Daniel Bachhuber's weblog

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.

Will Sullivan asks, “What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization?”

Why, adopt the technologies that are changing the media organization, of course.

Disclaimer: I’m no formal contributor to this October’s Carnival of Journalism but, y’arr matey, I be boarding the ship anyway. 

Online publishing mediums are in flux and will continue to be as time progresses. This is a truth. At the moment, you’ve got RSS, a website, Twitter, blogs, etc. to deal with, all of which have distinct cultural assumptions as to content form. Were all of these distribution mechanisms around five years ago? For the most part, no. What mediums will be added in the next five? It’ll be interesting to see.

There won’t be a stable “e-newspaper” product which parallels its predecessor, the print product. To my understanding, this is largely due to inherent qualities of the internet as a technology. It’s more of a paradigm shift than anything else. Journalism now has to contend with ever evolving distribution mediums. Websites, the mobile web, SMS, and the Kindle are all, ironically, examples of nearly the same thing, but not the same thing. There are different cultural expectations for content delivery depending on the type of device.

In any regard, while going through Jeff Jarvis’s “New business models for news” slides, a few small to medium-size content/distribution projects relevant to the student media arena came to me. First, student news organizations should be compiling community blog round-ups. Synthesize the local discussions. There are surely at least a few students blogging on campus about various popular topics of the day. The recent political debates come to mind at the moment. News stories without links are static, but think of what would happen if you started quoting student blogs and encouraging participation. Bam, community. Furthermore, this organizing power increases if you do two things: have an email address where your audience can send in leads or links, and read regularly as many campus blogs as you can. 

Second, Twitter-source coverage of hot topics, especially politics. Obviously it shouldn’t be all of your converge, especially because Twitter only covers a certain demographic, but Twitter is certainly an interesting source of content. In Eugene, the Weekly Enema has almost scooped the Daily Emerald on this one.

Lastly, build up your email newsletter product. Include a big image or two at the top, summaries of the leading stories, and a list of the most popular blog posts. Craft the newsletter just like you craft the paper, and get people to sign up for it. For some odd reason, I’ve heard more about this recently than our website (might it be that people haven’t discovered the wonders of RSS?). Tying your email edition to a CRM product and use the wealth of click data to create tailored, personalized emails.

The business model, of course, is the elephant in the room. There are plenty of innovative minds working on this issue, however, and, with money to be made, I’m not too worried. Monetize as you evolve in tune with the changing formats.