Don Tapscott gets things rolling at Edge.org:
The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.
This echoes the chapter in What Would Google Do?, where Jeff Jarvis argued that digitization forces universities to develop new models and think differently, but ultimately, some kind of role for universities is assured (though maybe not with the same degree of importance, or maybe reverence is the word, that many educators would hope):
Is there a university, post-Google? Yes, these institutions are too big, rich, and valuable to fade away. But like every other institution in society, they should reshape themselves around new opportunities. Universities need to ask what value they add in educational transactions: qualifying teachers, helping students craft curricula, providing platforms for learning.
I’m not so convinced universities are necessary for all of that — or that all of that is necessary. Universities will be around for a long time. Many people (if not most) will continue to prefer being taught in a structured and in-person environment, but there are a lot of big question marks about what other ways people will learn in the future… especially, creativity.
There’s a paradox when it comes to learning and trying to teach creativity. By definition, creativeness can’t be taught. It can be nudged and facilitated, but ultimately, creative mastery means independence. There’s no way to design an education for creativity. It’s something a student has to want, has to take the initiative towards, and has to keep investing themselves in over the course of years.
Louis Menand’s latest piece in the New Yorker, about creative writing programs, generates some useful insights:
Changes in creative-writing programs are influenced by changes in two related bodies of thought, both of which try to answer the question “How can we make people more productive and more creative?” These are the philosophy of education and management theory. Creative-writing courses follow naturally from the “learning by doing” theories of progressive education: they add practical, hands-on experience to traditional book learning. And, as McGurl suggests, presenting a story in a writing workshop is a little like making a business presentation in a corporate workplace. Such a presentation is, on some level, what he calls “a presentation of individual excellence,” a means by which we observe and test ourselves. It helps us measure how we’re doing in the human race.
For that education to be “creative,” the student has to use feedback to calibrate their own judgement, gradually casting or closing off reliance on externals, towards relying first and foremost on one’s own judgement.
The web is a perfect place for engaging in that kind of education, where hard stats are available and feedback can be unsolicited and open — often from unexpected places and people we would have never thought to ask — dialog is spontaneous and new role models are always just a few clicks away from being found and followed.
Universities will work out something great eventually, but until then I’m not inclined to wait around for them to figure it out. The opportunities are all here, already available for anyone with enough creativity and initiative to learn…
