Coupling Education to the Institutions of Modern Society

In my previous post I launched a polemic against the 'corporatization' of education: by this I mean an education system whose primary goal is to supply corporations with skilled, trained employees. I am not at all against corporations, or even capitalism -- corporations are a means of pursuing the goals of a capitalist society. Capitalism, in turn, is expected (or believed) by many to be the most effective means of building and maintaining a just society that satisfies the needs of the largest proportion of the people. The jury is out on this one, but that is not the focus of this post (or even this blog). While I no quarrel with corporations per se, I am rather leery of having corporations call the shots on most or all that happens in society. If a society, culture, or nation stands or fall on primarily on the strength and stability of its corporations, that society dwells on rather shaky ground -- and we see this happening in the United States as we speak. In the US, the health of corporations has an direct, immediate, and massive bearing on all that happens in the nation.

A nation, society and culture has to be much more than one of its institutions, however large and significant it might be. I am as much against the control of a society by corporations as I am opposed to its control by the State, by Organized, Controlled Relgion, or by a Monarch or Dictator. Regardless of the nature of the institution, human will, human desires, and individual passion must reign supreme; all other institutions must be subservient to the human spirit. Institutions are tools, machines that ought to aid the Journey of Humanity rather than subvert it.

Since human tribes began to agglomerate into larger social groups, human society has experimented with despots, supreme religious heads, faceless states/communism, and with corporatism. All of them have been fraught with significant problems the moment they begin dictating terms to other social institutions and to the individual. When corporations began to design and sell music, quality suffered.

The process of 'secularizing' institutions, including education, results in removing from those institutions a sense of larger purpose. Ultimately, every individual needs to confront the question of his or her purpose in this universe. And that purpose ought to be more than merely 'flipping burgers', 'building bridges', 'increasing sales', 'reducing costs', 'introducing new products' and so on. When academic institutions strip away everything other than the mechanics of work, then the soul of education disappears. Business education was 'secularized' -- the only things that are taught in class have to do with sales, profits, operations and so on. Matters of purpose are banished from discussion because they raise uncomfortable issues that are often unanswerable in value-neutral terms. The recent meltdown and the backlash against MBAs has caused at least a few business schools to wake up. Harvard Business School is at the forefront of this new movement, if for no other reason than self preservation. Here's what the New York Times has to say:

When a new crop of future business leaders graduates from the Harvard Business School next week, many of them will be taking a new oath that says, in effect, greed is not good.

Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.

What happened to making money?

That, of course, is still at the heart of the Harvard curriculum. But at Harvard and other top business schools, there has been an explosion of interest in ethics courses and in student activities — clubs, lectures, conferences — about personal and corporate responsibility and on how to view business as more than a money-making enterprise, but part of a large social community.

“We want to stand up and recite something out loud with our class,” said Teal Carlock, who is graduating from Harvard and has accepted a job at Genentech. “Fingers are now pointed at M.B.A.’s and we, as a class, have a real opportunity to come together and set a standard as business leaders.”

At Columbia Business School, all students must pledge to an honor code: “As a lifelong member of the Columbia Business School community, I adhere to the principles of truth, integrity, and respect. I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” The code has been in place for about three years and came about after discussions between students and faculty.

In the post-Enron and post-Madoff era, the issue of ethics and corporate social responsibility has taken on greater urgency among students about to graduate. While this might easily be dismissed as a passing fancy — or simply a defensive reaction to the current business environment — business school professors say that is not the case. Rather, they say, they are seeing a generational shift away from viewing an M.B.A. as simply an on-ramp to the road to riches.

Those graduating today, they say, are far more concerned about how corporations affect the community, the lives of its workers and the environment. And business schools are responding with more courses, new centers specializing in business ethics and, in the case of Harvard, student-lead efforts to bring about a professional code of conduct for M.B.A.’s, not unlike oaths that are taken by lawyers and doctors.

Further,

“There is the feeling that we want our lives to mean something more and to run organizations for the greater good,” said Max Anderson, one of the pledge’s organizers who is about to leave Harvard and take a job at Bridgewater Associates, a money management firm.

“No one wants to have their future criticized as a place filled with unethical behaviors,” he added. “We want to learn from those mistakes, do things differently and accept our duty to lead responsibly. Realistically, we have tremendous potential to affect society for better or worse. Let’s humbly step up. We are looking out for our own interest, but also for the interest of our employees and the broader public.”

Nature has a way of reminding us that none of our institutions is greater than the fundamental purpose of our existence, the quest to discover and fulfill which must be front-and-center on every individual's agenda. And the institution of education, while providing individuals the means to earn a living, develop their skills, and realize their potentials, must not be kept from also investing in those students the motivation to find and fulfill their purpose. Those institutions and curricula that eliminate from their portfolios all those educational opportunities that are seeming unrelated to specific work skills are robbing students blind of the chance of accelerating the process of becoming human.

It's good to have bright, young friends ...

... it's true ... they are alive and alert and bring all sorts of wonderful gifts whose full worth even they may not be aware of. I have at least one such young friend, Janardhan Rajan, who alerted me to the existence of this cool book called Brain Rules (Amazon, another) by John Medina. I love books about the brain, cognition, mind, intelligence and so on, and I am now compelled by forces beyond my control to acquire aforesaid book. Anyway, here's one quote that is totally, totally germane to this blog that I picked off of this cool presentation by Garr "Presentation Zen" Reynolds. (It's got 131 slides, but you'll love it!)

There is no greater anti-brain environment than the classroom and the cubicle.

I didn't say it -- Medina did. And the guy knows how the brain works: at the molecular level, too. Anyway, classrooms killed me when I was a student, and I have presided over the cerebral deaths of thousands of students as someone compelled by circumstances to confine my students to a classroom (a stricture I violated from time to time). I've railed against lectures and classrooms for years, and now comes a book that confirms what I have long believed.

So what is it about our society that keeps us from doing any better? Why has "education" remained one of the great con jobs of modern times, a con job so perfect that the "most successful" of the victims will swear by it and do everything in their might to defend it? I think the analogy of the frog in a pot that is slowly brought to boil and hence fails to jump out and save itself may be apt. We had a system in place to handle a small number of students selected for a lecture type of environment. And the we decided to scale up the model to handle tens of thousands of students in lecture halls. Didn't work. And yet we persist with it.

Modern educational methods compete with astrology, medical quackery and cosmetics for promising far, far more than the actually deliver. The sad thing is that since education is so greatly valued that people engage in wishful thinking and buy into the whole scam. There has been the occasional child that has exclaimed that the king wore no clothes, but few are listening. The lucky ones are those who are both talented and also so unfit for formal education that they choose to drop out and rely on their native abilities to achieve their goals. In a sense those who are not brilliant but are in fact suited for formal education -- a big chunk of the population -- work their way through the system because they seem to be succeeding in it even though it is, in fact, not giving them as much as it promises. But they care little, because they 'know' that they need it in order to 'succeed'.

This brings me to Ivan Illich's classic critique of modern education, Deschooling Society. I've got to take a look at that book again, but now from the perspective of a wizened old educator.

Formal education used to be a means for the small fraction of people of a reflective bent of mind to gather the means by which they could explore life's purpose and perhaps try to answer the great questions that faced mankind. From that noble purpose, formal education has been coopted and debased by a corporatized society that has transformed education into a machine that churns out cookie-cutter drones who will staff their factories and offices and produce standardized goods and services, punctually, and with a smile. Sadly, neither the so-called education, nor the decades of work under the corporate roof help the individual confront the fundamental existential questions that have always been at the back of his mind but which he never had time to think about, so engrossed was he in his work, and distracted at other times by the corporate entertainment firehosed through the media.

If he is lucky, he falls dead while still on the job, engrossed in his meaningless work. The unlucky ones are finally ejected by the corporate system and at a late stage in life find themselves face-to-face with Life's Ultimate Questions: questions they ought to have tried to answer early in their lives, but which they deferred to a phase in their lives when they can could do little about their situation. And preoccupied with that sad thought, they fall over and die.

The tragedy, again, is that the average person believes that the purpose of education is to provide him with skills that will enable him to become a 'successful' cog in the corporate wheel. Any real education that might help him confront the reality of his existence and enable him to ask questions about his role in life is dismissed as so much fluff. The stranglehold of the corporation on formal education is almost complete. Sadder yet are the institutions and educational frameworks that neither educate nor prepare the student for becoming a productive cog in the wheel. In fact, this category of institutions dominate the 'educational' landscape. They are worse than useless. Not only do they not educate, they 'uneducate' their students using the worst possible methods. Talk about a perfect storm.

What we need today are major revolutions both in curricula as well as pedagogies and androgogies; both are badly broken, and this brokenness is reflected in the nature of our world, best expressed by the Hopi Indian word, koyaanisqatsi -- life out of balance.

Singularity: The end of all formal education?

No self-respecting blog -- and this is one, trust me -- purporting to be about education in the 21st century (and beyond) could be complete without at least some discussion about Singularity. After I planned to write this post, I realized I had actually mentioned it once before, but that doesn't really count because it merited no more than a mention in that post. So, let's talk about Singularity.

Well, there's a whole lot to talk about, and there are several books on the subject. Unfortunately, the word has several connotations that are only loosely-related; and besides, being a buzzword, it's now cool to pepper conversations and blogs (like this one) with the term. [Try it yourself: slowly, and in a hushed voice, like in those previews for sci-fi movies, say the word 'singularity', letting each syllable roll off you tongue and vanish into the abyss like the astronaut in the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now didn't that feel so cool?]

So let me narrow down this discussion to just one type of singularity, the one to which Ray Kurzweil has devoted his book on the subject and also a website. The one of interest to us is technological singularity. Kurzweil extrapolates Moore's Law which models the exponentially accelerating pace of technological progress in the field of semiconductors to all advanced technologies, and projects the curve forward and backward in time.The singularity postulate predicts that technological breakthroughs and paradigm shifts will occur at an increasing rate and a point will be reached when it will outstrip the ability of human beings to comprehend it. From that point on, machines will emerge that exceed human intelligence and will be capable of evolving on their own. Combining these artificial intelligences with human beings will give rise to what Kurzweil calls transhumans. The book's blurb on Kurzweil's Singularity website says:

The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.

And it will happen in 2045. Note that down in your Google Calendar and set it up with an email or pop-up alert.

Just in time for the party to begin comes the New York Times with an article, grandiosely titled --- in the fashion of the Breathless Journalism fraternity -- "The Coming Superbrain". Let's see what John Markoff has to say.

Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human functions with computer-driven machines. These machines can see and hear, respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans can today. Such a shift, they say, would lead to a vast acceleration in technological improvements of all kinds.

According to Kurzweil, things will be even more fun:

Not content with the development of superhuman machines, Dr. Kurzweil envisions “uploading,” or the idea that the contents of our brain and thought processes can somehow be translated into a computing environment, making a form of immortality possible — within his lifetime.

Now, how cool is that? While the above may seem far-fetched, Wired Magazine editor Kevin Kelley paints a somewhat more believable scenario:

He is at work on his own book, “The Technium,” forecasting the emergence of a global brain — the idea that the planet’s interconnected computers might someday act in a coordinated fashion and perhaps exhibit intelligence. He just isn’t certain about how soon an intelligent global brain will arrive.

I'll leave out the article's discussion of B-movie type doomsday scenarios meant to bring out of their caves the same folks who raised a hue-and-cry about the Large Hadron Collider letting Black Hole-lets escape and swallow the universe; the New York Times has to cater to all of their constituencies, especially at a time when circulation is plummeting.

Just for fun, let's pretend Singularity is going to happen, okay? Now let's just talk about the consequences of Singularity for education. Imagine that we will be able to UPLOAD the contents of our brains to a computer's storage device. Even better, what if the reverse is also possible -- DOWNLOADING information, and just maybe, knowledge, to one's brain? Will this result in instant learning? No more sitting in a classroom listening to lectures, or reading books, or logging on and taking tests, working on assignments and so on. After all, the entire edifice of education is constructed on the premise that acquiring information -- and knowledge -- is a long, painstaking process which requires a variety of means in which information is attempted to be transferred to an individual and varied methods of testing whether learning actually has occurred.

But what, exactly, is learning? Is learning merely the transfer of information in a manner that it persists in memory? Is there more to learning than this? What is needed to insure that an individual is able to associate those fragments of information with relevant situations and questions? What sort of processing occurs in the brain to transform information received by our senses into knowledge that we can both experience within and which we can employ in appropriate contexts?

Or maybe Singularity implies that we don't need to learn anything at all, since there are intelligent machines who do all the learning for us and act as needed on the world around. So, does that mean that all we need to do is live a life of leisure, the Holy Grail of so many science fiction novels and particularly the sort of future envisioned by many so-called Futurists? From observing my own behavior and that of many others in this world, it is quite clear that these 'futurists' were hallucinating when they wrote of an era of Endless Leisure. A significant fraction of humanity is not comfortable with leisure for very long. They get bored and want to go and do something. Being engaged in activity -- not just leisure activity -- appears to be wired into our DNA. The majority of people would like to engage in at least some activity they feel to be productive rather than recreational as a means of providing their lives with a sense of purpose.

The need for purpose is a very strong force motivating human action. Most people, it appears, might go insane if their lives were devoid of perceived purpose. Having machines doing all one's thinking and acting doesn't seem to be a scenario that most would prefer for a period any longer than a vacation.

So, even if the Singularity does arrive -- and I wouldn't count it out -- it likely would only lead us to another significant paradigm shift where we search for new frontiers of thinking, knowing and acting: perhaps beyond the bounds of this planet.

I don't think the Singularity will end formal education, although it very likely will transform it.

I hope the Singularity arrives in my lifetime -- I'm a geek and I love fancy stuff like this. I love excitement, newness, technology, and change -- and a chance to explore other corners of the universe.

Traditional universities clueless about online ed

Delivering education online has been the Holy Grail of the New Academia -- Holy Grail, because, nobody seems to have found the right formula yet. The Chronicle of Higher Education, a US publication avidly followed by universities brings two troubling reports: two major university systems -- the University of Illinois and the University of Texas are scaling back their once ambitious online ed plans. Illinois originally had planned to enroll 70,000 students as part of its Global Campus initiative. Nowhere near as many students have signed up, and the recession too has played a heavy hand. Why has student response been weak when, as one commenter states:

I don’t live anywhere near UI so what am I supposed to do now? Has anyone thought about the students that are in the GC programs? We aren’t all 20 yr.olds living off our parents and taking classes in the basement. We’re adult professionals that prefer the flexibility of online learning and the curriculum and programs offered through Global Campus.

It doesn't take a wild imagination to extend the above sentiment to a significantly large population. The same commenter adds:

Online education is growing at a faster rate than higher education as a whole. Online education fills a great need for those wishing to pursue an education and can’t or don’t want to attend face-to-face classes.

A part of the problem seems to be that traditional faculty are not accustomed to the very different androgogies that are appropriate for online and other 'distance' education formats. There exists a perception -- frequently matched by reality -- that distance education is a poor cousin of 'real' classroom style education. A big part of this perception is that the majority of the brightest students as well as those who show early promise follow the route of traditional education. Online education is largely the preserve of those who couldn't make it through the traditional route, either because they could not compete or because of financial and other constraints. There is certainly a discriminatory aspect to traditional education vis-a-vis distance education. On average, those who follow the traditional route have better access to financial resources during the period when students typical attend college than those who are compelled by circumstances to pursue distance education instead. A significant fraction, perhaps the majority, of distance education students are also working full-time, earning incomes to support a family.

Traditional faculty are typically not sympathetic to and prepared to accommodate and adapt to the very different sort of challenges faced by those who pursue distance education. The educational experience suffers and only the most motivated among distance education students who take full personal responsibility for their education are able to make the best of the available resources. The vast majority indeed acquire an inferior education -- or what passes for one. Faculty who understand both the medium and the audience cause some students to exult asin the comment below:

One of the main differences is EVERY Global Campus student participates each week in class discussions and we work in groups to promote the social cognition of learning. Does every student participate in each face-to-face class? No. Do we only look at Power Point presentations created by our instructor and listen to a lecture and take notes? No. We get to experience a multitude of media-enhanced technologies in addition to the required readings and writing assignments each week. We use technology as a vehicle to enhance our learning experience. The Global Campus courses engage students in the learning process and I applaud the professors that have taken the leap and veered away from the “sage on the stage” environment because that is NOT a learning experience for students.

Another telling comment:

Whatever you think of on-line and distance education, pro or con, remember that the medium always affects and sometimes shapes the content (yes, nod to McLuhan). Every technology has virtues and drawbacks, and the more complex the activity into which it’s drawn, the more unpredictable these are. The default position of faculty concerned about the integrity of education has to be first what might be lost, and only second what might be gained (this is not to ignore possible gains, but to recall the responsibility of faculty).

I just finished teaching a seminar for junior philosophy majors on Kant. Student presentations with discussion would simply not work online (though they would have greater successl with advanced graduate students). Rather than give a lengthy explanation, I’ll say just this: these juniors are often not confident enough to write what they think, but in the rapidfire give-and-take of classroom discussion they are willing to speak their minds. I also used a mix of on-line and on-paper commenting on successive drafts of their papers. If I really want them to take account of my remarks there is nothing like red-pen markings scrawled all over the page, as opposed to the neat “Track Changes” and “Comments” of MS Word. When they are far enough along in the project to be solidly oriented, however, it is easier and faster for me to use the on-line methods, and in fact, it seems to encourage the impression that I am taking their arguments seriously.

To be at least as effective as traditional education distance education needs to be carefully thought through. From reading the article, and more importantly, the comments, I come away with the impression that the University's attempt was a combination of ham-handedness and half-heartedness. An initiative of this kind requires committed efforts over a long period of time, imaginative leaders, a sizable budget, an acceptance of risk and failure and ongoing efforts at learning and evolution of the whole system. The University perhaps didn't have the stomach for that. Another comment from a different article about this issue:

The real problem is its time this entire campus, online and off, started thinking about LEARNING and the best way to facilitate it. Recording video of talking head lectures isn’t going to cut it for either the real or virtual campuses. We do need non-faculty learning facilitators (come up with your own titles). I think it would be great of the faulty got together, chose a new paradigm (or a small number of new paradigms) and get behind them for EVERYTHING we do. We are saddled with a huge physical campus – that can only seat so many students.

I especially like the term 'learning facilitator' because that's how I view teaching, in general, and especially teaching mature adults in 'distant' configuration. Once this sort of thing becomes established, the whole approach of professors and lecturers and educators will change -- I hope.

We see University of Texas pulling out of the marathon too, after having blown $22 million over a decade.

So why are online-education efforts suffering? First, a reality check: Pure-play for-profit online-education ventures like the so-called University of Phoenix have turned a profit for decades, else they would have shut down long ago. On the other hand, large, successful traditional universities have been struggling to make a mark with online education. What do Phoenix and their ilk know that traditonal universities don't?

• For-profit education outfits focus on the bottom-line -- they run mainly those programs that attract enrollments and therefore turn a profit. They don't have any social agenda to satisfy, even if there is no return on their investment. Pretty soon, low-profit programs are weeded out and high-profit ones enhanced.
• Traditional universities --especially the large ones that actually have the means to explore online education, such as Illinois and Texas -- hire traditional faculty who are recruited and rewarded principally on their capacity for research, rather than their talent for teaching or ability to experiment with alternative instruction methods. At such institutions, there is usually a disconnect between the staff that develop the distance education infrastructure (and often are not well-versed in either the subject or in androgogy and pedagogy) and the faculty that deliver courses (who frequently are all at sea with technology).
• For-profit organizations live or die by the success of their online programs -- they have no alternative to fall back on -- and are compelled by circumstances to constantly innovate and evolve their systems and methodologies to meet the needs of their client base
• Traditional universities tend not to view their students as 'clients' to be served -- indeed, such a term (and the mindset associated with it) is typically considered distasteful in the groves of academe: professors are scholars engaged in research and imparting knowledge and education the old-fashioned way in order to build thinking citizenry rather rather than equipping trainee-customers with skills which they could immediately apply to earning a living.
• The core competency of traditional universities -- representing the collective competencies of its faculty -- lies in imparting education the traditional way; online education is usually an afterthought, an irritant, a requirement usually thrust by them by politicians who would like to be seen as implementing a social agenda.
• Traditional universities are excel at educating the traditional student in the traditional manner; do a passable job of educating the non-traditional student; and know little or nothing about educating the non-traditional student in a non-traditional manner.

Little wonder, then, that traditional universities such as Texas and Illinois are struggling to justify their online efforts -- despite strong demand for such education -- even while private, for-profit outfits are laughing all the way to the bank.

A free, online university from Israel

My friend Pavan Soni who, like me, is into innovation in a big way, is an Innovation Evangelist at Wipro. Pavan is an enthusiastic and gung-ho soul and sends out interesting snippets about innovative initiatives around the world. I just received this one about University of the People -- a new online university that intends to provide tuition-free education to less fortunate and indigent people around the world. Currently, 150 students have enrolled and the founder, Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef, has the ambitious goal of signing on 15,000 students in four years.

On the face of it, this is a wonderful development. The intent to provide educational materials -- if not an education -- and that too, for free, deserves fulsome praise. I'm still not clear about how this system of online education will work. Will they handle it like traditional universities -- and flub it (like Texas and Illinois) or will they succeed, like the University of Phoenix?

Having done online (and satellite TV) education myself at a traditional mid-sized university, I am not too excited by how they do it. But for those who, for various reasons, cannot make it to a physical classroom of a university, the opportunity seems like a godsend -- but only if it is structured properly. Now, there are many -- almost always, adult learners -- who have benefited from receiving a diploma (and possibly an education, in the process) via correspondence (by mail) or over the internet. And then there is the price: free.

I would like UoP to succeed and large numbers of persons around the world to benefit. If UoP succeeds, then they may help define a model for providing education to billions of people who might otherwise never be able to afford it, and thereby make for a better world.

Podcasts creep into my life

I've taken to podcasts in a big way, but only for one reason. Back in the US, I never felt any need to get into podcasts because whatever I wanted to listen to, I heard directly from people, the radio, or on TV (on the few occasions I chose to turn it on). The only time I listened to the radio was when I when I was in my car, or when I wanted to listen to a favorite program of mine aired on National Public Radio. Well, I might as well tell you my favorites: This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass; Le Show, hosted by Harry Shearer; and Car Talk, hosted by the pair of brothers, Tom and Ray Magliozzi; and Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross.

When I moved to India, I did not miss them - at least initially. After a while, withdrawal symptoms began to set in, and so I proceeded to subscribe to the podcasts of my shows through Apple's iTunes program -- using this program makes podcast downloading (and playback) a no-brainer. I tried listening to the programs on my laptop, but that's not the most convenient of things to do. Mostly because I am not used to sitting down and listening to the radio -- not since the 1970s when I used to listen to cricket commentaries or the Binaca Geetmala radio program.

So those podcasts sat accumulating on my laptop until it came time to give our Maruti 800 car of 20 years a decent funeral and get a new one. This time, I had the dealers install a stereo with a USB port. And then life as I knew it changed forever.

Driving in Bangalore is perhaps not the most unpleasant undertaking in the world -- I imagine life would be lot harder cleaning the city's sewers. Nevertheless, it's tough to get used to, and moreover, gets worse everyday with the rapidly rising population of vehicles. The noise, the pollution, and most of all the never-a-dull-minute weaving around leave me drained at the end of even a typical 10 km drive -- which could take anything up to an hour, or even more, depending on the time of the day. I need something to take my mind off of this.

USB port to the rescue! Now I download a mix of my podcasts onto a flash drive and I am on my way. So now, there is very little that happens on the streets of Bangalore that can stress me out. I am instantly transported to the streets of Boise, Idaho and am entertained, informed, and often even educated along the way. When I step out of the car, I am smiling. In fact, on many an occasion, I sit in the car waiting for a particularly interesting podcast segment to be over before I get out.

Which brings me to the reason why this post appears in this particular blog: man, what a way to disseminate knowledge! Now how might we incorporate podcasting into formal (and even informal) educational programs so that busy commuters may learn while they are on the move? It doesn't have to be only while driving -- one could be riding a bus and listening to a podcast on an MP3 audio player. It would be a useful way to catch up on a missed lecture or review on that was hard to follow the first time.

So, maybe Tegrity is indeed onto something here. In an earlier post I had called Tegrity a 'BandAid for a broken format'. But that was primarily because I don't believe that lectures are a particularly effective means of imparting education. I haven't changed my stand on lectures, but podcasts may be useful for disseminating useful information anyway, even if the efficiency of transmission might be low. I use podcasts mainly to occupy my mind, keep me entertained, and as a source of intellectual stimulation. I often get good ideas that are only tangentially related to the theme of a podcast simply by listening to it while trying to maneuver my car around town.

At any rate, I highly recommend podcasts - at least interesting and at least moderately informative ones - as a supplement to the traditional educational methods.

Crowdsourcing Peer Review in the Age of Blogging

That the internet is causing paradigm shifts in a number of areas, not the least of which is news publishing is beyond dispute. Much less has been said about its effect, if any, on the hallowed and time-worn process of academic peer review.

One of the cornerstones of modern scholarship, whether it be in the sciences, humanities or the arts -- or anywhere else -- is the peer-review process. Peer review is a filtering step in the process of scholarly research generation and dissemination. It is intended to ensure that the work that is finally published meets certain minimum standards and thereby does not take up valuable journal space, waste the reader's time and until and unless refuted appears to contribute to a corpus of research in some specific field. It is also intended to ensure that a researcher gets a fair hearing and is not prevented from disseminating research because of some gatekeeper's idiosyncratic beliefs. Typically, a scholar sends in a manuscript for review to a journal's editor who in turn sends them on to other scholars who are familiar with the specific area of scholarship addressed in the manuscript. The reviewers read the article, write up their reviews, including comments, suggestions and recommendations and send them on to the editor, who in turn passes them on to the manuscript's author. The author then chooses to address the comments and incorporate suggestions and sends them back to the editor. This process may involve several rounds before a submission is accepted or rejected for publication. Of note is the fact that both author and reviewers are anonymous with respect to each other, in the interest of ensuring some degree of neutrality.

Peer review has many critics -- and valid criticisms -- but it has worked reasonably well, and there haven't been any alternatives that can be deployed more conveniently, and so it lives on. One major problem with peer review is the large amount of time that elapses between the time a manuscript is submitted for review and is accepted for publication. Even more time elapses before it actually appears in print -- especially in the most prestigious journals -- given the large number of article submissions and the limited size of each issue. The situation was much worse before the widespread availability of email, but there yet remains much dissatisfaction with the process among researchers; like a bad marriage, it's a nuisance they have felt compelled to live with for all the benefits it offers.

One step in the article publication process is beginning to be sped up by the appearance of electronic or online journals. Online journals have at least three advantages over their 'dead tree' counterparts made from wood pulp: there is no practical limit to the size of each 'issue'; the step involved in typesetting an issue is eliminated; and most importantly, there is no need to wait for each issue 'cycle' -- an article may be 'published' on the internet the day it is accepted and proofed.

None of this has reduced the time taken up by the traditional peer review process or in any way eliminated or reduced its shortcomings.

Now comes an experiment to test the efficacies (and limitations) of having a scholarly book 'peer-reviewed' by anonymous blog comments. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, decided to test the efficacy of having a scholarly work 'peer-reviewed' through anonymous blog comments. Wardrip-Fruin was either a fool or a brave man, for leaving a blog wide open to the world is inviting a veritable deluge into your life. Anyway, the experiment is done and the results are out. The results are mixed but interesting. Blog-based review can in fact add in valuable ways to the peer-review process.

I am a little rushed for time right now, so will continue this discussion a bit later. Stay tuned. (to be continued)

CONTINUED:

Here's what Wardrip-Fruin says about blogging:

Blogging had already changed how I worked as a scholar and creator of digital media. Reading blogs started out as a way to keep up with the field between conferences, and I soon realized that blogs also contain raw research, early results, and other useful information that never gets presented at conferences. (emphasis mine)

So one significant gain from using the internet -- blogs, specifically -- for the early dissemination of raw, unreviewed result is a speeding up of research because scientific research is not a solitary pursuit (as is often imagined) but occurs in a social context. Many researchers are comfortable with reading unreviewed research, because as responsible and knowledgeable scientists, they know enough to tell good science from bad. Integrating blogs into research is particularly useful in academic disciplines where significant work is done outside of academia:

Given that ours is a field in which major expertise is located outside the academy (like many other fields, from 1950s cinema to Civil War history) the Grand Text Auto community has been invaluable for my work.

Compared to traditional peer review,

... the blog-based review form not only brings in more voices (which may identify more potential issues), and not only provides some “review of the reviews” (with reviewers weighing in on the issues raised by others), but is also, crucially, a conversation (my proposals for a quick fix to the discussion of one example helped unearth the breadth and seriousness of the larger issues with the section).

In traditional peer review, on reviewer might make a point, but the author may not understand how widely such a view is shared. Blogs, however, allow other reviewers to refute or extend an observation made by one poster, thereby giving weight and adding substance to an opinion. On the down side,

... the flow of blog conversation is mercilessly driven by time. While it is possible to try to pick up threads of conversation after they have been quiet for a few days, the results are generally much less successful than when one responds within a day or, better yet, an hour. I hadn’t anticipated or planned for this.

Turning on a blog-review will have the author on a treadmill that never stops running, a firehouse that ceases to spew forth torrents of commentary, many of which she may never be able to read at all, leave alone respond to. There is another, perhaps more troubling problem with online reviews:

One concern expressed repeatedly about the blog-based review form — by blog commenters, outside observers, and myself — is that its organization around individual sections might contribute to a “forest for the trees” phenomenon. While individual sections and their topics are important to a book, it is really by the wider argument and project that most books are judged.

This is in contrast to traditional anonymous, double-blind review where reviewers tend to provide 'big picture' commentary regarding an entire manuscript rather than mere sections, or chapters. The positive aspect of this 'problem', however, is:

The blog-based reviewers offered almost no remarks comparing chapters to one another — perhaps because they experienced the manuscript more as sections than chapters. Still, as I will discuss below, they also offered much more detailed section-specific commentary, much of it quite useful, than it would be possible to expect from press-solicited anonymous reviews.

The most significant benefit of online-reviews is the diversity of perspectives that it is possible to collect from a wide readership. In the traditional review process, it is not feasible to send out a manuscript for review to more than a few reviewers due to large number of manuscripts that need review.

When only a few reviewers look at each manuscript, each will have some areas of relevant expertise. But for many manuscripts, especially interdisciplinary ones, there will be many topics discussed for which none of the reviewers possess particular expertise. There’s no real way around this.

and,

This happened repeatedly, with humanities and social science scholars, digital media designers, computer science researchers, game players, and others offering helpful thoughts and information about everything from dialogue system interface specifics to statistical AI models.

Crowdsourcing "peer-reviews" through blogs certainly has a future. Work is needed to make the task manageable, and even if a 'lite' version were made possible, then it would make an excellent augmentation to the traditional peer-review process -- not eliminating it, but making it much more useful and usable.