From Dozens of Millions to Millions of Dozens

I chanced upon this musty, old article (by internet standards) from the BBC about Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite, a once promising internet search engine that peaked before Google even got going and later founded JotSpot, an application wiki company acquired in 2006 by Google and relaunched as Google Sites.

The key takeaway for me from the news story was this reflection by Joe Kraus on Google (and how it stole the market from the likes of Excite) and Amazon (and how it beat traditional brick-and-mortar book retailers Borders and Barnes and Noble). I quote from the article:

Only 40% of Amazon's revenue comes from the 125,000 books stocked in an average Barnes and Noble shopping mall store.

The other 60% of cashflow comes from the now famous "long tail" - hundreds of thousands more books that Amazon has found a way of distributing economically to customers who seek not the best sellers but a very precise title probably very obscure to most people and most shops.

And the second example:

Both Excite and Google are free to use; both business plans needed the support of advertisers.

But Excite took the conventional view that the ads would come from the top 100 companies in the USA, the people who buy huge amount of TV time and blanket the newspapers and the magazines.

Google did not go for the big spenders. Google's squads of PhDs wrote algorithms that would make it viable for the company to take hundreds of thousands of ads from hundreds of thousands of small (or big) companies, and pop the ads up in highly relevant spaces close to the search lists.

Then he concludes:

"The 20th Century mass production world was about dozens of markets of millions of people. The 21st Century is all about millions of markets of dozens of people."

I think we can apply this same insight to Technology Augmented Learning in the Age of the Internet (and beyond). Prior to the 20th century, formal knowledge- (vs. skill-) based education was typically imparted by wise and experienced scholars and teachers to a tiny group of pupils through intense and personal interaction. Education was inherently an elitist, cerebral pursuit demanding great sacrifices on the part of both teacher and student and only a few very highly gifted and talented individuals made it through the process. The industrial era provided a new metaphor for education (and just about any kind of human pursuit) and the principles of mass manufacturing were extended to education. Massive schools and universities were constructed. Knowledge was standardized and codified and disseminated by methodically-trained teachers employing seemingly efficient methods of instruction in large classrooms filled with dozens, scores, and even hundreds of students. For a while, things seemed to work. The experience was not very satisfying as hordes of students and thousands of teachers and professors will testify, but the process was seen as being good enough, under the circumstances.

In reality, excepting for the most elite institutions, most students graduated with not much more than barely functional skills which they then proceeded to acquire on the job, where the worked at the expense of their employers, or on their own, outside the walls of academia. What worked for automobiles, pencil sharpeners and bottle openers doesn't work quite as well for processes that are inherently cognitive, intellectual and knowledge-intensive. People have different knowledge acquisition styles, interests, cognitive abilities and need for knowledge. Perhaps what we need are the equivalent of a million academic institutions each serving mere dozens of students. Now that looks a lot like the traditional guru-shishya framework.

We cannot resurrect the ancient guru-shishya instruction process to meet the ongoing learning needs of a billion learners. But we may very well be able to exploit available to technologies to provide a learning structure that can approximate it in its effectiveness. The goal is not imitation of the process but investigating what made it work, and combine that with modern educational research and new technologies to achieve the same end result.

Whether good enough is all that is achievable with education is a subject meant for another discussion -- I will simply state here that I don't buy that argument. What I will assert is that Google and Amazon provide hope that with modern technology, we can develop a system that is NOT one size fits all (and hence fits none). We could fashion the technology and methods available to build systems to meet the needs of the Long Tail -- education to suit every learning style and every specific type of knowledge. Education is the most important structure for the creation and maintenance of vibrant democracies. We can make this democracy work only if we create an education system that actually does its job and isn't merely good enough.

Harvard wants to fix business education

In the wake of the numerous financial scandals that have beset the United States -- and Wall Street, in particular (as well as the world as large) -- the heads of Harvard and other business schools have been scrambling into damage control mode as well attempting to engage in a process of genuine introspection. Business schools have a lot at stake. Prominent among those being held responsible for the meltdown are graduates of elite business schools such as Harvard and there is a danger of public anger being directed at these schools for having ostensibly nurtured criminal tendencies among its students. While financial scandals are an ongoing sideshow in all nations and economies, this is the first time that such scandals have been explicitly linked to significant personal financial losses experienced by millions of ordinary people. If financial and other improprieties become permanently associated with very well-endowed institutions, then many powerful individuals in high places may have the reputations (unfairly) smeared and the institutions might begin to go downhill as a result.

Actually, there is a lot more at state than merely the fate of a few mighty institutions. An entire paradigm 0f education on which entire economies have been nurtured for over half a century is being questioned: Are we on the right track? Do we need to reboot? Should we scrap much of what we have taught all these decades and start from scratch?

It's unlikely, though, that graduate business education will be dramatically transformed in the short run. First, it's tough to turn a big ship going at full-tilt. Further, many fundamental concepts taught at business schools are based on solid evidence and impervious to scandal. More importantly, the current scandal is largely focused on ethics -- or a lack, thereof -- as practiced by captains of industry. But unethical behavior is only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps unethical behavior was just one downstream link in chain of behaviors whose source was actions founded on flawed business principles. People sometimes do unethical things in order to compensate for failures that were the result of bad business decisions which founded on defective business principles. Perhaps the world has changed very significantly since the time the business ideas were first enunciated and tested and they are no longer applicable. The world of human beings, after all, is far more fluid than the inanimate universe that surrounds us, and is governed by laws that are much more complex and plastic.

Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto seems to be making a similar point. He says the typical MBA education is shallow, narrow and static, where it should be deep, broad and dynamic. He elaborates, stating that MBA students should not only acquire models and principles, but their underlying logic so that they can tear them apart to inspect them or to construct their own from scratch; they ought to appreciate that the world is a complex, messy place where business cannot be run merely on the back of rational-actor economics; and that innovation and design are key to moulding MBA graduates capable of dealing with change and variety. Martin does have an agenda here: the MBA program he runs at Rotman's differentiates itself from the rest on those very principles he presents as essential. Clearly, though, he believes that those ideas are significant enough that they can form the cornerstone of a whole new approach to business education. To be sure, the Rotman MBA is not radically different in every way from the Standard Model, if you well, developed by Harvard and imitated by thousands of others around the world. Martin himself was a Harvard MBA and the fruit is unlikely to travel too far from the might tree that is Harvard Business School. It is difficult both radically change an MBA program and gain credibility for a different paradigm in competitive market where the current way is well-entrenched.

But perhaps, this presents an opportunity for a disruptive model to emerge that initially does not serve the mainstream (or threaten the market leaders such a Harvard, Sloan and Northwestern) but eventually attains a strong enough position to threaten to topple the status quo.

We live in exciting times.

Stanford launches Open Office Hours on Facebook

Stanford U - like much of California - is known to push the envelope when it comes to technology (and culture). After all, Stanford was the pot in which Yahoo and Google - and a whole lot of other wonders of modern living - were stewed and brewed. Understanding that the traditional educational model isn't really working well (or perhaps just in a fit of whimsy), Stanford now has leading professorial lights holding office hours on Facebook -- not only for its own students, but for anyone in the world so inclined. If there are any more holdouts out there who have thus far resisted the inexorable forces that push us all into the vast Facebook ocean -- and who think that Facebook is meant only for kids sharing pictures of their drunken revelries -- there's goes their final excuse. I mean, who wouldn't delight in engaging in a conversation with, oh, I don't know, Donald Knuth, the living patron saint of all computer scientists? Or Phil Lombardo, infamous for conducting the famous prison experiment? I'm getting goosebumps already, just thinking about it.

Like all social experiments, this Facebook Open Office Hours (FOOH?) initiative is likely to have consequences way beyond and quite different from those that led to its lauching. People are going to pick it up and run with it. I am very excited to see how this might transform education and learning. FOOH not only breaks downs the walls of the classroom, it also removes the larger wall around the institution itself. Previously inaccessible and remote scholars of repute will now be seen as real human beings, inspiring a wider swath of young people to take to scholarship, now that they know that great people are fashioned out of ordinary - but enthusiastic - little people like themselves.

Facebook wasn't originally meant for such an application at all. It was meant for Harvard students to extend their exhibitionistic and voyeuristic proclivities into the virtual world -- and it has succeeded in this project well-beyond its creators wildest dreams. It's delightful to know that there are curious adult minds that have begun to experiment with applying the technology to other domains. Persons beyond a certain age tend to feel threatened by what feels like an uwelcome intrusion into their private spaces and time. But that is true only if one is still grounded in a way of life that is rapidly vanishing before our eyes. Members of the younger generation are able to seamlessly blend their real and virtual lives and thereby extend the relationships, influence and sources of knowledge into dimensions that didn't exist even one decade ago. This is the new reality that the world of education must come to terms with employ as the basis for the complete redesign of architectures of education.

What are some benefits of FOOH? To be sure, this is not just about Facebook, but any means of direct engagement between teacher and student by employing video, audio, rich media in general and conversational structure. Harrison Owen, the inventor of a now wildly successful and widely employed group process called Open Space Technology came up with the idea for his process at an academic conference. He found that the most interesting discussions and explorations occurred not during the scheduled sessions themselves but during the brief coffee and lunch breaks when attendees from various sessions jostled and mingled in a disorderly fashion. Why not, he thought, organize a conference which in its entirety was like a coffee break, where discussion groups self-organized and important issues emerged out of this social process, thus turning the concept of a conference on its head? The relevance of Owen's observation here is that the most significant components of the educational process occur not merely during the scheduled classes but in the breaks in between them, as students and teachers wander about and mingle, on and off campus. FOOH provides a framework for structuring, capturing and preserving those interactions for later review not only by the original participants, but by later visitors. Imagine what it would be like if one could eavesdrop on all sorts of conversations going on across a campus, and hang out in the presence of great scholars whenever they choose to emerge? FOOH then becomes a Knowledge Bank.

No doubt naysayers will abound, and disadvantages of FOOH will be discussed in depth across the internet. But all tools and technologies have their downside, it is how you choose to use them that brings benefits. Me, I'm all for extending this experiment around the world.

Of Lectures, Lamps and LEDs

This blog post began as a response to VS Baskar's comment/query in response to my previous post (Tegrity: BandAid for a broken format?). He asked:

The format which you are discussing as outdated, is it being followed in India ?

If not what format is followed in India and how many years we are lagging in keeping pace with the world standards. Can the western format be followed if the number of students are huge as in India?

The basic format of a classroom with rows of seated students, a black/white/chalk-board out front and other optional accessories such as a flipchart, overhead or LCD projector and a computer, perhaps hooked up to the internet is pretty much standard all over the world. Indeed, this is the Gold Standard, and has been in use (without the modern accessories, of course), for hundreds of years. The problem is that this format is familiar, looks good, but is rather inefficient. To draw an engineering analogy, its "knowledge transmission efficiency" is poor.

The incandescent lamp -- that thing we call a light bulb, immortalized as the symbol of bright ideas -- has been around since 1802: that's 80 years before Edison's mythic, Eureka-tinged invention of it. Edison got the credit because he made the whole system of illumination of which the bulb was but a part, work effectively. Effectively doesn't mean efficiently, of course -- over 90% of the electrical energy supplied to the lamp is wasted as heat. Now, that is pretty darned inefficient, if you would ask me. VS, a chemical engineer, would be horrified to hear this; even chemical engineers can do better than this. On the other hand, the up-front cost of light bulb is quite low, the result of over a century of refinement and increasing manufacturing efficiency. And consequently, the light bulb -- and its associated fittings -- are ubiquitous. And so we are stuck with it, much like with the inefficient QWERTY keyboard.

The parallels with the Gold Standard Lecture Format are quite interesting. The lecture format has been around for centuries, both teachers and students all over the world are familiar with it, and it is easy to find teachers who can do it. But what if there were alternatives?

The global energy crisis with demand outstripping supply as well as environmental concerns has provided impetus and urgency to the search for more efficient alternatives. The current candidate is the Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL) and an emerging, even better alternative is the LED lamp. Both are more expensive than the light bulb, and an infrastructure is yet to emerge to take advantage of network effects. Check out the following links:

CFL and LED lights: a comparison

LED vs. Incandescent lamp vs. CFL

Today's educational institutional framework is still stuck in the equivalent of the incandescent lamp age -- the world over, not just in India. All the technology that is increasingly used in the lecture hall is equivalent to paving the cowpaths -- an expression popularized by Business Process Reengineering guru Michael Hammer which means unthinkingly automating a process which is inherently inefficient rather than redesigning it entirely, from ground up. While we're at it, let me also fling the term putting lipstick on a pig into the mix.

We use the Gold Standard format because we don't know of any other -- well enough, anyway --and the pace of educational institutional growth over the past few decades has been so rapid that human society has been caught with its pants down. We are stuck with an obsolete paradigm. Winston Churchill once remarked that "... democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Perhaps something similar is to be said about the Gold Standard.

Except, we now have the opportunity to innovate and develop one or more entirely new paradigms using the prodigious amount of knowledge about cognition and learning we have gathered over the past century as well as the variety of existing and emerging information and communication technologies. We must not tarry any further because the demands placed on the current paradigm are rapidly escalating and the paradigm itself does not have in it to survive the onslaught. We are facing a complete breakdown of the educational paradigm as it stands and need to quickly put our heads together and find a variety of alternatives to fit the varied needs of the diversity of cultures and requirements that abound in this modern world.

Tegrity: BandAid for a broken format?

I've been checking out Tegrity (or rather, its website), the 'lecture capture web service' I mentioned in an earlier post and have come away with mixed feelings. Tegrity captures audio and video lectures and presentations and stores them on a server. Lectures are delivered in a fairly ingenious way to students and there is some capability to search and drill down to specific bits of information. So far, so good.

Assuming the lecture format to be the Gold Standard for imparting knowledge, technologies like Tegrity and iTunes U serve primarily to fix deficiencies in it. The lecture format worked in an era of low mobility, small classes, few distractions. An instructor had all the time in the world to lecture, elaborate, explain, and answer all the questions of a small number of students who did not have to rush off to work, attend to families, deal with huge course load and indulge in entertainment and other distractions. A lot of things have changed since the lecture format was invented and refined. The nature and pace of life has changed dramatically, and so has the quantum of knowledge available and required to be ingested and digested. The lecture format does not work any more. Yes, the world cannot be changed in a hurry. Yes, the paradigm shift required is so huge that academic institutions and their associated structures as we know them may need to crumble and an entirely new way to educate developed. Are we ready for this? And if not, and if the existing format is so badly broken that it does little good, how long should we remain in a state of voluntary delusion?

Until we call it as we see it, repeatedly, at every forum, and through varied voices, the best we can hope for is series of BandAids of ever increasing complexity. And which will, in fact, lock us into a broken paradigm, eventually leaving us worse off than we already are.

I shudder to think of what is yet to come.

This is your education on iPods ...

“Lectures are the worst possible learning format,” says Brian Brooks, Associate Dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

So there you have it. He adds,

“There’s been some research done that shows if a student can hear that lecture a second time, they retain three times as much of that lecture.”

With the goal of enabling students to hear that lecture as often as possible (and thereby shaking up the Billboard Hot 100, one presumes), aspiring journalists at the school will carry iPods or iPhones.

This is an experiment, following that of Stanford and other campuses, and lectures will be made available as podcasts from university servers using Tegrity, a lecture capture web service, and also via Apple's iTunes University. Students also have the alternative of downloading the podcasts to their PCs or laptops although the mobile option would be more convenient. The theory is,

“There’s a lot of theory out there that says what you want to do is engage students in realms where they are already comfortable, and we know a lot of students are already familiar with iPods and iTunes so we want to get into that space and take advantage of that,” he said.

So there's the meat of it. Many students these days seem to be quite disengaged from education. On the other hand, they are very engaged, but to matters other than education, and more often than not to popular culture. So why not try to reach them through the channels they are most wont to utilise: a behaviour-centred approach?

The great shapers of opinion and/or behaviour today -- at least among the young or the undereducated -- are no longer individuals with commanding personalities, or their surrogates in the form of religions and cults. The modern corporation has been very successful in its project of employing science and scholarship to unravel the secrets of influencing opinion and behaviour and developing systematic means of exploiting this knowledge. This is a force that can be used for good, but is not infrequently employed primarily to empty consumer pockets fill corporate coffers. Universities and other institutions with a social conscience, rather than (or in addition to) tilting at these forces, might do well to co-opt them for more benign purposes, as in this case.

Then again, this is an experiment in augmenting the existing format of large institution higher education with ubiquitously available and popular technology. Will it work?

Much depends on what metrics are to be used for determining success. Students are likely to be thrilled to have the iPods legitimised as an academic accessory. With that imprimatur in place, they might be persuaded to check in on some lecture, in between periods of soaking in the latest pop or rock sensations. But I don't know how many young people would have the patience to sit through just listening to a 50-minute long lecture, even assuming the sound is of acceptable quality. Further, there are few subjects taught in a modern university for which the format of a pure lecture, devoid of any visual aids or visual and spatial references and props, will work very well. Perhaps for poetry and literature. Even there, it's not just the information content of a lecture alone, but also other paralinguistic cues such as facial expressions, body posture, etc. which imbue a lecture with additional, often critical meaning.

Furthermore there is a certain irony in the Associate Dean declaring lectures to be the worst possible learning format, and then enabling students to learn in that format as many times as possible. Why would you want to inflict the worst format on someone repeatedly? Is the repetition of a bad format better than just doing it once?

Looking for positives, only on rare occasions -- perhaps one had to miss out on an entire lecture of scintillating quality -- would students choose to listen to a lecture in its entirety. More likely, one might wish to home in on specific snippets that had not been clear when heard the first time. To make this experiment really successful, the University ought to develop or find some technology that allows a student to quickly locate a specific segment of a lecture by searching for content, without having to listen to the lecture from start to finish. This lecture podcast service requires a voice-recognition and transcription engine for the purpose.

Here, folks, is an opportunity to advance the cause of education with more than just blindly flinging technology at it. What more can we add to this mix of iPod/iTunes/Tegrity?

The architecture of learning

I arrived on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin in late August, 1986 and was stunned by what I saw -- this was larger than anything I could have imagined. My baggage consisting of a couple of battered Indian suitcases had been misrouted by the airlines -- TWA, I think; they were still in existence then. And all I had was the clothes I wore and a small complimentary bag containing a toothbrush, toothpaste and some other stuff which I received by way of an apology from the airlines (after I had harangued them about my condition for a while). Still a thrifty Indian at heart, I took a bus to the university campus from the airport -- fortunately, Austin airport was not too far from downtown (they've moved it since, I believe, just like they have done in Bangalore).

Yes, the campus of UT Austin is massive, and chock-a-block with structures. It's practically an entire city unto itself. Back in the mid-1980's there were about 65,000 students on one single campus. Now that's huge. My own undergraduate institution, REC (now NIT) Tiruchirapalli had only about a thousand students in the 1970's (plus a lot of barren land). UT Austin and U-Michigan Ann Arbor are perhaps the two largest (in terms of student population) single campuses in the US (and possibly, the world). Scale, baby, scale.

So how did they manage to schedule classes for those vast hordes of students? Of course, the majority were undergraduates. So here's what they did -- they built huge, I mean huge, lecture theatres. Used to be, you -- and perhaps a dozen other select acolytes -- sat under a tree at the feet of your Master. He -- they're typically portrayed as a 'he', right? -- would speak, and you would listen, and on occasion, ask questions. Perhaps he had a lesson plan. He had no chalkboard, no slide presentations, and few props, if any. No Exhibit A, Exhibit B. In cold places like Europe, they built classrooms, mostly occupied by monks, and later, students of a more secular sort. They had chalkboards, and seats and lectures. Students mostly listened, and took notes. They worked on problems and assignments, quietly, mostly individually.

Then came the industrial age, Max Weber, and the birth of the modern bureaucracy. A new class of employees called 'white-collar workers' was invented. Their primary purpose was to work with information. This called for an educated workforce to serve which purpose many new universities were built and expanded. The number and variety of programs grew. Many new corporations were created and thrived. The economy exploded. There was a rapidly increasing demand for information workers. It was getting expensive to build new universities and there weren't enough teachers to go around. It was far more efficient to grow the size of existing universities and expand the number of students enrolled in each individual class. At UT Austin, a freshman Chemistry class (a required course) would have as many as 800 students. In a single section. Held in a massive lecture theatre the size of a concert hall. Now play with that image in your head. Me, my mind boggles.

What have we done to the Architecture of Learning: from under the Banyan Tree to the Monster Sized Lecture? As the number of learners grew, we just scaled up, using technology. We figured that the learning process is pretty much the same regardless of numbers -- all that's really needed is to accommodate those numbers, provide comfort and shield them from the elements, amplify the information generated at the front by the teacher so that it physically reaches everyone, and we're home free!

Guess that didn't work, but who cares -- we still 'graduate' so many students, don't we?

No, we have a big, big, problem here that those running modern institutions don't wish to address -- when you scale up the numbers, you simply cannot use the same process (even on steroids) any more. You have to develop entirely new processes. The system is broken, and very, very badly. Razing all the institutions to the ground and starting afresh would be a fine way to go. But that ain't gonna happen. Yet. So we'll need to innovate in other ways. We'll begin exploring some ways from the next post on.