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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.'"
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.
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!
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."
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.
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.