "digital facelift" would be enough to carry them through. That the newspapers tried many different models to try to make money through the Internet, even as their subscriber base was shrinking, but that the "unthinkable scenario" was one with which they weren't prepared to deal.

The unthinkable scenario, according to Shirky, was that the different models the newspapers tried (subscriptions, micropayments, walled gardens) didn't work, and that sustaining traditional models of copyright not only wasn't going to work, but, per a quote from Gordy Thompson, "suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off."

At its essence, Shirky's argument is that the advent of the free-flowing nature of the Internet, and the ways people like to share, is making the print newspaper business obsolete. But the business itself refused to see it.  Per Shirky:

"When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. . . . One of the effects [of this] on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away. . . .

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem."

He also compares the time we're in now to the time period just after the invention of the printing press. Elizabeth Eisenstein's book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, notes that we are pretty clear on what life was like prior to the printing press (circa 1400), and also pretty clear about what it was like around 1600. But what did it look like during the revolution? During the great change? It turns out that that time, like this one, was chaotic. "Old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy."

"That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing."

I'm making this longer than it should be, especially since I am really hoping all of you will read the post yourselves. The thoughts that have been churning in my mind since reading it are all over the place, and have to do with not only where I currently work, but also around the whole idea of higher education.

How can our institution respond to the revolution? Heck, forget the institution--how can my division respond? In a world where information is plentiful, where much of it is free, and where informal learning can occur just in time and wherever you want, is the academy still relevant? Credentialing is one thing, but how would that work in an era of free an open information?

And about that online learning thing--is that, too, a "digital facelift" for higher education that will ultimately be a model that doesn't work?

Another thought I had was around the idea of experimentation. If indeed "The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place," then are we trying enough new and creative ideas in higher education that we might have a chance of getting some of the "new stuff" we need? Or are we creating "innovation departments" that are shunted to the side and easy to ignore? To that end, how in the heck do we do wild experiments when we sit inside large, complex bureaucracies? Particularly ones where funding can be an issue?

This is not to say that things aren't happening at my institution. One division is especially good at thinking creatively and providing platforms for students and faculty to engage in ways that are vastly different than we used to. There are also experiments happening with open educational resources from the offering side of things. But is what we're currently doing enough?

The basic issue for me is that we can be slow to change, and we can't afford to be. When experimentation on a large scale is difficult, and "looking like" others is what institutions value (this may be especially true in the case of tenure-seekers), then we are missing what Shirky might call "octavo volume" opportunities. The man who invented the octavo volume didn't know at the time that it would make literacy cheaper and more portable--but it turned out to be a "key innovation."

Don't get me wrong--I love my job, and I love where I work. I get juice from the idea of getting up every day and trying to move forward an agenda I believe in--learning, no matter who you are or where you live. But that having been said, I think we need to start asking the hard questions of ourselves--including whether or not we should exist at all. If the idea that we might "go away" is not on the table, then what else are we missing? Do I think that my division, my larger unit, or even the university itself is going away any time soon? No. Do I think we're in real danger of obsolescence if we don't start really talking about the elephant that sits quietly in the corner? Absolutely.

So here's my attempt to start the conversation. Have at it. ☺