Here’s the debate:

How Should the University Evolve?, part 1 of 2 from BLSCI on Vimeo.

and the Q&A is here:

I’m in the midst of Thanksgiving prep so don’t have time to contribute my own commentary. Basically we were a bit at cross purposes. Siva gave a theatrically impassioned and well-supported defense of the traditional university and I tried to make the point that I don’t care much what happens to the traditional university. I come neither to bury nor to praise it, but to talk about the needs that learners have (whether students or no) and how those needs might best be met (using both technology and traditional forms and new hybrids of the same).

This discourse was pronounced both “empowering” and “bullshit” on Twitter, and rightfully so I think. Kyra Gaunt, an anthropology professor at Baruch, a TED fellow, and a hero of mine, gave out more truth at the microphone during the Q&A than I heard coming from the stage all night. She correctly intuited”My sense: @sivavaid who really liked your book was doing the academic devils advocacy thing which I hate. #debateisnotengagement”

At some point academics end and you have to take a stand on stuff.  My fave Tweet was this one:

@unboundstudent: @anya1anya @sivavaid DIYU Takeaway? future of higher ed is a conversation of the ppl!

Little Andalusian girl with an iPad

So there’s this kid. Super bright. Failing classes in high school. He can’t concentrate on his homework. What he can concentrate on, for hours at a stretch? Editing videos on his laptop.

“At the beginning of his junior year, he discovered a passion for filmmaking and made a name for himself among friends and teachers with his storytelling in videos made with digital cameras and editing software.. He acts as his family’s tech-support expert, helping his father, Satendra, a lab manager, retrieve lost documents on the computer, and his mother, Indra, a security manager at the San Francisco airport, build her own Web site…

Vishal taught himself to use sophisticated editing software in part by watching tutorials on YouTube. He does not leave his chair for more than two hours, sipping Pepsi, his face often inches from the screen, as he perfects the clip…“I’m spending two hours to get a few seconds just right,” he says.“If it weren’t for the Internet, I’d focus more on school and be doing better academically,” he says. But thanks to the Internet, he says, he has discovered and pursued his passion: filmmaking. Without the Internet, “I also wouldn’t know what I want to do with my life.”

Is his computer the distraction? Or is it his classes that are the distraction? Why should he have to wait to turn 18 and get into art school to concentrate on his passion full-time? How can he get connected to a broader community to help him collaborate, get his portfolio out to a wider audience, and support his self-learning through sites like YouTube?

What kind of paradigm shift does it take to get parents, teachers, school officials, and the bureaucrats who measure and count “student achievement” to see  this kid as a success story, not a screw-up?

I’m back from a challenging and invigorating and even relaxing 2 weeks in Europe, where I spoke at the JISC CETIS edutechs conference in UK and the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona.

I’ll be chronicling some of my take-homes from the conferences and the state of higher ed in Europe, but right now I wanted to get up a little post about 11/9, when I Skyped in from my hotel room in Almeria, an extremely charming city on the Mediterranean in Spain’s Costa del Sol, to John Maeda‘s monthly meeting of executives at RISD. Here is a picture John shot of the scene.

John Maeda is this incredibly visionary and playful thinker across a host of disciplines–design, art, technology–who finds himself in the unusual role of an academic administrator. No disrespect, but I get the sense it’s a little bit like having Willy Wonka in charge of some civil service bureaucracy. Nevertheless he has an extremely strong team around him, clearly, with a range of strengths, and they had all read the book and we traded some interesting observations.

First of all, John was at MIT when the Open Courseware program got started, and he pointed out to me something crucial that I neglected to mention when discussing the program, namely, that professors were paid directly, a few thousand bucks, for the work of putting their classes up on the web. Incentives are good when you’re persuading people to try new technologies!

Second, they asked me what I thought about how an old-school institution like RISD should adapt to these new possibilities for technologies in teaching, learning, and interacting.

I said I thought the most important thing was to figure out how every student can get their work out onto the open web to join the global community of practice of designers, to begin to learn how to use the web to collaborate, to innovate and improve their techniques, get feedback and of course to build a portfolio for jobs. That this should not be the exceptional achievement of a few students but it should be the basic expectation of every student. But this is not something that RISD administrators and faculty should figure out how to do on their own. They should involve their students in the process of figuring out the best way to do this, the best tools to use, the best practices to adopt. Assignment can be open ended; create a digital portfolio and get 100 people to interact with it. You can use a wiki, Blogger, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Behance, LinkedIn, on and on…Students are the digital natives and should lead the way.

Secondly, RISD should think about adopting technologies in ways that are congruent with their mission. When it comes to faculty, faculty are like anyone else–they use technology when it helps THEM do something they want to do BETTER. When it makes teaching easier, not harder. When it makes it easier to connect with their students. When they can hold virtual office hours and spend more time at home with their families, or when they can put together a 500-image slideshow from crowdsourced images in a matter of minutes and have more time to prepare their lectures, or when students view TED Talks at home on their own time and come prepared for a livelier class discussion in small groups instead of teachers having to lecture for 50 minutes.

Many of us–and John laughed when I said this–are fanboys and fangirls. We get obsessed with the gadget, the app, the widget itself for its own sake. But that’s not a recipe for a lasting broad adoption of technology.

That technology when it really succeeds becomes like electricity. It disappears. You don’t think, “I am now connecting to the national electric grid, wow, cool!!” You just flip the switch, and it works.

I am getting more excited every day for the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival. I’ve interviewed about 25 of the nearly 300 participants about their projects and plans, from HASTAC to the Hackbus. I’ve ordered the new MacBook Air for lightweight documentation on the move and a pair of fierce walking boots. I am cutting down on caffeine to increase my sensitivity for the big boosts I’ll need to follow what’s going on from 10 am to 8:30 pm and probably late into the night (since both Spaniards and geeks tend to dine late).

I feel like each space is going to follow its own story arc over the two days and many people will be experiencing tunnel vision (in a good way) focusing on their various projects, but my delightful job is to cover as much of the festival as possible (with the team of Matt Thompson, Matt Garcia and all the fabulous bloggers here and elsewhere).
Also, just because of my personal skill set, I’m gravitating toward the blah-blah-blah sessions rather than the bleep-bleep-bleep.
So, besides keynotes and such, here’s some particular sessions I really want to check out:
THURSDAY
11am Intro to Badges
12pm Hacking Wikiversity
14:00–14:50 Storming the Syllabus: Session #1 Twenty-first century Literacies: Building a syllabus together with Cathy Davidson
3pm: Ideas&Values of WebCraft
4pm: Graffiti/ Free Software (you have to check this out)

FRIDAY
11am Pathways to Open Content
12pm Earn my Storyteller Badge at the Citizen Identities and Neighborhood Literacies for Open Learning #2
2pm Keynote w. Prof. Manuel Castells
3pm Building an Open Textbook with FlatWorld Knowledge
4pm The Next Big Thing for OER-what is it???
5pm Hopefully yoga but maybe the open mic??
6pm With much assistance I will perform a feat of entertainment, edification and multitasking not unlike the time my friend Stevhen cooked spaghetti with shrimp live on stage while performing gypsy rocknroll during his band’s concert.

An alternate phrasing of the anti-elitist objection is to say that a DIY U future will automatically perpetuate the meritocracy, by giving even more advantages to the best students. To which, I have a couple of different answers.

Are we really against having a true meritocracy, in the sense of a society that rewards excellence? Yes and no.
I think there’s a basic fundamental tension between democracy and meritocracy. This tension was actually described quite well by Michael Young, who coined the term “meritocracy” in a satire written in Britain in the 1950s:

Young’s fictional narrator describes that on one hand, the “stolid mass” or majority is not the greatest contributor to society, but the “creative minority” or “restless elite”. Yet on the other hand…from such adherence to natural science and intelligence, arises arrogance and complacency.The casualties of this progress described by the phrase “Every selection of one is a rejection of many”.

The major problems with meritocracy as it is currently practised in America, as I see them:

1) Since I don’t have as strong a faith as, say, Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, in the genetic component of socioeconomic advantage I have to believe that the large racial and economic gaps that persist in our educational system are the result of systematic inequality, not differences in innate ability. Therefore it follows that a massive injustice is being perpetuated on thousands of children who get crappy instruction in crappy schools and never get a decent chance to go to college, even though if you had stuck them in a top-flight public school from 1st grade they’d definitely be Ivy League material.
But not enough is being done about this, and I think that’s partly because the New Elite have so much faith in the status quo that has put them on top.

2) The self-identified “elite” do tend to be hothouse flowers who look with disdain on the mainstream choices of their fellow Americans from fast food and evangelical religion to reality TV. Not only is this an annoying attitude when you’re on the receiving end (I know this because I’m from the South and people are always slagging on the South in front of me) it has fed the flowering of a defensive ignorance from folks who choose not to believe in, say, climate change because they hate Al Gore.

3) There’s a lack of diversity in the talents that we recognize, cultivate and reward as a society. Working with your hands, affinity for the natural world, a tendency to support and build community rather than strive after individual achievement are just three traits neglected by the self-identified “elite.”

Here’s how I believe a DIY U future can help:
1) I believe that there are super smart autodidacts out there stuck in crappy schools, or no schools at all, in the US and developing countries, for whom the provision of Ivy League quality courseware for free constitutes a bonanza of educational manna. Maybe there aren’t a billion William Kamkwambas out there. Say there are only a few dozen in each country, wouldn’t that make the money already invested in OER come out into a good investment?

2) Opening up the walls of the Ivy League & other elite colleges can demystify what goes on there and possibly even endear it to the public. There’s a big difference in the way people feel about their public library (like saying, This is OUR public library) vs. how they feel about the campus library, or the college campus in general; there’s a difference in the way people feel about the campus sports arena, which they visit regularly, vs. some weirdo physics lab. On the other side of things, opening up the walls of elite universities could foster some much-needed humility for the self-identified elite. I know for me personally, when I have to go explain my Yale-bred thinking to the students and faculty at Kansas City Kansas Community College, it leads to much soul-searching and posts like this.

3) The open, decentralized, nonhierarchical pursuit of knowledge can foster a greater diversity of topics and pursuits than that accommodated in even the most commodious course catalogue. Whenever and whereever education consists even partly of people getting together to learn whatever they want, we naturally see the proliferation of study of practical, hands-on skills like composting and bicycle repair and yoga and basic web design and guitar and Spanish. This is good because we may need these kinds of skills a lot more in the sustainable future that we’re hopefully evolving toward.