Distributed Education in the Google Age – Jeff Jarvis

Distributed Education in the Google Age – Jeff Jarvis I’m very sorry I can’t be there. Especially because I missed Tom Loosemore. So, I tried not to write a book about Google but instead to write a book about the changes in our world, as seen through the success and grammar of Google.

I think the changes we’re seeing in the economy and society are fundamental and profound and permanent and I think it’s very hard for us to try to even begin to understand what’s happening. The one organisation that has understood this, probably not even consciously so much as their DNA, is Google. So I tried to look at it through that driver as I say.

And I start off with a bunch of Beta movies that I have. I have forty of them, dear God I won’t do that, and also as a gift I’m not doing any Powerpoint. I thought I’d just run through a quick bunch of those because it sets the context of the discussion of the future of the university actually. One is the whole notion of control, and in our world, as I know Tom Loosemore talked about this morning when I saw his twitter.

This is about handing control over to people and that’s hard for businesses and institutions to figure out. Institutions that can not figure that out will die. The institutions that have a respect in the public to hand over control, the realisation that good things will come of it, will succeed I think and that’s part and parcel of what Google has done.

The most important lesson I think I’ve learned from watching Google is that what they’ve done is create a platform and networks. Contrary to the fears we hear all across the EU, they’re not trying to take over and own the world, they’re trying to organise and enable the world and they’re enabling us to do what we want to do. In that sense, I guess I disagree with the notion that Google is the institution. We are the institution. And we can as Clay Shirkey says in Here Comes Everybody, be organised without organisations.

So being a platform and a network, and enabling others to succeed on top of that, I think is the critical concept to grade our success in this age of successful Google. I’m amazed to this day how the link changes everything and I can’t get my head getting Jeff Jarvis – Distributed Education in the Google Age The Media Education Summit 09 – September 9th 2009

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around how it changes everything. It changes fundamentally for example the economics of media. We’ve gone from a content economy, where you took multiple copies of things and sold them again and again, a controlled link economy and content with no links has no value. Content gains value as it gains links. Which is to say that if you see two channels of value they’d be recognised in this new media economy and I think in education as well, which is a creator of content and also the sender of the links.

And those who complain about global news and daylight where I worked in other places, stealing content, they’re doing of course exactly the opposite, they’re sending value and those who operate in the old economy are incapable of understanding that and that’s what’s causing the problems. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, you want to think distributed; you want to be where the people are. There was a quote in The New York Times a year ago from a college student, a total researcher, if the news is that important, it will find me. And that’s not what we’re used to, we’re in big institutions things where people come to us, were the font of information, the font of knowledge, instead we now must go to them.

I presented recently the findings of a project I’m working on at CUNY, new business models for news, at the Aspen Institute, and there Marissa Mayer of Google said of course now you’re getting your head around this notion of the web page and website, we should pull it apart and say ‘OK, what’s next is the creator of push pull news stream. We can assimilate ourselves into that.’ So the notion would be distributed according to where the people are. The fact that we are in a post scarcity economy that tries to benefit by having scarcity, whether that’s of knowledge or of seats in a classroom is over. If you watch Google it benefits by creating abundances and as such breeds as many spots or adverts relevant as is possible on the web to ever need more relevance then it takes advantage of that abundance rather than trying to sell the scarcity of there ads to a few eyeballs.

Our president in his communistic speech to school students here yesterday, told them all to embrace their failures, and I think that’s an important lesson for the Google age as well, the notion of the Beta. When Google does that, releases a Beta, it’s saying this product is imperfect, it is unfinished, help us finish it. It is necessarily a call to Jeff Jarvis – Distributed Education in the Google Age The Media Education Summit 09 – September 9th 2009

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collaboration. And what is education but a constant process of living in the Beta and understanding how to benefit from that and how to make mistakes as well and how to make mistakes part of your process. We don’t do that in education. Right now in education, the tyranny of testing, we say ‘There is one right answer and you will all get the same answer and that’s it’ it’s a notion of perfection. This notion of perfection comes, I think, from the industrial age where you turn out everything the same including our students, and that has to change.

One quick story. Mark Zuckerberg was at Davos two years ago on a counter face programme and he was talking to a bunch of media boffins there. And one of them, the powerful scion of a major newspaper company, and because it’s off the record I won’t say who it was but he works in the building next door to me here in New York, and he turned to Zuckerberg and he said ‘Mark how do we create a community like you did, how do we do this?’ It was almost embarrassing according to Alan Rushbridger. And Zuckerberg came back and said ‘You can’t. Full stop. That’s it.

You can’t. Since communities already exist, you don’t create them. They’re already doing what they want to do, you should find ways to help them do what they want to do better.’ ‘The description for that’ he said ‘is to bring elegant organisation’ I love the elegance of that phrase ‘elegant organisation’. Great story.

He was in his art class, while he was at Harvard. He did not have a class all year, he didn’t study, finals were a week away, he was in a panic. It’s one matter to drop out of Harvard and start a million dollar company, it’s another one to call home and say you’ve flunked. So he didn’t know what to do. Well he went and he thought he needed data and he went on line and he found all these art and raved about them in the final. And he put them all on a web page with blank boxes underneath. He sent those to all his fellow students saying ‘I’ve put up a study now’ think Mark Twain, a fence and a bucket of paint. And the students of course dutifully came in and filled in all the blanks and then, because it was Harvard, they argued about it until they got it just right. You know how the story ends. Zuckerberg got an A on the exam but the instructor said that the students as a whole got better grades than ever in the test that term.

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When Eric Schmidt talked to the graduates of Carnegie Mellon last year, he emphasised one view of Google is that you could always do more together than alone.

And one thing we do in education is make it a very lonely thing. Yes, we talk in class together, but you’re alone with that essay, you’re alone with that test, you’re alone, you get your result on your own. And the greatest skill we can probably teach them in this new age is collaboration. Because, as Tom said this morning, what’s new in new media, I already retweeted this, is not distribution, but collaboration over distance.

So, as we now take some of these concepts and bring them to university. As I wrote this chapter, I blogged about it and I was trying to figure out the structure of my thoughts on this and, as always, my blog readers were very helpful. Bob Glynman[ph] works for Google, he constructed education, he said, into three components, Teaching, Testing or Certification and Research. I added a fourth, which is Socialisation. There’s no reason in a distributed disaggregated world all those things need to happen in the same building, in the same place, anymore. They did for convenience in the past but everything else is being disaggregated, why not education. If you take socialisation alone, then I always wonder whether we should send kids off .. sorry .. I have one of those lighting systems that decrees me dead every ten minutes, so pardon me while I make a fool of myself, I’ve got to move a lot, pardon me. There we go. There we go. Better for the environment and my heart I guess. Where was I? Oh, youth. So we separate this notion of socialisation from university, you know, sending our students off for a year in Europe is probably better than sending them to a dorm for a year.

The first and most important question I have about the university is why it should not have a way to nurture the creativity of student there. The fact is that our greatest companies today have been started by drop outs who worked adversity with the need to create. How good is the university at incubating potential? Should every university and every school for that matter have what Google has for its engineers, it’s a 20% rule. What if one fifth of the time of every student had to be dedicated to creating something, a book, a programme, a play, a company, a sculpture. True, much of them or most of them are almost all of them are going to be crap, probably, but we won’t know until we try and we enable people to create things that we act as Jeff Jarvis – Distributed Education in the Google Age The Media Education Summit 09 – September 9th 2009

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like a nurturer of creation. The most important thing about education today is that we don’t nurture enough of that creation.

Instead, look at the testing culture we have, especially in here in the US, where we test people before they learn anything, which is kind of absurd if you think about it, we should test them only afterwards, which you do more in the UK than we do here, but we do it to try to standardise people. Like my kids are now 12 and 17, they are under this terrible, tyranny of testing. They’re all being stamped out like cookies and really what they show us, I think, is that education is still built for the industrial age.

It is built for training people out all the same, so they turn out products all the same.

It’s not what’s going to build the next Google. More on that in a moment.

So, if a school operated like an incubator for young talent, what would that look like?

One brief mention about the notion of socialisation is that certainly here and certainly in the posher schools in the UK, schools are a place that create the old boy’s network, sexistly but all to accurately named, and I do think that’s one role that gets taken over by the internet. We create our own networks now. Facebook may be the new Harvard in that sense anyway.

So that’s one, socialisation. Another role of university, in kind of reverse order, is research. Will research, should research still be conducted at the university level?

Perhaps it’s the one place where it can happen and we need more of it in companies who are doing less of it. But it’s not sacrosanct. It’s an area of budget and factors now, and I think we have to examine research as a function. So the fact that Channel 4 has it’s effort to create new things and try new things is an effort to bring research into the world and it’s not just the province of the university. So how can universities become platforms for research in many ways inside and outside the university, with and without faculty. And by the way the ideal atmosphere in relation to research is this collaborate networking and is the idea of opening up research being transparent, figuring that out.

The next role is testing. And I’ve already railed on about that I think this notion that we have to test students before they come in and that’s the best measure that they are what they are sends precisely the wrong message throughout your education career.

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As there’s one right answer, everybody has to get it. You all better be the same at the end of the day and if you’re not the same, that’s failure. And failure is not welcome, failure is not a learning exercise, failure is to be a matter of shame and a mark that you are going to go less far in this world. Whereas of course failure should be sought out, if it’s sought wisely and we learn from it. And the best thing we can do with failure is to work. It’s true in science obviously, it’s true in media as well. There’s a controversy going on right now here in New York, the New York Times is trying to reveal the identity of a blogger who blogs about the New York Times. They evidently got it wrong at the first try and they killed the post and bloggers are going nuts because we have a different ethic of failure in the state of correction here, which is that you leave up your mistakes, it’s the only right thing to do, because the more you put a record out on the web and the right thing to do is to cross it out and to show you the mistake you’ve made, be transparent about that. We don’t deal well with the notion of mistakes and failure in education because we are built around testing and that I think just doesn’t work.

Part of this of course is the notion of certification, is the notion of public degree and I think that, as well, is potentially quite outmoded. In fact it’s very limiting to say that you should be stuck with this idea that we are finished with education at 21. I’m sure we’d all agree about that. But it’s what we do, it’s what the system sets up. And the Lord knows I know that I’ve learned in my career, especially since I’ve gone on the internet. There’s loads of new skills that I never learned at school about business and technology and marketing and finance and government and all kinds of things that I’ve learned now in public on the web and that’s a better way to learn and we’ve got to figure out how to bring that off.

So, what’s better then, we still have to judge people, we still have to hire them, we still have to figure out who are the right ones to do the task and I think that part of that becomes .. goes back to the notion of creation and our portfolio. A portfolio of work that represents us. I am now presented online, I might go online for better or worse, find my twitter feed for better or worse. I have a portfolio online, you can figure me out, know who I am, know how I think. And if we encourage students to create and to create that body of work then that becomes their portfolio and it’s the best way to judge what they do.

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Now there’s the constant cries of what about the drunken pictures in college, you know, I do believe that we have a doctorate in it, usually a short affiliation there. I embarrass myself, you embarrass yourself, go in there and admit. It’s all there. So what? You were wrong. In the Google age that’s the only, the more you create, the higher up that goes about you. Your portfolio speaks loud for you. I have this problem here in CUNY really trying to get students to understand the true value of that and to blog because they will not only learn in public but create a brand in public.

And that’s scary for them because they say ‘I’m not ready for this, that’s why I’m in School to learn this stuff, but I think that it’s the only way to learn. I teach interactive journalism, my students have to have a public, to interact, so they have to go out and do that.

In the business of testing, universities have pretty much ceded it, here in the US at least, to industry groups. It’s not the university that tests you to be a lawyer or a doctor, it’s the professional association. It’s not the university that certifies you as ready to support a Microsoft product, it’s Kaplan or someone like that.

So finally we arrive at the source of the real value of the university, which is teaching.

And one lesson more [inaudible] is I think that teaching is of course a search and go obnoxious on this metaphor real fast. But where we search, we don’t always know what we’re searching for. So although I argue that we should hand over control, even to the students, this is one area where I don’t necessarily agree with myself and think that there’s still a role that handing over your education to an educator. Because you don’t know what you’re searching for and so you’re saying ‘Help me do this. Help me figure out what I’m looking for.’

Now that’s not the case in everything. You might say ‘I want to learn German.’ It’s pretty clear what you want to learn, go learn it. I will learn how to support this bit of software. Also very clear. I want to think about philosophy, I want to think about the future of economics. That’s different. Then hand yourself over to a mentor of one sort or another. You’ve got to find that mentor, so you’re searching for the people involved.

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I was having a discussion with the President, outgoing, of the new school, here in New York, who was looking at the lectures that are up on line at MIT and other universities and said ‘You know, as good as we have it, it’s hard to beat those, they’re just great. What should we do with them?’ ‘We find a way to take advantage of them.’ And as we speculate about that of course the idea that we should copy the UK method of lecturer and tutor, and if those lecturers from MIT and Stanford and Harvard that are on line are so wonderful, then they can reach thousands upon thousands of students. The value that the university at the local level can bring is the tutor. They get a new school as the tutors work on that class in physics and help the student reach the highest level while also allowing the student to reach the highest level of educator through this distributed view.

So if we think of the university as a distributor, what does that really look like then?

How can we connect to people in different ways, how can we make that scale in new ways. Now there’s obviously, you know, business profits and I’m not sure I have answers for that. I work in a state supported school here in the US, it’s much less expensive than others and we are able to do that because of the support we get.

Though, if you add up what my students pay to what I get paid it’s pretty much gets up to my salary, it just doesn’t pay for everything else, like research and resources.

So there is an economy that is emerging for the Kaplans of this world, I don’t know what your equivalents are in the UK of for profit educational institutions. Again it’s less probable that there’s going to be the support for a school subsidy, but here in the US we’re college is something like $50 to $55,000 a year. There’s a big market for commercial education and I don’t think that’s to be sniffed at, I think that they play a role in the new eco-system of education, just as students learning from each other.

There are .. I forget the name of the great UK site where people teach you things, teachstreet is one of them here in the US. That was Kaplan, was pure on line learning, all working together.

So the question becomes, what does education look like, I think the thing we should consider is what does the university as a platform look like? How do we enable a university to set up these structures so that people can learn whatever they want to learn from whoever they want to learn it. And include in that business structure, include in that the functionality that enables that, include in that the services of Jeff Jarvis – Distributed Education in the Google Age The Media Education Summit 09 – September 9th 2009

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helping a student create a curriculum, as an incubator [inaudible]. What are all the functions to deconstruct a university and deconstruct education and put it back together in a distributed fashion. And I think we see some people now who are creating this free university. There’s others that are trying to create this new institution of education.

I was at a large US retailer here a few weeks ago and put the challenge out to them, imagine there’s that kid in a dorm room who is looking at the availability of platforms to build new businesses on top of that and their big competition here is Amazon and we brainstormed about how to build a new kind of retail experience. It’s really a media experience on top of Amazon. Let Amazon do the shipping and stuff. How do you bring people in and educate them about the products and create social .. sorry, here we go again. I know I’ve talked too long now. Create a social experience around this, bring value out of that of buying products. It’s the same thing for a university. If you were a kid in a dorm room reinventing the university, using platforms that exist now or should exist, using Google, using the lectures that are up at MIT, using the functionality of social sites, knowing the people like Loosemore building amazing things. What does the distributed university and the distributed education look like?

One last point. In my book I quoted Jonathan Rosenburg, the senior VP of Knowledge Management at Google and he blogged about how Google hires people because of non routine problem solving skills, in other words, what common test is you’re asked how to solve a problem of spelling. The obvious routine answer is use a dictionary. The non routine answer is what Google does, is to learn from the mistakes of people, so that you can then correct them out of that. And he said ‘In the real world, the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you have gained from the free market. So it’s easy to educate for routine, but it’s harder to educate for the non routine. I fear we are educating for routine, for standard, for sameness. We are not educating a generation of students to go and create the next Googles. They’re doing that in spite of us’. So that’s my remarks and I hope I’ve kept to time and I’m eager to engage in a dialogue.

Jeff Jarvis – Distributed Education in the Google Age The Media Education Summit 09 – September 9th 2009

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