Technology At City University of Seattle

Fred Wilson of AVC, probably one of the most down to earth writers you will ever read, has opened up a conversation about how education needs to start addressing the needs of information workers rather than the industrial workers that education previously taught. Good idea, and one with the potential to bring about changes in education, but there are always issues, and while the future looks shiny, there is going to be critical choices made by colleges, students, government and business to make that shiny vision come true.

Some background on the subject, Sir Ken Robinson talks about the need for an education system that Nurtures creativity (cap on Nurtures here in important to note) rather than the rote system of learning that we are currently engaging in. That the primary change need in education is to cultivate creativity and acknowledge that there is more than one form of creativity. Sir Ken Robinson gave this speech at TED in 2006, but this forms the core of the AVC argument, or the initial impetus for Fred’s thoughts on this subject.

Technology and the transformation of work, the advent of social networking, real social networking such as blogs, FriendFeed, facebook, MySpace, and other places where people collect to share information, viewpoints, and information can be used to reach more students, reach more people on a global basis. The interesting part is that the predicate on Globalization 3.0, where the people to people connection is more important than the person to corporate or person to government connection means something here. We learn from each other in an open environment like FriendFeed or Facebook than we can learn in Blackboard or Moodle. The idea of academic inflation, where the Bachelors degree is the new high school diploma, and the Masters is the new bachelors and so on is one of the core arguments that Ken Robinson makes in his speech at about minute 13. Intelligence is an issue here, we know that intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct. Where creativity is the creation of ideas that have value, we drive creativity through our intelligence. The more we understand that intelligence comes in all shapes and sizes, much like people do, the easier it will be for us to develop creative people who have great ideas that have a demonstrable value. Remember thought that value is not confined to making profit for a company, it could be new power sources, new ways to feed people, new ways to address water shortages, new ways of reaching people, and sadly, new weapons systems, and new ways of breaking into a computer.

The more we acknowledge that there are differences in how people learn, how intelligence is demonstrated, and how creativity is nurtured are the key takeaways from Ken Robinson’s speech at TED. And while he focused on K-12 education, what he says is also very important at the college level, because education is about teaching people, transferring knowledge, and showing options to students that they might not have seen before.

Here is where things get interesting, Fred Wilson is a Venture Capitalist, and his firm is looking to invest in disruptive educational systems/technology because they see a market there. The market has always been there, but it is social networking technology that is help driving the disruption in the market place. Fred is looking for technology and ideas that:

The shift away from existing institutions in education, the environment and other areas up for change will not be brought about magically by the web alone, but by companies that use the web to create the right kind of platform. We believe that these represent tremendous startup opportunities over years to come and look forward to meeting with entrepreneurs and teams working to give “power to the people.” Source: AVC

Question: Can VC’s do it right?

Fred brings up a great point, we all are fairly aware that education reform is difficult to implement at any level. The realistic question from the educational viewpoint is going to be cost, the ability of teachers and educational institutions to adopt/adapt to the technology that Fred and company wants to fund. The other real question is what technology is going to be right for students, and following along the lines of Ken Robinson’s speech at TED, can an institution nurture creativity. There is no question, education is an institution, but one that has had various incarnations over time. Traditionally, from Greece up through the Middle Ages, students were the ones who were in charge of their education, they chose the professors they wanted to learn from, in some ways they also chose the course work that they wanted to learn. While Bishops taught at cathedral schools, it was the seven liberal arts that ruled the curriculum of the day. It was the contact with Arabic science and Greek Philosophy that really had a disruptive effect on schools. Add to that the disruptive technology of the printing press and colleges of the day were turned on their heads, books became cheaper, education became more available. We hold onto those standards today with the concept of universal education in most countries in the world. There is also early on in Paris, Abelard, an instructor that nurtured creativity, so much so that his fame spread across the medieval world. It was the teacher supported by students rather than university supported by state (until chartered schools were authorized by kings) with the students as nominal participants in their own education.

Modern education, the education system we have today is based on the University system started in the latter middle ages. There is a large vested interest in keeping the university system in its current form, with its current standards and practices. The inertia that the current system places on reform (the resistance to no child left behind, and the resistance to Obama’s educational reform projects) means that in many cases reform is difficult if not impossible to accomplish quickly. Reform is also touched on by politics and religious ideals, which without a uniform homogeneity is impossible to please all people who have to live with the compromise education that we have ended up with. As one group becomes vocal, education changes slowly. The game is that politics changes education, but education in its base form continues on regardless of politics, process, or belief systems. Vested interest in the longer run has won out over the political and social changes that influence education. This is the world that Fred Wilson wants to disrupt, and this is a space that with its own level of inertia will take decades to change. There is no quick path here unless Fred and the companies that he is sponsoring also see the need for change.

This brings us to systems like edublogs, academic earth, open campus systems like the one that we have here at CityU. One of the most important needs, one that has been brought up by many people including Vineet Nayar of HCL, is ensuring that students are getting the education they need to be creative at work. Some people (me included on this one) are exactly the target audience that Fred and the companies he wants to invest in need to meet and talk to. MIT is doing wonderful work, so is the University of Washington with their Kindle testing for electronic textbooks for students. We are right in there with them, via free podcasts of entire classes, an open campus, free videos, you name it, and we are right with our more progressive peers. In this case my college is on the edge of everything that is important in where education in general will be in 10 to 20 years. While we still have the inertia in the system that has been inherited since the start of the formal university system, students still want excellent teachers that inspire but there are still more problems that need to be addressed, and cannot be addressed simply by technological investments.

Continue on to Part 2

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