This Week in Google on the University

screen shot of This Week in Google broadcast

On episode 23 of This Week in Google (TWiG) the crew got around to talking about Google and higher education. Reading and listening to Jeff Jarvis, I’ve been impressed with the possible application of his ideas about journalism to the domain of education. Since academics deal in topics that are not “current” and can’t measure success by number of readers, there are factors insulating them from the crisis facing journalism. The economics of the situation is nevertheless obvious and will in the coming decade force changes in the university. Academic journals, for example, can be hundreds of dollars per year for a subscription, and I don’t see how scholars would not be better served by a peer reviewed format that centralized academic discussion and made it open to anyone interested in a topic. This could be modeled on the “topics page” that Jarvis hopes will replace traditional news articles. Similarly, with all the developing modes of online communication, paired with stripped down travel budgets at colleges, I don’t see how the big academic conference continues as a viable model for scholarly exchange. There is enough inertia in the current system that it will continue on this path for a while, but change is coming.

TWiG is a good place for thinking about change, since Google and the cloud are on the forefront of the re-arrangement of any number of business models. While moving through a number of domains in which Google could exert its influence, education came up:

Leo Laporte: Apple with its iTunesU has in a very subtle way started encouraging universities to start publishing courseware and lectures… and it is a little bit undermining the model for universities.
Jeff Jarvis: I think we go to a model of a lot more star lecturers and then local tutors.
Leo Laporte: I’m with you on that.
Jeff Jarvis: If you want a great physics class, you’ll get the lecture from someone at MIT and then you’ll find someone around here who can explain what the hell it means to me…

If the classroom experience is all about the delivery of knowledge from lecturer to student, then this model makes a lot of sense. How would a student in a 400 person intro class not be better served by watching the “great” lecturer on a specific topic? One can imagine a scenario in which canonical or “textbook” lectures arise and become the standard fare for all college students who study a certain topic. The tutors could well be grad students—who often run discussion sections for large classes as it is. This could work for what I think of as a knowledge packet theory of education: students take in information and are then tested to make sure they got it.

This doesn’t really describe the classes I know at the liberal arts college where I teach. My classes range from about a dozen in a seminar to 35 for an intro level course. For all my classes I mix in class discussion. It’s not that everyone in a large class will talk, but a dialogic approach to conveying knowledge makes students process information differently (an assertion that could and should be tested). Students get information, but at the same time receive prompts about how to best process that information.

In my lecture today on the development of hadith in early Islam I called for a couple of thought experiments. After outlining the early Muslim answer to authority, I asked the class to come up with some alternative ways that the early community could have met its challenges. A few students responded, and everyone would have had to think about the question for a moment. My responses to students who spoke up gave a living example of how arguments can be built or expanded or narrowed. Students would get a sense of what responses are in play, and what the boundaries of discussion are. That sort of classroom interaction is not something for which a “star lecturer” viewed remotely would strive, but it’s at the heart of liberal arts education.

Using new software I recorded my lecture with the accompanying Powerpoint slides, and uploaded the lectures onto Moodle (course sharing software). Later when I got the inevitable e-mail from a student (“sorry I missed class because..”) I could direct her to log onto Moodle and listen to the lecture. The basic information is there in the recording, and she’d be able to see which hadith I specifically went over in class (useful for test). But student questions are inaudible in the recording, so there’s no way to think along with classmates. This is a loss for this lecture, but it will be even more of a loss in the next class when I have two complex texts to work through. I’ll give only the briefest lecture, and won’t bother to record the discussion on the texts since it won’t come through.

I don’t see how recorded lectures—even by stars—will ever displace this small classroom experience. But it’s important for us at liberal arts colleges to realize what is distinctive about our model.. and to nurture it. That means recognizing the value of dialogue, both in the classroom and in smaller student settings.. and not trying to offer lectures that are really made for another academic setting.

Jeff Jarvis gave another comment on education:

…new tutoring platforms… If you dissect education into its core components of the information (books, whatever), the explication (lectures), and then the education (tutoring), I think Google could do amazing things creating new structure around that.

The bottom line for me is that I don’t see “explication” and “tutoring” as separable.. for the reasons given above. However, that doesn’t mean Google could not have a huge role in higher education. Obviously Google Books may change around aspects of the textbook world (which would be welcome). After that I see Google’s main role as providing infrastructure (topics pages, online meeting capability) for academic exchange.. which is basically a call for them to keep improving things like Wave and Groups so that these can be used in ways they might not expect.. and which will come naturally to us who are looking for better (and less expensive) ways to connect.