[p2p-research] Disintermediation: The Disruption to Come for Education 2.0

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Disintermediation: The
Disruption to Come for Education 2.0 via O'Reilly Radar - Insight,
analysis, and research about emerging technologies. by Rob Tucker on
5/14/10

On the largest of scales, we rarely have the luxury of designing
technological systems. Instead, technologies happen to us - our
experience of them being ragged, volatile, turbulent and rife with
unexpected interactions. Tim’s posts about the emerging internet
operating system (here and here) describe a great example of this - the
winner of that particular fight being very much TBD and the factors
determining victory or defeat being themselves the subject of lively
debate. When we talk about Education 2.0, though, we are prone to think
that we can design it - that we can consciously and deliberately lay
the groundwork for its effective implementation. Our deliberation,
though, may be less powerful than the larger forces driving its rapid
evolution. One such force will certainly be disintermediation.



Disintermediation is a process in which a middle player poised between
service or product providers and their consumers is weakened or removed
from the value chain. Disintermediation is driven by the fact that
middle players consume resources and in removing them from the chain,
these resources are recovered to enable either lower cost for the
consumer, better value from the provider, or both. Disintermediation
can be total, in which case a middle player is removed entirely. It can
also be partial, in which case an intermediary is carved up and the
different ways in which they formerly added value are segmented,
replaced, or done away with as circumstances permit. Understanding the
process of disintermediation is critical to understanding the ways in
which Education 2.0 will evolve.



An example of what disintermediation looks like is what happened to
travel agencies. Before the Web, travel agents served as direct points
of contact to facilitate travel arrangements between customers and
service providers (airlines, hotels, rental car agencies, etc.) . In
1980, for example, a travel agent might meet with a family who wanted
to travel to Europe. The agent contacted TWA, arranged for lodging and
tour bus service within the European vacation, served as a vendor for
“traveler's checks” and provided a “one stop shop” for the traveling
family. The value proposition for the travel agent was that he or she
was the retail outlet for knowledge about travel - in this case
European travel. Dealing with the producers of this knowledge (the
Airlines, French Hotels and the Italian tour bus service, for example)
was cumbersome and required significant subject-matter expertise.




Disintermediation of travel agencies occurred in two distinct phases:
an initial phase in which technology enabled travel agents to do their
job better and a “terminal” phase in which these same agencies were
disintermediated. Phase one of the process began with the shift to
computerized reservation systems within the service providers -
American Airlines and their Sabre system, for example. This was
initially greeted by travel agents as a positive development. Sabre
made their jobs easier - they could help more clients faster and with
more comprehensive service. As the Web matured, though, services like
Expedia, Travelocity, Hotwire and Priceline.com, allowed the end user -
the consumer - to make travel arrangements directly and with far
greater transparency regarding price and available services than the
travel agents had been able to provide. First the savviest of the
travelers, the “road warriors” who flew hundreds of thousands of miles
a year, but soon “mom and pops,” came to use the electronic services
instead of their local travel agent. In a single decade, the number of
US travel agents declined by 45%.





The lessons of this example apply rather directly to Education 2.0.
Teachers, schools, and districts occupy ground not too different than
the travel agents of 1998. Specifically, the value proposition of the
current educational system is that it understands the landscape of
human knowledge and that it can plan and enable the exploration of this
landscape in a way that is cost and time effective. Learning is
educational travel.



But we now see the rapid development of Web 2.0, with devices like this:






and an application environment that will do for the landscape of human
knowledge what Expedia did for physical travel - organize it,
connecting the consumers of information directly with the information
itself - classic disintermediation. We don’t know who the Travelocity
of human knowledge will be, the Priceline.com of learning. Google is
obviously the player to beat. Niche players will abound, though, -
specialists in particular kinds of “intellectual travel”, for
particular age groups or particular subjects.



How deep could this disintermediation go? Deeper than we would expect.
If we take the primary function of school to be the dissemination of
knowledge, the disintermediation could be near total. As a thought
experiment we can imagine the following: The student’s experience may
be ad hoc and fluid - with constantly shifting and boundary-less
“classes.” It may be much more spontaneous and self-organizing - and
all the more engaging for its voluntary essence. We may see the
emergence of services that check a student’s progress against
algorithms of likely educational success - simple AI versions of the
20th century guidance counselor. There may be tests that check for
subject progress or mastery that any student is free to take whenever
they are ready - no need to wait for “test day.” Self-paced,
self-directed, self-driven. There may be constant and direct input from
industry and Gov 2.0 about what students need to know: If it looks like
there’s a glut of chemical engineers coming up, for example, students
might be advised to shift to a track more consistent with electrical
engineering. They might get this information right about the time
they're learning to ride a bike. There will always be physical schools
- students need to go somewhere during the day to enable the engine of
modern economic progress: two parents working. But these schools will
evolve into things that look more like civic centers - hubs for
community involvement and rich relationship-building, augmented by more
spontaneous micro-communities that span the globe, forming and bursting
like soap bubbles. None of these things are certain. What is certain is
that disintermediation rarely has a delicate touch. It will change the
way we teach and change the way we learn in the decade and decades
ahead.



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