Edupunks?
FastCompany ran an article in their September issue titled, How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education. That seems like a kind title to me. Anyone interested in higher education - from administrators to professors to businesses who support or interface with colleges and universities should read this and explore more of this movement. The title could just as easily read - Oh, my Lord, colleges will be gone in 10 years!
For me, there are several important developments worth noting.
No one owns the info anymore
Whether we try or not, information and knowledge (two different things, by the way) are being catalogued and distributed freely and at break neck speed on the Interwebs. And we're not just talking about bloggers and wikis. MIT is making their courses available online - curricula, videotaped lectures, the whole nine yards. All sorts of people have access to serious materials about serious subjects - and they ( I should say, WE) are availing ourselves of these resources to develop our own knowledge base and experience.
Also, information is a wholly different kind of commodity than anything else in the tangible world. As Peter Drucker points out in Management Challenges for the 21st Century, if you sell someone information, you still have the information. Not true with pencils, chairs, and bacon.
Research is as research does
There are some basic principles to serious research and people can conduct terrible research just as easily within academia as without academia. Essentially there are three phases to meaningful research - and this is true for way-out-there science as surely as it is in preparation for writing a poem or a novel. The three categories are: How - what's the methodology? How will you gather and organize the information important to your research? What - are you gathering the right information from the right resources? Is there enough information to work with? and So What - this can be the critical element, what conclusions are you drawing from the information? Are you spinning your conclusions to match your original assumptions or did your research allow you genuinely discover the answer? Have you added any new understanding to the topic?
Higher Education institutions no longer own serious research. It's been distributed to the masses and the masses like having it. Did you know there are a growing number of marketing firms who contract with or have on staff clinical psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and neuroscientists? It's true. Now, granted, these folks earned those labels at university. But that may not be the case in 20 5 years.
People learn by doing
It's a standard cycle - whenever the economy dips down, community colleges' enrollment goes up. This makes sense - layoffs lead to retraining. There's more to it than that but for the sake of brevity, let's stick to this aspect of the trend. In this last round of economic downturn, there has been a shift that has been growing for some time - maybe, what, 10 years? The shift is cultural. We've been witnessing the downfall of the one-job-career for some time but starting last fall, a new conversation was added to the mix that didn't necessarily exist. Here's the conversation, "The big companies aren't coming back."
What's this have to do with Edupunks? Everything. The new world of work is all about taking control of your own career and deciding things like where you want to live, what your work circumstances are going to be, and how long you'll stay in a given job or role. Don't believe me? Ask Richard Florida, Matthew Gilbert, and a dozen other folks who follow workforce trends.
Can't count on companies to remain loyal? Reduce the average amount of time you spend at a given job. Don't have $25,000 a year to go to school? Study on your own while you get a job. Edupunks and, in my foresight, dozens of other groups or classes of people will continue to challene the prevailing model of education. They're learning how to get what they need on their own.
We continue to work with schools through these changes and I for one am fascinated by the shifts. Let me know what you think - on this blog or privately at escott@terrainsim.com