[p2p-research] Universities Irrelevant by 2020?

[Andy Robinson]

I don't think it was Ryan's claim, it's that Wiley guy, and it's got as far
as a leading local paper in America...  I daresay Wiley knows how to get
publicity (and taking a few zeroes off the time figures is one way).

This said...  education has changed a lot already, hasn't it?  Some places
at least.  I'm hearing from people in schools that blackboards have been
replaced by projection screens, IT is core to the syllabus.  But the
computer stuff is probably less noticeable than the neoliberal "reforms".

In my experience, universities are very slow to change, and not very
up-to-date with IT.  Replacing lectures with illustrated/cinematic
video-lectures would make sense to me, but nine out of ten lecturers would
not know how to start putting a home video together, and the IT support
staff probably not much more.  Lectures in written format are starting to
appear online, and students are getting used to having an array of articles
a few clicks away, far more than are in libraries (counting the free stuff,
and the stuff that comes with university-access packages like Jstor, Ingenta
and Muse).  It'll take awhile for books to catch up, though a lot now offer
free excerpts.  Since the main purpose of academic publishing is peer-review
accreditation rather than actual book sales, I could see it conceivably
happening that books will start to appear for free.

The future of education may well be something like Illich's model, networks
of skill models, networks of mentors, networks of educational objects.  This
is how real learning occurs, and always has been - it's easier now with the
Internet.  But education is going the other way - towards testing, access
regulation, education for stratification, rent-extraction on skills and
mindsets.  This will if anything strengthen universities as gatekeepers,
even though it is ruining the university experience for staff and students.

I'm not sure a networked world would lead to the disappearance of
universities, however.  There are several big advantages to universities
that won't disappear quickly.  One is that mentoring or new researchers, and
exchange between scholars, is easier with face-to-face interaction and some
kind of personal relationship, which is easier where lots of scholars are in
one physical place.  Another is the classic idea of universities as
sanctuaries from the world, spaces where the pursuit of knowledge is
protected from hostile political and economic forces.  Hakim Bey writes of
universities becoming something like "research monasteries" in a networked
world, one of many kinds of autonomous zones.

bw
Andy
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