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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.

… is a solid topic for the Poytner Chat being held this Thursday at 10 am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern. A few months back, CoPress published a video called “A Case for Innovation”:

In it, we identify the historical context for the issues that a number of print publications are having today, and lay the groundwork for why innovation is critical for the transmogrification and survival of these organizations. Innovation, in our world, is about experimenting and taking risks. It’s “trying what’s radically new” with the hope that some ideas will be good learning experiences while others will be tremendous successes.

It’s critically important that journalism schools experiment as well, and I look forward to a productive conversation about approaches they can take to create an environment that fosters innovation.

Journalism education needs much more of a fundamental reboot than just adding courses to teach “social media,” and the world has room for one more podcast full of pundits to guide the transformation. We give you:

This Week in Rebooting the Ecosystem for Reinventing J school

Writer’s note (because there ain’t no editor): In all seriousness, the three of us love, like serious humanly love, This Week in Tech, Rebooting the News, and all people, podcasts, and/or cities we tease at in this episode. It’s only out of love that we jest. We have better technical difficulties too.

To frame the solutions to the problem, we begin by establishing some of the ways in which J school is a broken model for the 21st century. In most other fields, Joey Baker points out, academia is the research space. If that’s not the case, then it’s the military. The news industry is the only one where the industry leads and academia is behind.

Greg Linch points out another issue in that J schools, as institutions, are really slow to change. They have a critical inability to adapt quickly. This is a bigger issue in the 21st century because some of the tools journalists need to know how to use are changing at an exponential rate. As both Joey Baker and I point out, many of the tools taught in a four year undergraduate program are obsolete or nearing such a stage by graduation. J schools aren’t going to get back ahead by teaching “social media.” The problem isn’t with what they’re teaching, but rather how they’re teaching it. Another fundamental that needs to change.

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Arrived a few minutes late to Digital Journalism Camp, organized by Abraham Hyatt, and these are my notes from the first session about news entrepreneurship in Portland. Steve Woodward and Carolyn Duncan, of the Portland Ten, led the session.

Steve Woodward of Nozzl Media argues that the drop in newspaper revenue is a metrics problem. Newspapers need to work more with metrics and be able to prove their value such that they can reengage their advertisers. The tools for metrics in print are much less than the tools for metrics online.

Discussion about Perez Hilton. Carolyn Duncan asks “who the hell was this guy three years ago?” Chuckles from the audience as someone asks “who the hell is this guy now?” The same guy asking that question follows up with “if you want to be in this business, trust is the word. If you don’t have trust, you’re not going to make a dollar.”

Pete Forsyth on trust and citing sources on Wikipedia: “you want to have a clear, transparent editorial process.” The producer of the content has to adhere to a published set of standards that others can audit.

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The future of journalism is a bright one. It’s time to take the incredible opportunity that the internet presents for improving the entire process of news and capitalize on it. When the internet is the default platform of choice, however, the barrier to invent and reinvent drops to the floor. This is why newspaper companies should’ve applied more resources to innovating ten years ago and will need to work double-time now to remain relevant. Many won’t make it. It strikes me as ironic that, in an age where many people working online complain about “filter failure”, or having access to too much information, we can have a parallel conversation about the supposed “death of journalism.” While many newspaper companies are in various stages of financial viability, I’d like to offer four required mindsets for creating the future of journalism.

Note: this memo is open in the sense than anyone can read it, but also in the sense that you damn well better steal these ideas.

Value experimentation with new business models

As Ryan Sholin says, the business model is the elephant in the room. Let’s take this one step further: the value proposition is the elephant in the room. A basic rule of economics is that if you create something of value, you can monetize it. To paraphrase Douglas Rushkoff, money doesn’t make good journalism, good journalism makes money. Let’s take a look at the past. In the era of the print product, it was acceptable for a reporter to rewrite an article off the wire because their audience generally had access to that content in one place: the paper. In the era of an increasingly ubiquitous internet, these duplication efforts can actually diminish a news brand. Link to it instead of rewriting it. Add value first.

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Tomorrow morning will find me headed to Philadelphia for Saturday’s BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly. Needless to say, I’m super stoked for this opportunity. Not only will I be able to finally meet my boss, my new colleagues, and the rest of the CoPress team I haven’t met, but I’ll get to spend an entire day, and probably much of the weekend, discussing the future of journalism with some of the smartest news folk in the country. If my flight doesn’t get laid over in Atlanta, I’d like to spend my time taking about at least a couple of different things:

Designing a News Startup From Scratch in 60 Minutes

The goal would be to rapidly prototype what a news organization of the future might look like by walking the hypothetical startup from concept to a year after launch and covering things such as:

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