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What If We Ran Universities Like Wikipedia?
Pickens writes "Do university bureaucracies still make sense in the era of networks? At the recent Educause conference, David J. Staley laid out the findings of a focus group he conducted asking educators what a college would look like if it operated like Wikipedia. The 'Wiki-ized University' wouldn't have formal admissions, says Staley; people could enter and exit as they wished and the university would consist of voluntary and self-organizing associations of teachers and students 'not unlike the original idea for the university, in the Middle Ages.' In addition, the curriculum of the 'Wiki-ized University' would be intellectually fluid, and instead of tenure, professors' longevity 'would be determined by the community.' Staley predicts that a new form of academic organization is emerging that will be driven by volunteerism. 'We do see some idea today of how "volunteer teaching" might look: think of the faculty at a place like the University of Phoenix. Most teaching faculty have day jobs — and in fact are hired because they have day jobs — and teach at the university for a nominal stipend,' writes Staley. 'If something like the Phoenix model is what develops in a wiki-ized university setting, this would suggest that a new type of "professorate" will emerge, consisting of those who teach or publish or conduct research for their own personal or professional satisfaction or for some other nonmonetized benefit.'"
Most teaching faculty have day jobs — and in fact are hired because they have day jobs — and teach at the university for a nominal stipend
I would guess that they are working a 2nd job to make ends meet. Not for the "love" of teaching.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
The lack of real expertise on some (many?) subjects, the petty squabbles to protect inconsequential fiefdoms, zero accountability.
I fail to see how a wiki model could remove all that from universities.
Boom. Roasted.
would probably look something like this.
That "nonmonetized benefit" is access to college girls with loose morals.
The future is the University of Phoenix? The one that has one of the highest default rates on student loans because it's graduates can't get jobs?
Sure. That's the future.
If we were really talking about the Wiki-ization of Universities I would image we would have boards of experts to decide who the professors were. It might resemble a university bureaucracy.
consisting of those who teach or publish or conduct research for their own personal or professional satisfaction or for some other nonmonetized benefit.
So, the University of Phoenix, a for profit university, is the model he's using to determine that in the future, professors and researchers will not be doing so for profit. Something seems really, really wrong here.
No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
In the middle ages interested (and I mean wealthy) people would be able to grasp multiple areas of expertise (think leonardo da vinci).
Since then things have gotten a WHOLE LOT more complicated, i.e., Would we want civil engineers building bridges if they could skip structural courses?
Professional expertises are narrower and narrower and with that the margin for freedom in terms of what is required to finish a degree is smaller.
The world is more complex, society is more complex, and while there is certainly some wiggle room for each individual the bottom line is that highly specialized workers require a highly specialized, structured, education.
Run universities like Wikipedia? So you can have tenured nazi's running around like they own certain subjects wholesale, like some Wikipedia admins do? So "truth" is only relative to what the most powerful group of professors (admins) that give a damn about the subject matter?
No thanks. The USA has one of the best university systems in the world, flaws and all, but running it like Wikipedia would just insure that the most incompetent and most vocal (who are often the same) will have an even larger voice.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
This is basically a model of public intellectualism, and popular education. It has three components: 1. Creating a culture of learning which is not dependent on structure, but which is interwoven into life's fabric. 2. Pushing access to information to everyone, with no prejudices about who it will benefit best or who should be prioritized. 3. Encouraging a culture of healthy debate, humility, and a collective struggle for answers, instead of an individual struggle for superiority.
We're already seeing this on some level: Wikipedia, Kahn Academy, Amateur Astronomy, Open Courseware, etc. But I think it's not enough to just keep doing what we're doing, I would advocate that we need to go further. There is no reason that, for instance, a university doing research, no matter how obscure, should not be pressured to put their work online in an accessible fashion. Videos of conferences and presentations, notes, theses, etc. Beyond that, we need to actively break down prejudices about who benefits from this information. We cannot claim to know how people will use information, and determining the importance of their access based on condition, geography, poverty, gender, etc. should not be tolerated. Someone who does studies alternative energies should not dismiss the notion that a teenager living in Nigeria might not want to pour over everything they know, either in order to use that knowledge to create a DIY solar or wind generator, or to create something they hadn't even considered. We cannot keep an international presentation on evolutionary biology within a circle of privileged academics, just because we hold to the myth that if you aren't in a university, you aren't interested in being an intellectual.
And once we have that, or maybe concurrently, we need public spaces, free of charge and open to anyone, that people get together to talk about what they've learned, and to learn more. Like a library where talking is encouraged, or a pub without beer.
This is something I feel very strongly about, that the delineation between the academic and the non-academic, the intellectual and the non-intellectual, must be broken down and done away with. Here, then, is an RSA animate which talks about the structure of the current education system, and touches on the stratification within it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
The businesses I've been in cared about the degree because it showed
1) you could finish a 4+ year project
2) which had lots of jerks along the way and you didn't melt down
3) that had ridiculous hours at times
4) that had absolutely inflexible deadlines at times and you made them.
5) you had to communicate a lot with others.
---
Other that than, I can't count how many times someone is moved laterally away from their degree within 18 months of being hired.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Given the number of lawsuits against "University of Phoenix" - which is really just a big fucking degree mill - when people found out that their degrees were non-accredited in many cases, this is a key point to consider. "Wiki University" is more likely to be just like Wikipedia in general: corrupt, based entirely on "who you know" or "did your viewpoint contradict some corrupt loony with far too much crowd following or access to the delete/ban buttons."
How would this be useful again? Let's remember that if the objective is to self educate, you can already do that quite well in this day and age. The Internet makes almost anything available to you, there are libraries (including the ones on Universities) open to the public, and indeed you can sit in on classes at some universities, even if you aren't a student (some have to allow that). Learning when and what you choose has never been easier.
However that's not the point of a university. A university is about providing a structured program, with some verification for people that complete it successfully. That has value above and beyond just the education received. This is by no means a complete list but some of the major things:
1) It provides some proof of what you've done. When someone is self taught, they could well be full of shit. You have no idea. If they have a degree, at least you know that they did well enough for the university to consider it ok. I'm not saying that is a guarantee of competence but it is a whole lot more than just "Trust me, I know what I'm talking about."
2) It shows the ability to stick with a lengthy, difficult, endeavor and succeed. That is a worthwhile personality trait to have.
3) It hopefully means you got a broad base of knowledge in the subject. When someone self teaches they often focus just on what interests them or is relevant to the task at hand. A university can mandate a broader range of study on things, and focus on theoretical backgrounds to practical items where the use might not be readily apparent, but important later on.
4) The accredited ones are held to some standards. Not only is the university itself examined, but individual programs are. It isn't just all up to whatever they feel like.
I can't see how such a "Do whatever you want," kind of university would be at all useful. Sure you could learn things, but as I said, if all you are going to do is learn what you want, attend the classes you want, then it really isn't any different than you just teaching your self, watching lectures online, etc.
This doesn't mean university is the be-all, end-all, but the point of the institution is more than just teaching people whatever they happen to be interested in.
On the other hand, I think it would be nice to hand someone their resume back filled with [citation needed]s.
Here in Canada, an undergraduate degree from a respected, accredited university is in effect a 'certificate of cleverness.' It says to potential employers that you're smart enough to have completed four years of full-time course work at a place that is reasonably hard and that you've produced the requisite outputs. With a few exceptions (undergraduate engineering etc.), it's not considered 'job training.'
It may be different in the USA, I'm not sure...
Universities that sponsor research provide a more important function than teaching. Fundamental research is not done well by private industry. Throughout history the arts and the sciences have always needed benefactors. This is still true today. A professor in a science is paid to perform research with no known benefit. Such research is extremely important, because fundamental research seldom has a known benefit. However, eventually benefits become apparent, much later. Private industry does not like to sponsor fundamental research for this reason because the ROI is unclear. That leaves universities with NSF grants. A wikipedia-like university would not be able to pay scientist professors, since the assumption is that work would be volunteer. Then who would pay for the salaries of these highly skilled people as well as the research labs?
The University of Phoenix has an interesting delima. They have a goal of offering as much opportunity as possible (lax admission standards), because it is profitable. I am an MBA student with the University of Phoenix, because I live in the middle of BFE, and drank way too much beer during my undergraduate program several years ago and graduated with a 2.5, which took a lot of schools off-the-table without a stellar GMAT score. Because of their lax standards of admission, they sign on a lot of students who simply cannot handle the program. I was enrolled on Academic Probation in which I had to maintain a 3.0 through the first four classes. During those classes, the quality of my classmates quickly improved as those who were not committed or incapable of the work dropped.
Phoenix gets penalized for giving students like me an opportunity to try to be successful in the program, but having a high failure rate when those students don't cut it in a program that is comparable to a lot of state-school MBA programs.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
How does that work in such a college.
So guy shows up on campus and says he's a electrician and he's going to teach anyone interested. All kinds of students flock over looking to learn a trade. He's got a whole bunch of references, but half of them don't answer the phone and at least a quarter of the rest are just references that lead to the other references.
He explains that this course is just a stub and hopefully some better electricians will come along and make it better and safer. But hey, let's go and get you your ticket!
Bibo Ergo Sum.
I think it is worse than that. Let's look at theory of *whatever*. I do a lot mathematics. How many theoretical mathematicians would this new uni support? I'm guessing not a lot. So, if we were to have this back when number theory had no practical applications unlike as it does today in security, we'd probably have no number theory upon which to base our computer security that underlies our new web based companies like Amazon and countless others. How do we measure that loss before the loss can be seen?
What about physics? Quantum theory was developed because a lot of physicists and mathematicians thought it would be really neat to understand nature in a deep level. There were no applications obvious at that time yet it underlies much of modern electronic computation. Why would they get funded to do their research? How about Einstein and relativity...the use of which makes GPS actually work. No obvious use, why would yer basic Joe Gimme-a-Job schlump take a course in relativity?
How about philosophy? Descartes had some pretty neat algebraic ideas...no one ever conceived of them before him and in their original text, they are very obscure. Yet much of modern mathematics is built on algebraic theories. I cannot imagine him getting a job. How about the logicians who worked on philosophical logic? Some of that spawned modal logic which in turn spawned Floyd-Hoare logic and the whole notion of proving programs correct with respect to some mathematical specification. It is used intimately in security arguments. How do we fund the philosophers now? How do we predict which philosophical theories will be of use in the future? What about Aristotle? He invented logic. How does he get funded when the common man couldn't see what use it would ever be as short-sighted as they were that they couldn't see modern computers?
The basic problem with numb-nuts ideas such as wiki-university is that it is spawned by Business School Product who can see no value in anything that doesn't immediately translate into increased sales of widgets. It pretty much consigns humans to no greater intellectual curiosity than what Business School Product can put a price on. And that price has nothing to do with any future value. It is a prescription for consigning the human race to extinction; it would merely become an experiment it how short term gain will doom long term sustainability.
The undergraduate portion of an MD's education is mostly just qualifying that person to get into medical school. It's the specialist school, the clinicals, the internship, the residency, and the board exams that make someone an doctor. It's not the premed certificate.
What if the point of going to a university was to actually learn something rather than to get a piece of paper? How I see it, these kinds of changes would make colleges less useful for hiring decisions, but far FAR more interesting for people who actually want to learn something. I don't see that as a bad thing. Most degrees should mean very little anyway. The idea that having a degree means someone can do a specific job better than someone with it is popular but seems to be wrong in most cases. Why not get rid of the BS and make universities actually worth going to?
Not sure if people have the total concept of what a university looked like in the middle ages (despite looking it up on the wikipedia). Basically people who joined universities were mostly either clergy, civil servants, or what we would call today "professional" students.
Back in those days, other than the church, there were generally no need for preparatory degrees. Most good jobs that regular folks could aspire to didn't require degrees, they required lengthy apprenticeship which one could tackle by working for essentially peanuts for awhile or actually paying money to join various guilds.
However, if one had a patron (or a rich family) or if you wanted to dedicate your life to the institution (often associated with the church, but there were some secular institutions), you could instead attend a university and study law, medicine (usually reserved for rich folks), or theology. In the modern era, who would be paying for all this stuff over the 20 or so years that a typical university course of study would entail is quite an interesting problem.
Of course for those that have the attraction of becoming a professional student, maybe running a wiki-university like the middle ages is interesting, but I don't think it's what many folks had in mind.
I get the feeling that most folks are thinking about a "free" prep-education for business or engineering or some other trade. That's not really like a university from the middle ages, that is like a much more modern re-invention of the university into a trade-guild. Now, instead of joining the guild, you pay your tuition to a "university" and learn a trade or skill from someone there and get your guild-card/degree to hang out your shingle or to join a co-op/company.
I think that the folks interested in the "free" prep-education should instead just be questioning the whole concept of a guild that a university education has become and if a wiki-guild is actually more what some folks had in mind...
Was a solid, theoretical, background. If you don't recognize the value, well maybe you just need to work for more time.
I work for a CE department and we see older students quite often. Not people who are changing careers or the like, though that happens, but people employed as engineers, being sent by their company. The reason is they are good workers, smart, etc, but they never learned the theoretical electronics background. So they run in to problems they have trouble solving, or solve sub optimally because while they know some of the practice, they don't have a good grasp on the theory.
Also don't think the "Putting up with bullshit, doing as you are told, and sticking with something for 4 years," is useless either. That is part of what companies want. They want someone who understands that work isn't fun it is, well, work. That it isn't about doing whatever strikes your muse, it is about doing what you are asked to do, and following through on things in the long term.
However if you really think you learned more for Wikipedia than your university courses then it says one or more of these three things, none of which reflect well on you:
1) You suck at learning. You did a bad job paying attention in class and trying to grasp all you were being taught. You need things broken down for you in to small, media-size chunks and put in simplified terms for you to be interested.
2) You are lazy at learning. You just wanted to do the bare minimum, memorize what you needed for tests without much understanding, just what you needed to coast by. You didn't bother to learn anymore, or use any of the amazing learning resources you had (like the professors).
3) You chose a really shitty school. Means you either lacked the acumen to make a good choice or the drive/ability to actually go to a good one.
If you really think you learned more off a wiki than in school, that says some rather poor things of you.