George Siemens posts frequently and with clarity on his blog elearnspace, and often I find myself nodding my head as I read or questioning my assumptions or bouncing around to other web sites as I hunt down reinforcing or contradicting information. Today I challenged a couple claims made in his posting, Explaining leads to information, which examines the past, present, and future roles of universities. For instance, George says:
At one point, we thought content was the value point of universities. Wrong. MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative changed that.
In my opinion this is only partly true at best. First, MIT’s OpenCourseWare is not the same as the content of MIT. MIT OCW is “not … a MIT education”, nor is it claimed to be. Having looked at a lot of the OCW that is available on MIT and other sites I don’t see that the majority of “OCW” qualifies as a full course, let alone worthy of being labeled the professor’s “content”. While the better examples of MIT OCW include video lectures with instructor notes, many are simply syllabi with reading lists, outlines, or loose notes. Does this represent MIT’s content? How does one define the university’s content as a value point?
We might proceed by asking, what is content? Is content a static thing that can be documented on the Web? Where is content contained? In the university libraries? If so, interlibrary loan crossed that boundary decades ago. Is it in the faculty themselves? Quality faculty are never static; their lectures change as their research develops as their expertise expands or deepens as their knowledge grows. To me having access to an expert is quite different from having access to that expert’s syllabus and lecture notes. As mentioned, some of MIT’s OCW includes taped lectures (as does UC Berkeley’s Webcasts), arguably taking one as close to being in the classroom as possible without being a student. Other OCW (like the UK Open University’s LearningSpace) replicates full or nearly-full online course materials as OCW, though still not approximately a true classroom experience as they leave assessments and interaction to the self-learner’s own means. This brings us to George’s second value point declamation:
Ok, then the interaction with faculty is the value point. And wrong again. Open communication and collaboration in online environments with networks of peers and experts gave us control over our interactions.”
This statement assumes (1) that all your favorite experts are online or connected to online environments, and (2) that these experts are willing and able to interact with anyone that makes a demand of their time. If this were true, I’d be following Harold Bloom on Twitter, and making impromptu Skype calls with him on Sunday afternoons. Or perhaps the implication is that even though Harold Bloom is not online or willing to communicate with me, someone else like Bloom is, or even better: dozens of willing, online enthusiasts will do in Harold Bloom’s stead. I would counter that while base information may no longer be scarce, lucidity and expertise is still uncommon, and true genius remains rare.
Admittedly I may be missing the forest for the trees; the thrust of George’s original post was to suppose that “the role of university may well become one of being a coherence-maker, helping learners make sense of information abundance and change”. I agree with that, but I have to echo’s George’s final comment that “university’s have always done this”. I am not convinced that the privileged access to unversities is anything more than superficially endangered by online content repositories and social networks. I still see the university’s value points centering on content and expert interactions. Coherence-making will continue to be a value point, if one that does need to be consciously magnified as we continually orbit closer and closer to information and the gravity it impresses on our daily lives.