As a geo-technologist, I’m always thinking about information generation and reliability, open access and the relevance of (lower and) higher education today. Through all this, I also ponder the changing nature of education and jobs, more specifically how we learn and how we work, given the changing nature of information. Here are a few interesting reads.
Harvard Magazine | Gutenberg 2.0
… [Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School] sees similar problems when making the rounds with medical students, fellows, and residents: When we run into a problematic complex patient with a clearly genetic problem from birth, and I ask what the problem might be and what tests are to be ordered, their reflex is either to search their memories for what they learned in medical school or to look at a textbook that might be relevant. They don’t have what I would characterize as the ˜Google reflex,“ which is to go to the right databases to look things up. The students doubtless use Google elsewhere in their lives, but in medicine, he explains, the whole idea of just-in-time learning and using these websites is not reflexive. That is highly troublesome because the time when you could keep up even with a subspecialty like pediatric neurosurgery by reading a couple of journals is long, long gone.
I wish universities had general science informatics graduate programs, and not just bioinformatics ones. Do they? Then again, does one even need formal certification in “science informatics” when what is required beyond the requisite science degree(s) is a natural DIY inclination to search for information? How To Mine Online Resources can be a learned skill and net savvy certainly isn’t some genetic-nerd quality, but whither the reflex?
A comprehensive report on Open Access by the United Kingdom’s Joint Information Systems Committee:
The increased impact of wider access to academic research papers could be worth approximately £170 million per year to the UK economy.
Although we believe that publicly funded research should be available to everyone, it is not a straightforward journey and our role is to involve and work with colleges and universities to help them to make the choices that are right for their individual situation … The long term goal is to achieve a coherent layer of open scholarly and academic resources readily available to all on the internet.
Anya Kamenetz and I met years ago in New Orleans when she interviewed me on post-K recovery for the Village Voice. She has now penned the insightful and timely DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. From the book:
1. The promise of free or marginal-cost open-source content, techno-hybridization, unbundling of educational functions, and learner-centered educational experiences and paths is too powerful to ignore. These changes are inevitable. They are happening now …
2. However, these changes will not automatically become pervasive. Many existing institutions, especially those with the greatest reserves of wealth and reputation, will manage to remain outwardly, physically the same for decades, and to charge ever-higher tuition, even as enrollment shifts more and more toward the for-profits and community colleges and other places that adopt these changes.
3. In order to short-circuit the cost spiral, and provide access to appropriate education and training for people of all backgrounds, there is much hard work to be done in the way schools are funded and accreditation and transfer policies are set. College leaders need to have the will to change … political leaders need to legislate change … Above all, learners and their families need to recognize that alternatives to the status quo exist and demand change.
4. The one thing that can change dramatically and relatively swiftly is the public perception of where the true value and quality of higher education lies. It’s no longer about the automatic four-year degree for all. Institutions can’t rely any more on history, reputation, exclusivity, and cost; we now have the ability to peer inside the classroom … So we have both the ability and the obligation to look at demonstrated results.
Change comes from imagination, moving away from the herd mentality and questioning how a traditional college education will serve one’s ambitions for the future. This is why I don’ t have a college degree in computer science; no way good money would be wasted on something I could teach myself. It was my interest in geology, which requires laboratory facilities and access to field education, that motivated and propelled me through what is otherwise a factory conveyor belt*. I’m really interested in science access being made open further through the creation of co-learning spaces (like co-working and co-tech spaces) and, in this day and age of the Maker Faire, public maker laboratories with teachers. Or is this where universities with these facilities can re-establish their relevance and open their doors to learners wanting shorter-term contracts?
That’s it for now.
* The stadium classes, the use of precious laboratory and discussion time to re-learn and re-teach what the professor crammed into the 50-minute lecture, tutoring your fellow students after class because your teaching assistant has mentally checked out, finally caving into student demands of “Is this going to be on the test?” only to find out that they can’t reproduce an answer if it stared them in the face and the terminal humiliation of the grading curve. And they wonder why we have a creativity crisis.
