Strong Ties

1. Strong Ties Why Democracies Still Need Universities in the Digital Age Danielle Allen, Institute for Advanced Study Ideas and Universities Presentation, May 4, 2011

2. Part I The Death of Universities?

3. Because of disintermediation and the death of the gatekeeper. . . . “The disintermediation based on the digital technology has transformed different environments, from banking to media, education and sales. This paper explores a new kind of disintermediation or re-intermediation; also called cyberintermediation. The paper analyses how the revolution of information and communication technologies provides new alternatives of disintermediation in the generation and distribution of knowledge. The authors raise questions such as: To what extent is this phenomenon reshaping the traditional role of the university? Will it cause a crisis in the educational institutions? Will this disintermediation of the education evolve towards the disappearance of institutions like schools and universities? . . . . Beyond the prophecies, which announce the ‘death of the university’, the authors discuss and suggest new agents, actions and transactions that are useful to think about the educational institution of the new century.” --Cristobal Cobo, Carlos Scolari, Hugh Pardo, “Death of the University? Knowledge production and dissemination in the disintermediation era,” conference presentation scheduled for McLuhan Galaxy 2011, May 23-25, 2011, in Barcelona.

4. Because computers can do everything universities can do more efficiently. . . . “Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which ‘going to college’ means packing up, getting a dorm room, and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges can’t survive. The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit ‘education’ entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology has just hit its stride after years of glitchy videoconferences—and will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree—much like the news business in 1999.” -- Zephyr Teachout, Associate Professor, Fordham School of Law Head of Internet Organizing for the Howard Dean Presidential Campaign, 2004 www.bigmoney.com, Sep. 8, 2009

5. Because universities can’t provide sufficient quantities of education. . . . “ ‘More than one-third of the world’s population is under 20. There are over 30 million people today qualified to enter a university who have no place to go. During the next decade, this 30 million will grow to 100 million. To meet this staggering demand, a major university needs to be created each week. —Sir John Daniel, 1996’ It is unlikely that sufficient resources will be available to build enough new campuses to meet the growing global demand for higher education—at least not the sort of campuses that we have traditionally built for colleges and universities. Nor is it likely that the current methods of teaching and learning will suffice to prepare students for the lives that they will lead in the twenty-first century.” --John Seely Brown and Richard Adler, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0,” in EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 16–32

6. BUT. . . • Universities are not as susceptible to disintermediation as traditional news organizations (which are also less susceptible to disintermediation than received opinion has it). • Research indicates that online learning cannot overcome key “problems of sociability” without an offline component. • “Key problems of sociability” are weak trust production, free-riding problems, unstable membership. • U. Matzat, “Reducing Problems of Sociability in Online Communities: Integrating Online Communication with Offline Interaction,” American Behavioral Scientist 2010 53: 1170-1193

7. BUT. . . • Computers are a long way from doing it better. • Their success as educators depends on their ability to SCAFFOLD effectively, which remains quite limited despite rapid advances. • Scaffolding is defined as “a structure, guided in specific form by tacit assessment of a child's independent capabilities and needs, and mounted temporarily on the learner's behalf until the child can self-sufficiently produce the behavior on his or her own.” [The removal of scaffolds is called “fading.”]

8. BUT. . . • Computers are a long way from doing it better, cont. • The original example of scaffolding is a mother’s interaction with a child, for instance in peekaboo. • Computers succeed for basic algebra problem solving & geometric proof, but not for complex scientific reasoning and not for the humanities • R. Pea, “The Social and Technical Dimensions of Scaffolding and Related Theoretical Concepts for Learning, Education, and Human Activity,” THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 13(3), 423-451, p. 425, p. 433

9. BUT. . . • Scaffolding also raises sociability problems. • “In the activities of scaffolding for learning, what specifically requires the social face-to-face of scaffolding versus the interactivity that might be provided by a software artifact? Is contingency of responding all that matters (e.g., Reeves & Nass, 1996; implied in most of these articles as well), or is it human agency that is crucial in the scaffolding process? It is entirely possible that issues of identity development. community or cultural values, a sense of belonging, affiliation, faith, trust. individual caring, and responsibility weigh into these matters and that without the ‘human touch’ of scaffolding and fading from agents that truly represent these dimensions of experience, scaffolding and fading for learning may be less effective (or unhelpful altogether).” • In general, technology-based scaffolds are not faded out. Human scaffolds more effectively fade. • R. Pea, “The Social and Technical Dimensions of Scaffolding and Related Theoretical Concepts for Learning, Education, and Human Activity,” THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 13(3), 423-451, p. 445

10. SO. . . • Offline anchoring of learning communities is necessary for any learning that requires: • strong ties • responsive scaffolding • fading of scaffolds. • What types of learning are these?

11. Part II The Need for Universities

12. The Critics Speak • Critics who charge universities with irrelevance generally begin with a (mistaken) view of universities as being solely sites for the production and dissemination of information. • They propose re-directing universities toward the cultivation of human capacities. • This is a re-invention of the liberal arts.

13. The Critics Speak • Michael Wesch argues: “As an alternative, I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. To illustrate what I mean by subjectivities over subjects, I have created a list of subjectivities that I am trying to help students attain while learning the ‘subject’ of anthropology: • Our worldview is not natural and unquestionable, but culturally and historically specific. • We are globally interconnected in ways we often do not realize. • Different aspects of our lives and culture are connected and affect one another deeply. • Our knowledge is always incomplete and open to revision. • We are the creators of our world. • Participation in the world is not a choice, only how we participate is our choice.” M. Wesch, “From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Enviornments,” (Academic Commons, January 2009)

14. The Critics Speak • John Seely Brown and Richard Adler argue for a transition from” learning about” to “learning to be.” • “The emphasis on social learning stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning—a view that has largely dominated the way education has been structured for over one hundred years. The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kind of substance and that pedagogy concerns the best way to transfer this substance from teachers to students. By contrast, instead of starting from the Cartesian premise of ‘I think, therefore I am,’ and from the assumption that knowledge is something that is transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of learning says, ‘We participate, therefore we are.’” --John Seely Brown and Richard Adler, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0,” in EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 16–32

15. Reinventing the Liberal Arts • A Core Function of Colleges and Universities Has Always Been the Development of Human Intelligence • But what does this mean?

16. Human Intelligence • Situational, not fixed (see social psychologists like Greg Walton); • A product of scaffolding-with-fading in contrast to distributed intelligence, which is scaffolding without fading; • Complemented by distributed intelligence but should have leadership role. • Universities are uniquely positioned to develop it.

17. Back to Scaffolding • “[There] is the fascinating and challenging question of sorting out empirically which of the sense making, process management, and articulation and reflection supports that they and others have created should be conceived of as scaffolds-with-fading to be pulled down and whisked away once the learner is able to perform as expected without their use-and which of these supports deserve to serve in an ongoing way as part of a distributed intelligence scientific workbench and as fundamental aides to the doing of science whose fading is unnecessary and unproductive.” • “Such boundary issues are at once empirical and normative as we debate values for what learners should be able to do with and without such designed scaffolds- debates nonetheless informed by empirical accounts of learners' performances in the diversity of situations in which their knowledge and adaptive expertise should come to play.” • Pea 2004, p. 442, 446

18. What should we be able to do without scaffolding? • “Listen to Music”: recognize order, pattern, balance, harmony (and their opposites) intuitively (Pattern recognizer) • Use Images, Data, Evidence: move from representations & objects to models that make patterns visible (Conscientious observer) • Use Names & Argument: use definitions, categories, dialectic, collection and division, ethical reasoning to interpret the meaning of the patterns (Interpreter) • Judge: actions that should flow from those meanings (Judge) • Negotiate: accuracy of pattern identification and quality of interpretations and judgments with others who are also identifying patterns, interpreting them, and making judgments (Negotiator) • (This merges a Platonic account of the processes of thinking [but not of what counts as success for those processes] with an account that stems from tracking the intellectual labor of juries, as in D. G. Burnett, A Trial by Jury and New York’s Campaign for Fiscal Equity; the phrase “conscientious observer” comes from the work of Elisabeth Soep.)

19. Part III Why Do Democracies Need to Cultivate Human Intelligence?

20. Cultivating leadership capacity • Human intelligence is a leadership capacity, both for the individual and society. • Human intelligence is the basis of individual autonomy. • Human intelligence is also the basis of effective social, political, and cultural leadership. • Paradoxically: democracies need more leaders and more leadership capacity than do other kinds of political system.

21. Controlling our tools • Using the 2011 Pulitzer’s to take our social pulse: • Radiation stories about people not controlling their computers • Insurance stories about people not controlling their models • Finance stories about people not controlling their resource allocation mechanisms • http://www.pulitzer.org/node/8501

22. Raising the average level of public intelligence • There is a need to respond to the increased impact of amateur cultural producers on public culture. • Best response would be to lift the average intellectual level of the citizenry both to prepare people as producers and to facilitate their more sophisticated consumption of what is produced.

23. Part IV Conclusion

24. The richest intellectual centers in 21st century will: • Anchor the cultivation of human intelligence in offline communities; • Extend human intelligence by connecting it to distributed intelligence while being clear about the difference between the two and the leadership role of the former; • Increase the number of people engaged in universities’ human development projects by connecting offline to online communities and thereby extending the reach of the cultivation of human intelligence.

25. And universities fit the bill.