Daniel Bachhuber's weblog

This year, Edge’s World Question is “How has the internet changed the way you think?” which, at first glance, just re-emphasizes my perma-”so what” state. I started reading through the 16 pages of essays on the flight this morning, however, and even though the question may be mediocre some of the responses are world class. Stewart Brand has an especially astute observation on how the Internet better enables distributed collaboration:

One’s Guild

I couldn’t function without them, and I suspect the same is true for nearly all effective people. By “them” I mean my closest intellectual collaborators. They are the major players in my social extended mind. How I think is shaped to a large degree by how they think.

Our association is looser than a team but closer than a cohort, and it’s not a club or a workgroup or an elite. I’ll call it a guild. Everyone in my guild runs their own operation, and none of us report to each other. All we do is keep close track of what each other is thinking and doing.

Absolutely the most perfect word.

Clay Shirky hosted an impromptu discussion section this evening on redesigning higher education. He’s put together a wiki page of the best responses, but I feel like I need to record a few too for posterity. The question was simple: If you were going to create a college from scratch, what would you do?

AFG85: @cshirky Classes would create wikis for specific topics and students would be graded on the quality of their contributions.

AFG85: @cshirky And the same wikis would be used year after year, so new students would have to add to the contributions of last year’s students.

digiphile: @cshirky Fund multidisciplinary labs for applied innovation & incubation. And learn from the example of PCU & “Accepted” http://j.mp/4LHTkG

sewsueme: @cshirky instead of having a college counselor you would have a concierge/ curator who would help you make sense of your education journey

sewsueme: @cshirky as @ccoletta & I were debating earlier in the evening: there would need to be a new accred system. Employer or performance based?

sewsueme: @cshirky learners cld collect “credits” (learnings) from anyplace–Apple store, a uni course, an apprenticeship as long as they cld prove

sewsueme: @cshirky there might be some new course creation but aggregation from multiple places wld be important

ricetopher: @cshirky Why build anything? College as aggregator, filter set, facilitator of networked learning better model in an age of ubiquitous info.

AFG85: @cshirky for professors, have a small full time staff supplemented with practitioners from different fields teaching for one semester

AFG85: @cshirky for students, go YCombinator style–systematic applications, then one weekend of ten minute interviews.

ekstasis: @cshirky single biggest failure of education is the focus on grades as a proxy for learning. they don’t always track. #CollegeFromScratch

I still think that accreditation is going to be the toughest nut to crack. All of the other pieces, distributed collaboration, access to learning materials, etc., are falling into place thanks to the disruptive tendencies of the web. People are learning, by golly, but the record of their learnings is all over the map. For any of these zany ideas for new universities to fly, the students will need to have an equally new method for articulating their accomplishments. Right now, this legitimacy comes from the accreditation board.

If you can convince employers that your new mechanism for accreditation is more accurate and effective than the standard college degree then, well, I think you might have a new college worth starting from scratch.