With citations, we discuss the reason for using sources (to gain authority for the author by showing that the writing reflects ideas already established by others) and then explore the value of sources by disreputable or anonymous authors (very little). Sources without their own established authority do not provide any value to the author of the piece, and are thus far less useful than valuable sources.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

With grammar, we discuss the effect we make on our readers.  I often use the analogy of wearing nice clothes to a job interview, even one for somewhere that doesn’t require nice clothes for its staff.  Wearing nice clothes shows a specific attitude, an approach to the interview that shows not just enthusiasm, but a knowledge of the practices of interviewing (and thus inclusion in the body of people who know how to act in a workplace).   Grammar plays a similar role.

All of this came to mind as I read this brief passage in a larger piece from PZ Myers about a recent creationist rant directed his way:

I must also mention that his habit of capitalizing the binomial name is a bit irritating. We teach a class in science writing here that hammers on a lot of the scientific conventions, and we literally tell our students that one of the first signs you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t know basic biology is that they get the punctuation wrong. (“I’m a professional ‘biologist’ “)

My democratic impulse is to suggest that one’s knowledge of proper nomenclature in biology isn’t relevant to one’s argument about the facts of biology, in the same way that one’s knowledge of how to interview does not reflect on one’s work ethic or ability to learn how to use a cash register.  But both issues play to the same question — do you know the basic rules of the game? If not, many people are going to discount what you say because you obviously don’t belong.

As social animals, we divide into a multitude of sub-groups, and one’s ethos in each group gets shaped by one’s ability to speak the dialect (or act the part) of that group.  Of course, the limitations of those sub-groups often overlap inequities in our culture and hide harmful prejudices, so we mustn’t imagine that rhetorical biases justify discrimination.  But we must be aware that they influence ethos.

Battlestar Galactica

I’ve played the BSG board game twice so far, and both times I was an incompetent Cylon.  One time I just didn’t understand the strategy, the other time I made a tactical blunder that revealed my villainy at the first possible opportunity.  Gah!  Oh well, I almost won anyway.    It’s a fun game, but has lots of rules and is probably more fun with a group of seasoned players than with newbies like me.  It’s also fun to say things like “Damn toasters!”

Betrayal at the House on the Hill

This is a fun game that shifts gears mid-stream and gains a different outcome each time.  It’s a good group game, but the end varies widely depending on the goals the players need.  In our case, the players needed to get to a central space with two objects and I needed to kill them.  I made one tactical error, but really I was hampered by the board, which did not give me the opportunity to protect the space like I wanted to, and the two objects they needed were already on the board.  Alas, they won in short order.  If I’m not careful, I’ll soon acquire the title of #Lamest

The Walking Dead (two board games, one based on the comic, one based on the television show)

I had fun playing these games, particularly the one based on the comic, which has a bit more strategy and a more interesting board to work from.  I won’t say too much more about that, but instead encourage you to look for Paul Booth’s forthcoming essay on the subject.

Cthulhu Dice

A fun palate cleanser, the limited game actions and intense dependence on luck make this less fun than its sibling game, Zombie dice.

The Family Truckster

We’re taking the Great Family Road Trip this summer for two and a half weeks in July, so we can expect to spend plenty of time in the car with the kids.  Consequently, I’m putting together a few playlists — one for us when the kids are watching movies, one for the whole family, etc.

As an artificial barrier, I’m making these playlists no more than 60 minutes.  Just cuz.

What would you put on your Road Trip playlists?

Pre-reading:

• Part 1: The Ghosts of Travel Agents
• Part 2: Death From Above

I couldn’t think of a good image to accompany this post, so here’s a monkey with glasses.

In Part 1 of this series, I offered as object lessons service industries that saw significant upheaval in the Age of Electracy.  In Part 2, I suggested that universities face significant challenges from “above” because of the changing shape of public opinion.  These factors don’t correlate very closely with what happened to travel agents or stock brokers.  By contrast, the rising forces of competition certainly analogize closely.

At its heart, the University faces the same problem Travel Agents and Stock Brokers faced — a shift from information scarcity to information abundance and the emergence of technologies that automate (or scale, at least) key parts of our business model.  I’ll write a bit about three pressures we face, each of which has emerged significantly because of the digital age and each of which challenges our conception of who we are and what we do for students.

1. Lectures, information, and syllabi

For many subjects and much of the history of university study, college professors imparted knowledge to students via what Paolo Freire famously called the “banking model.”  We dispense knowledge via lectures and books, the students store that knowledge in their memory, and deposit it back on tests.  Hopefully some of it sticks.  This model worked for many reasons — first, knowledge itself was relatively rare, and the means to sort it were difficult to find and not easily copied.  Second, the expert who understands and can dispense that knowledge was even more rare, and he (or she, but usually he) could only be reached via classrooms and visits to musty offices.

The internet has, I’m afraid, disrupted that scarcity.  Information is no longer rare.  It’s getting easier to find and index every moment, and smart agents, search engines, and widely available tools mean that less and less do professors hold monopolies on what information is best nor do we limit how it can be accessed.  On top of that, with easy-to-distribute digital recordings, our dispensation of that knowledge need not be rare either.  A lecture given once is no longer ephemeral, but can be captured and placed online where it can be viewed in perpetuity.

As a result, the lecture model of instruction in face-to-face classrooms has dropped out of favor as professors and students alike come to recognize that such one-way interaction does not necessarily make the best use of synchronous classroom time.  For professors rooted in the older culture, though, this challenges us to think about what we ought to be doing.

2. Convenience

It’s become very clear to nearly every professional working in higher education that students want more online offerings available for their study.  They like the convenience, the flexible schedule, and perhaps the ability to thrive under their own intrinsic motivations.

Marginal outfits and for profit schools like Phoenix University colonized a lot of this landscape early, and many traditional universities were slow to join the bandwagon.  And when they do, they often misunderstand such offerings as an economic boon, a way to eschew the ghastly overhead that makes face-to-face classes expensive to offer.

But as brick and mortar universities work to understand the role online offerings should take in their larger environment, many students are opting for those other institutions, and suddenly there’s competition in the marketplace from these venues.

3. Credentialling

The one place traditional universities still hold a strong lead is in credentialling, the purpose for which much of the external world understands us to exist.  By giving someone a degree, we certify that they know what they’re doing, and our reputation as an educational institution (as well as our certification from the credentialling bodies) means that employers and other interested parties can quickly grasp the value of our offerings and our graduates.

But it would be a mistake to imagine that this monopoly will hold for much longer.  As offerings diversify, credentialling will do so as well.  Already, formal networks like LinkedIn allow for users to certify other users, a practice that doesn’t carry much weight now but could easily do so in the future.  Programs like Badges (the idea of earning a mini-certification in a specific skill based on free or open coursework) and initiatives like MOOCs mean that more and more, people will seek alternate means to certify their competence in many fields of endeavor.

These three factors all heavily influence the reasons students choose (or choose NOT) to attend our institutions.  As the costs continue to rise (which they will inevitably do), information abundance, online offerings, and diversified credential schemes will hack away at the underbelly of academia, a surface made weak by our centuries-old monopoly on the training of the middle and upper classes.

In part four, I will explore a bit about what I think we need to do, as educators concerned with the future of higher education, to transition our institutions to meet the needs of the Electrate public.

Replay

Replay by Ken Grimwood

It’s human nature to wonder whether our lives would have turned out differently if we had made different choices.  What if you had stayed together with that old flame?  What if you’d chosen a different career path? Children? No Children?  Grimwood’s novel takes such questions to a new level with its central premise, following a man who dies and “replays” his life from a single moment twenty-five years earlier, over and over again.  A few thoughts:

• In any novel built on a single core premise, the execution of that premise has to be thoughtful and thorough.  Grimwood accomplishes both masterfully.  The elements of the world necessary to make his replay possible play out perfectly, the explanations appear when they need to, are found by the characters when they must, and are left at times tantalizingly unresolved.
• Grimwood also balances the narrative with new elements, keeping the reader involved by adding new aspects to the story just when the reader starts to feel like they understand it all.  Another novel based on a premise that adds twists at just the right moment is The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas.
• I think the novel tackles the question of age-fatigue very well.  Of course, when someone lives dozens or hundreds of years longer than everyone else, they will develop a different view of the world, both more weary and more wise.  Winston finds a kind of truth in his search for meaning over several lives, and as we go along with him, we develop a similar wisdom.  I’m reminded of the sanguine long-lived characters in several SF novels like Accelerando, Schismatrix, and the debauched villains in Altered Carbon.
• The biggest flaw I noticed is the lack of uncontrolled negative experiences.  Sure, Winston endures his share of heartache and bad choices, but the novel never burdens him with the random tragedies that many people experience and one would expect to emerge eventually in the experience of multiple lifetimes.
• Like Groundhog Day, the solitude of repeating leads Winston to develop an internal peace, a sense of purpose we all hope for (at least, those of us who encourage and believe in liberal arts education), and wisdom.  With decades to relive instead of just a day, Grimwood’s protagonist gets to make choices with consequences, a far different experience than Phil in Groundhog Day, a man trapped in a single small town for a single day.

Last, the novel adopts a view of time-travel that’s too narrow for my taste.  Throughout his lives, Winston makes choices that would have ripple effects on those around them, but in Grimwood’s story, those ripples dampen pretty fast.  Only the biggest of moves have long-term consequences for people outside Winston’s immediate circle.  I suppose it feels realistic, but it’s disappointing.  I guess I like to imagine that we have more effect on outcomes than Grimwood thinks we do.

Oops! Were you using that planet? Sorry.

Years ago I saw the Discovery channel (or was it SyFy?) movie Super Volcano and added a fear of a massive North American purge in the wake of a Yellowstone eruption to my worry-list.  I read Simon Winchester’s Crack at the Edge of the World  about the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed San Francisco and learned that there is a large fault–mostly dormant–in southern Illinois that could certainly send an earthquake toward Chicago, where none of our buildings are built with earthquakes in mind.

It’s happened again: Solar flares.

Randall Munroe’s latest What If knocks it out of the park with the most-common of physics questions, “what would happen if the sun suddenly went out?”  Among his answers — our children and fighter pilots would be safer.  Most of them are funny.  But this one is downright terrifying, to my mind:

Reduced risk of solar flares: In 1859, a massive solar flare and geomagnetic storm hit the Earth.^[1] Magnetic storms induce electric currents in wires. Unfortunately for us, by 1859 we had wrapped the Earth in telegraph wires. The storm caused powerful currents in those wires, knocking out communications and in some cases causing telegraph equipment to catch fire.^[2]

Since 1859, we’ve wrapped the Earth in a lot more wires. If the 1859 storm hit us today, the Department of Homeland Security estimates the economic damage to the US alone would be several trillion dollars^[3]—more than every hurricane which has ever hit the US combined.^[4] If the Sun went out, this threat would be eliminated.

Improved satellite service: When a communications satellite passes in front of the Sun, the Sun can drown out the satellite’s radio signal, causing an interruption in service.^[5] Deactivating the Sun would solve this problem. (“Sunless Earth“)

In case the prospect of a massive electrical surge that destroys everything with wires in it doesn’t frighten you, the photo above was taken by the Hubble space telescope of a distant star where the solar flare was so massive that if it had come from our sun, it would have extinguished life on Earth.  But our sun is stable and doesn’t do that, NASA says.

Sure it doesn’t.

Dr. Who Series 3

I’m assuming you’ve seen these episodes, but if you haven’t you should be aware that there are spoilers ahead.

• The last episode before the big finale was great — the weeping angels from “Blink” go into my top three scariest television monsters (right after the silent ones from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the face mask babies from an earlier Dr. Who episode). It also finally revealed to me the origin of the phrase “timey-wimey,” which I have seen floating around the Dr. Who fanosphere for years.
• Family of Blood was an excellent episode as well, with a strong narrative about war and its place in British culture.  Delightful.  It would be a good episode to pair with “7:52″ in Scandal, season 2.
• I thought the subtext about Martha’s unrequited love for the Doctor was pretty great, especially the moment toward the end when she made it clear that it was hurting her to spend time with him, and she needed to go for her own sanity.
• But I also thought the end of “Last of the Time Lords” was particularly stupid, with some weird “everyone thinks of the Doctor at the same time so he becomes a superhero” science going outside the usual silliness for a Dr.Who hand-waving science bit.
• Jenny and I found ourselves looking up more stuff than usual — I felt there was more canon and old references in this series than in the last couple.

One last thought.  Our encounter with The Master at the end of this series suggests that Time Lords took titles for themselves based on their proclivities — the Doctor called himself that because he fixes things or people, The Master because, well, he reads Ayn Rand or something.  It made me imagine a few other Time Lords and their titles:

• The Butler – manages the household staff of Gallifery.  Answers the door when Daleks come calling.
• The Plumber – investigates the inner workings of races and cultures, figures out how they handle the everyday unpleasantries that are part of life.
• The Haberdasher – someone has to supply all those badass Time Lord duds.
• Tim – that’s just what everyone calls him.

“Battletech Stompin” image borrowed from Operation Bulldog

This is the second in a four-part blog series taking a snapshot of the current economic, political, and grammatological situation facing the modern American university system.  In part one, I provided a preface for this discussion.  Parts two, three, and four focus specifically on pressures from different quarters challenging us to re-imagine what it is we do.

Pre-reading:

• Part 1: The Ghosts of Travel Agents
• Nerds: Who we are and why we need more of them

Part 2

Lessons learned from big jumping robots

When I was in high school, my pals and I enjoyed a brief stint playing the tabletop roleplaying game Battletech, a game whose plot involved large, heavily-weaponed robots (“mechs”) shooting at one another.  I became particularly enamored of a maneuver in the rulebook called “Death from Above,” in which a player’s mech jumps on another player’s mech, rendering lots of damage to the head and shoulders of the victim and simultaneously receiving lots of damage to the attacker’s legs.

It’s a tricky move to pull off in the mechanics of the game, and generally not very productive for the attacker.  But despite the Pyrrhic aspect of the attack, it was darn satisfying to perform.  There was delight for my teenage self in the image of my robot jumping through the air and stomping on another robot.  My own security be damned.

Nerds

David Anderegg’s book makes a cogent case that the way our society talks about smart people damages children.  At the core of his argument is the American anti-intellectual streak, which he traces all the way back to Washington Irving and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  Sleepy Hollow is, at its core, a story about teaching nerds to mind their place in the pecking order. 

One of the more obvious ways this translates to modern American attitudes is a contempt for education as a public entity.  The last fifty years have seen us resting on our laurels regarding our educational apparatus, funding it at barely-breathing levels in poor districts and eroding funding for higher ed as the rhetoric has shifted from “let’s all pitch in to beat the Russians” to “college will help individuals get better jobs.”  Individuals ought not get government handouts.

My feelings about education are that we need much, much more spending.  Sam from The West Wing put it this way in the season one, ep ‘Six Meetings Before Lunch’:

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes, we need gigantic monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six figure salaries. Schools should be extremely expensive for governments and absolutely free of charge for its citizens just like national defense. That’s my position. I just haven’t figured how to do it yet.

But this series isn’t about how the forces assailing universities ought to change, it’s just meant to set the stage for understanding those forces, as I see them.

Research or die

The failing funding from above drives universities toward certain kinds of money: grants and donations.  Donations drive the uneconomic support of large scale sports programs, while grants encourage a rapacious fever for grant money that rarely returns focus to the students to whom we purportedly owe our purpose.

Alas, there aren’t a lot of things colleges and universities can do to stop the pressure/hemorrhage from above.  Barring a shocking change in the American attitude toward higher ed, we’re unlikely to see public support for college increasing any time soon, so colleges best re-think how they do business with the same attitude that most workers of my generation have about social security–it’s a nice idea, but we doubt it will be there for us.

Death from Above

Accusatory monkey

My initial discussion was apt, I think, because it highlights the particularly gruesome aspect that our failing funding for education on all levels (including higher ed) presents for us.  For the people that disdain public funding of anything, and for the people who rail against universities for all their drinking at the “Big Government” teat, the reduced funding and failing systems feel like victory.  “See,” they snarl, pointing like that monkey in Family Guy, “education is screwed! We’d best jump ship now.”  But like the robot jumping on another robot, they ignore the damage they do to themselves.  In this case, they don’t see the society around them, where our lead or even our competitiveness are fast falling behind the other first-world countries and rising countries from other parts of the world.  And instead of crying that we’ve got a national emergency and pumping money into the education system in massive boluses, they bemoan its death and revel in their own victory, inured to the leg-armor falling to the ground all around them.

There will be blood spoilers.

Quick plot synopses first:

• Iron Man 3 was a meditation on capitalism, bio-engineering, and the media’s role in the fight against terrorists and global panics.  And there were a lot of robots fighting with genetically-engineered supermen.  I still think they should have used my proposal for the sequels.
• Star Trek: Into Darkness was a meditation on war, bio-engineering, and the nature of peace in a time of danger and destruction.  And there was a lot of fighting between humans, spaceships, and a genetically-engineered superman.
• Epic was a meditation on heroism, tradition, and the forest.  And there were lots of leaf men fighting with, um, rot bugs?  I don’t know.

A few thoughts (like I said, spoilers ahead):

• Irresponsible boy-men continue to be the centers of these movies.  Kirk, Tony, and Nod all have an excess of talent and a lack of responsibility to use it well.  It’s essentially a roiling pile of privilege.  It would have been good to see each film use Ben Folds’ “Rockin the Suburbs” somewhere in the film. (To be fair, Tony moves pretty quickly into the remorseful, responsible mode in this film, but it’s the same narrative as all three IM movies.)
• While there are moments for women in Epic, Iron Man, and Star Trek, none are very significant or compelling.  I look forward to the day when movies like Brave won’t get press simply for having a female lead.  Sigh.  I don’t think any of the films pass the Bechdel test (though perhaps Epic, since the Queen and MK discuss the future of the forest and not how cute Nod is).
• One of the movies has no significant twists in the plot, the other each have two solid twists.  Of the twists, only the first of the twists in Iron Man was a surprise to me.  The others were all, I’m afraid, telegraphed far in advance and thus not a surprise.
• Despite my grouchy complaining here, I liked all three movies quite a bit.  I found them charming and enjoyable, and while I was watching I turned off my critical whiner and enjoyed myself quite a bit.  Good show(s).

Most importantly, all three films will, I am absolutely sure, fail to follow up in any significant way on a world-changing scientific discovery.  Epic reveals a scientist who discovers that the life and death of forests depends on a race of tiny people who look like leaves.  This challenges the very foundation of modern forestry and several branches of science.  It will not be part of the future sequel (though we can hope).   Iron Man 3 explains, at the end, that Tony “solved” the addiction problem for the genetic repair drug at the center of the film.  I suspect we won’t see the future Marvel movies reflect that fact that a wonder healing drug has been invented.  The same goes for Star Trek: Into Darkness, where Bones’ synthesis of Kahn’s blood could literally bring Kirk back from the dead.*  If this isn’t in mass production by ST3, I’m gonna be darn angry.

See also: my meditation on Iron Man and Michael Jackson

*Thanks to Rolfe for pointing out this crucial observation for me.

Emusic:

• Bhi Bhiman, The Cookbook: Bhiman’s soulful voice and good sense of humor makes this album a winner for me.  Several songs have a narrative component like “Equal in My Tea,” and all brim with poetic language worthy of the best.  Other songs from this album I really like: “Up in Arms” is a great meditation on race and war; “Talkin’ NASCAR” is funny, if somewhat grim (mocks the conservative GW Bush perspective with lines like “Terror, Terror, Freedom, Freedom, W, W, NASCAR NASCAR/ Terror is the word I use instead of saying Muslim people”); “It’s Cold Out Here” depicts the heartbreak of a man whose mother is dying of cancer, brutally; “God is a Warrior’s Fan” (a hidden track at the end of “Jaffna Town”) is hilarious with its bile for Kobe Bryant. The whole album is great.
• The Mahones, Here Comes Lucky.  A guitar-driven celtic rock band reminiscent of the Pogues with an occasional twinge of country along the lines of Tom Petty.  I prefer the more rockin’ songs like “Queen and Tequila” or “Going Back to Dublin,” and “Whisky Devils.” “Raise Your Hands” also has a nice anthem-y feels to it.
• Tom Lehrer, “In Old Mexico,” “Clementine,” “Oedipus Rex.” – The first is pretty dated (including its casual use of the racist slur wetback), the second was a cute novelty song that doesn’t hold up to many listens.  The third is a pretty funny discussion of Oedipus and his life.

Soundsupply:

• The Deer Hunter, The Color Spectrum – The album name certainly represents the sonic landscape of this album — perhaps an experiment in different genres by the same group.  Some songs have an alt-rock feel reminiscent of Bush or Tool, a sound exemplified by “Deny It All.”  But they also have a lighter sound, like “She’s Always Hiding” and “Things That Hide Away.”  I particularly like the ballad “Lillian.”  A decent experiment, but it would be hard to really like this album as it feels more like a compilation than a single work.
• The Get Up Kids, There Are Rules -  Fast paced rock music with hints of brit influence (“Regent’s Court” sounds a lot like something The Killers would record).   Not bad, per se, but this album didn’t do a lot for me.

Other Music:

•  Daytrotter top songs of 2012 (18 songs)- Another set of catchy songs.  Among the highlights this time: “Midnight Sun” by The Pines reminds me of Bill Morrissey with a nice meditative sound; “Baby” by Natural Child sounds like a Rolling Stones song;  “White Hat” by Big Harp is my favorite this month, a jaunty folk song sung by a man with a deep voice.
• DanC Best of 2012 – My buddy Dan‘s best of year album which ends up being my infusion of dance/pop music.  On the roster this year were 20 songs, most of them catchy (annoyingly so, sometimes).  Of the songs I’d heard before, I like “Starships” by Niki Minaj (it’s a dang fun song) and “Good Time” by Owl City.  I also was so tired of “Call Me Maybe” that I un-checked it so it wouldn’t play any more.  Of the songs I hadn’t heard, I particularly liked “Girl Gone Wild” by Madonna and “We Won’t Ever Be Rich (But We Could Be Happy)” by the Candle Thieves.  The winner of the bizarre but delightful song for the year is “Let’s Have a Kiki” by Scissor Sisters.  The only songs I actively disliked were “Pontoon” by Little Big Town, which crosses that nebulous line into “too country for my taste” and “Gang Bang” by Madonna which is strange and weird and off-putting.

Overall, a good month for music.

The Ghost of Industries Past

This is the first in a four-part blog series taking a snapshot of the current economic, political, and grammatological situation facing the modern American university system.  In parts two, three, and four, I will focus specifically on pressures from different quarters challenging us to re-imagine what it is we do.  This part serves as a preface and setup for the following posts (which will probably appear once a week).

A note on influences, citations, ideas

Instead of trying to tease out the who, where, and how I got some of the ideas in this piece, I will up-front acknowledge that this is a melange of thoughts from my reading and from around the web, influenced by the following (among others): Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson, Marshall McLuhan, Lawrence Lessig, Donald Norman, Greg Ulmer, Katherine Hayles, Jeff Rice, Steve Krause, Alex Reid, Bradley Dilger, and BoingBoing. Apologies up-front to those I’ve borrowed from but not cited here.

Setting the stage

If you aren’t a regular reader of my blog (or you show up just for the monthly music round ups), you may want to peruse the following posts to set your personal stage for the coming discussion:

• The coming wave of consumer-created media
• Memes, Evolution, etc
• On Navel-Gazing

The Ghosts of Travel Agents Past

“I am here tonight to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate.  A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.”

“You were always a good friend to me.  Thank’ee!”

“You will be haunted by Three Spirits.”

“Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob? I — I think I’d rather not.”

“Without their visits, you cannot hope to shun the path I tread.  Expect the first to-morrow night, when the bell tolls One.  Expect the second on the next night at the same hour.  The third, upon the next night, when the last stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate.  Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us!”

It walked backward from him; and at every Step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that, when the apparition reached it, it was wide open.

Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door by which the Ghost had entered.  It was double-locked, as he had locked it with his own hands, and the bolts were undisturbed.  Scrooge tried to say, “Humbug!” but stopped at the first syllable.  And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the invisible world, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of repose, he went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep on the instant.

How will the rising age of Electracy affect the university? We inhabit a system built on models of learning and information exchange as practiced in the Literate era.  While we like to imagine ourselves as exploring and building on the lessons of contemporary media, we come up very short, to my mind.  As we develop more and more rigorous ways to digitize pieces of our former workload, universities must re-examine what it is we do and how we understand our relationship to the economies of knowledge and MONEY.  Consider these spirits from the past:

• Travel agents – This used to be a profession built on booking plane tickets for people.  The Internet destroyed it.  The individuals who survived the Internet Tsunami did so as vacation planners, demonstrating their ability to sort from among vacation choices and providing value by doing that sorting work for people.
• Stock brokers – This used to be a profession built on registering trades for people.  The Internet destroyed it.  The individuals who survived the Internet Tsunami did so as financial planners, demonstrating their ability to sort from among investment choices and providing value by doing that sorting work for people.
• Real Estate Agents – This used to be a profession built on listing and finding homes for people.  The Internet destroyed it.  The individuals who survived the Internet Tsunami did so as “full service realtors,” demonstrating their ability to make homes saleable through staging, clever marketing, and aggressive foot leather, then doing that work for people.

How does this scenario translate for the university?

• University – This used to be a profession built on credentialing and providing information to people.*  The Internet will destroy it.  The institutions who survive the Internet Tsunami will do so as what? We need to demonstrate our ability to help people become effective economic participants in the 21st century economy, able to wield modern information systems skillfully and do that work for people.

Electracy demands a different kind of student, a different kind of educator, and a different institution to house them.  Let’s hope we build find it before the water gets too high.