I stumbled accros a
post which has much to offer on the
discussion which will take place tomorrow at the
UM Library. While I participate myself lightheartedly in an
online course on AI I came accross another post, this time by on
Maastricht University's Youtube channel.
Mr. Wim Gijselaers is as eloquent as correct in his statement that "we are too late, meaning that change already occured and we have not even noticed it" and combines insight with forsight from the perspective of an educator throughout his presentation. Mr. Homam Karimi takes on the opening of the discussion by introducing
studytube, a video-learning platform recently launched and still in his beta phase. From the outset the web2.0i video platform which contains self-guided training clips and the possibility to measure your own study success can be seen as examplifying the change Mr. Gijselars is concerned. A bit like vodafone's inhouse employees training online-environment it promises to free students from paying a visit to "the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules" in an attractive manner.
Universities where never anticipating processes that transformed society. Even before the first wave of innovation in education sweeped over europe as a result of the industrial hardware, it was clear from the criticisms of Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle and many more that university education (of the scholastic-aristotelian tradition that extended from the 9th century with the start of the manuscript culture until the Gutenberg era in the Renissaunce) was a major source of dissatisfaction for thinkers all over Europe. (See Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages; 1996) Nothing has changed right up to the modern era. Peter Drucker studied law and with his encyclopedic knowledge elevated Management education into a liberal art form. (Landmark's of Tomorrow, 1959) He forsaw in the 50's what became the tide of the third wave of innovation in education: The demand for an educated workforce in an ascending knowledge society. He wrote "For the first time in human history higher education is not a privilege, a frill or a luxury. It is a necessity of production." Back then the major universities held on to "lecture" based industrial education while the world around it was fully operational in an ever more complex, information structured ecochamber.
The reasons are now the same as back then: A necessity for production. When Mr. Gijselaers askes "what environment do we live in?" he points to a previouse environment created by the the internet; Of which studytube is a perfect example. The "greatest teaching machine" created the conditions in which the classrooms of the resurrected Gutenberg era must look like the captured oral wisdome of the newely invented letters of the phonetic alphabet which Sokrates aimed to defend. One has to forgive Mr Gijselaers for making this misstake by which he adds little confusion to the overall goal of his enterprise. It was Kadmu's teeth that Socrates saw as an impediment to the education of former orally transmitted knowledge, not books. (For a brilliant expose
Preface to Plato: Eric Havelock)
The environment kids grow up now is that of a post-information age; An age characterized not by scarcity but superabundance of information. What Tom Wolf sayed about other information service providers in the 80's can be adopted to education providers today. The business model of universities is not unlike that of a mining company. Unless the raw material extracted from the operation is scarce, no profit can be made. And there is certainly no scarcity of teens willing to pay an awful lot of money for a cheap and specialized education.
