The new low cost of exchanging knowledge

Posted on by Brian Hughes

David Dean, founder of Yamisee, gave a great talk about this new, e-learning tool at a EdLab today:

Yamisee is a live online learning platform that creates an entirely new marketplace for teachers and subject matter experts to share their knowledge. Much in the way eBay connects buyers with sellers, Yamisee connects independent experts with paying students. Providing everything an instructor needs to conduct classes and earn money through live online learning events is why Yamisee was selected as a 2009 Company to Watch by the Connecticut Technology Council. (from the event description)

David discussed how they are striving to make Yamisee a marketplace of learning opportunities, and it seems like he has the basic structure to make it a vibrant one.

Why it might catch on:

Why it might not:

  • The marketplace is ultimately built on trust – bad options and high standards could hurt the business model.
  • People may not care as much about social interaction as we might think (they may prefer to crawl the web instead).

But both of these are more business-related worries than technical or conceptual problems. Overall, I’d be excited to see a social network like Yamisee be successful, because that would mean people are excited to learn new things from experts. (And that’s not always the way things seem to go these days…) It will also be interesting to see if this kind of e-learning tool is able to distinguish itself from the growing list of options.

Thanks David!

An irony of scholarly attribution

Posted on by Brian Hughes

I have been thinking about the academic honesty issues for a while now. So far my best ideas are in my draft essay, Challenges on the Horizon for Scholarly Attribution (another Knol experiment).

My interest in academic honesty came out of my exploration of the copyright wars, and my subsequent considerations of ownership in academic culture. Policies about scholarly attribution (acknowledgements, citation, and so on), for example, are the result of beliefs about the importance of acknowledging ownership of ideas – at once protecting authors’ livelihoods as well as allowing us to trace the history of an idea through multiple author’s works.

I have struggled to untangle these two goals not only to better understand the intention behind academic policies, but also their effects. My purpose is twofold: 1) to suggest that AHPs reveal a conflict between the scholarly and educational goals of academic culture, and 2) to show how limitations conceived by intellectuals under the sway of copyright law have a dramatic negative impact on educational opportunities.

From the abstract of my essay:

This essay explores how new tools demand that educators rethink the goals and effects of policies that prescribe originality in scholarship. The example of appropriation in art, and the conflict between appropriation and copyright law, will not only suggest how new tools can allow individuals to overcome limitations of policy to a productive end, but how we may value originality differently as a result of technological change.

An additional sidenote about my interest: those familiar with copyright law (and especially those who are critical of it) can appreciate the irony that academic honesty applies to ideas themselves – which is not the case with copyright. Thus, academics have seemingly gone one step further than so-called capitalists to protect themselves and their trade at the cost of individuals’ ability to freely “create culture.” This is perhaps my strongest motivation to continue to create an analysis of this urgent matter. I believe that the future of education depends on ending this embargo on unattributed intellectual production. (Which is not to say that attribution doesn’t have a proper role in education.)

Institutional collaboration as strategy

Posted on by Brian Hughes

Brad Wheeler says that higher ed is a “different” kind of industry in that institutions don’t directly complete against each other. Instead, and as a consequence, ed organizations should follow a strategy to approach problems in similar ways (across a wide range of activities).

He spoke about the growing set of activities that are leading to a “meta-university.” Parts of this tool-set, he says, come from the following inter-institutional collaborations that have resulted in the following software projects/platforms:

He also talked about the foundation for joining collaborative development across institutions. Some key factors:

  • Goal alignment
  • Values alignment
  • Temporal alignment
  • Talent alignment
  • Governance clarity
  • Problem solving alignment

So, to summarize, it sounds a bit impossible to join one of these efforts. On the other hand, I would love to see PocketKnowledge develop in a direction that brings in external collaborators (even leaders!). To that end, he mentions several of the “many ways” individuals and organizations can collaborate beyond contributing code, such as…

  • commenting
  • testing
  • critiquing
  • creating buzz

An interesting model for PocketKnowledge might be what he calls “Institutional Sourcing” (as opposed to “Commercial Sourcing” or “Consortium Sourcing”)… where an institution’s reputation drives its roll as leader and manager of a particular tool.

Publishers as purveyors of education

Posted on by Brian Hughes

In Post-Medium Publishing, Paul Graham makes the very elegant point that people have never paid for content. He explores this point from a few directions, pointing the way toward a future with low-cost distribution and high-quality “events.”

Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won’t pay for content anymore. At least, that’s how they see it… In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?

If he’s right, it’s amazing how slow publishers of all kinds have come to appreciate this – even as they run their businesses into the ground. (Perhaps they are just being optimistic that they will survive long enough to retire!? Anyone under 60 should probably adopt a different strategy.) The same could be said of academic institutions.

While academic publishers are conveniently tied to institutions with event models, I suspect they will increasingly see “traditional” publishers move to compete in the academic marketplace… offering new and powerful educational experiences. Will they be able to compete head-on with colleges and universities? I suspect they will. After all, they’ve been distributors all along – it’s just a new kind of content.

A generic box is the college of the future

Posted on by Brian Hughes

Acording to this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, new campus is being built to spec in Chaska, Minnesota – that is, they are building it without knowing who the tenant will be, with the intention of leasing/renting space to a variety of schools. Is this what the college of the future looks like?

Perhaps. It’s a slick idea. As we’ve recently seen on Willoby & Himrod, U.S. colleges are exporting education around the world. So why not grow new campuses at home in the U.S.?

This could lead to competition for students, opening up whole new markets for undergraduates and professionals who would like to receive a degree from a distant college, but who prefer face-to-face instruction.

Will remote facilities be able to deliver the goods? Two possible developments, neither of which feels so good: 1) more traveling for star professors, and 2) more adjunct positions using a ready-made curriculum.

Cheating is the pedagogy of the internet

Posted on by Brian Hughes

I ran across this fun and informative lecture by Jon Ippolito discussing various tensions between cultural production (in general) and the current culture of intellectual property law – where he introduces his idea that “cheating is the pedagogy of the internet.” It’s the written version of a lecture he gave at Columbia University a few years, when I was lucky enough to hear him. His ideas and criticisms about pedagogy and the internet led to his project called The Pool.

Watch and be introduced to other goodies such as:

I’ve been trying to take some of the ideas he touches on here and push them forward a bit. The law stuff is great, but perhaps it’s not the most accessible inroad to thinking about academic honesty. In lieu of that, I’m interested in what kind of conceptualization of education we would need to make room for new technologies that accelerate cheating. (Maybe it would turn out to be an approach to education we’ve always needed?)