distributed education in the google age – jeff jarvis

Jeff Jarvis – Distributed Education in the Google Age The Media Education Summit 09 – September 9th 2009 1

Distributed Education in the Google Age – Jeff Jarvis

I’m very sorry I can’t be there. Especially because I missed Tom Loosemore. So, I

tried not to write a book about Google but instead to write a book about the changes

in our world, as seen through the success and grammar of Google.

I think the changes we’re seeing in the economy and society are fundamental and

profound and permanent and I think it’s very hard for us to try to even begin to

understand what’s happening. The one organisation that has understood this,

probably not even consciously so much as their DNA, is Google. So I tried to look at

it through that driver as I say.

And I start off with a bunch of Beta movies that I have. I have forty of them, dear

God I won’t do that, and also as a gift I’m not doing any Powerpoint. I thought I’d

just run through a quick bunch of those because it sets the context of the discussion of

the future of the university actually. One is the whole notion of control, and in our

world, as I know Tom Loosemore talked about this morning when I saw his twitter.

This is about handing control over to people and that’s hard for businesses and

institutions to figure out. Institutions that can not figure that out will die. The

institutions that have a respect in the public to hand over control, the realisation that

good things will come of it, will succeed I think and that’s part and parcel of what

Google has done.

The most important lesson I think I’ve learned from watching Google is that what

they’ve done is create a platform and networks. Contrary to the fears we hear all

across the EU, they’re not trying to take over and own the world, they’re trying to

organise and enable the world and they’re enabling us to do what we want to do. In

that sense, I guess I disagree with the notion that Google is the institution. We are the

institution. And we can as Clay Shirkey says in Here Comes Everybody, be

organised without organisations.

So being a platform and a network, and enabling others to succeed on top of that, I

think is the critical concept to grade our success in this age of successful Google. I’m

amazed to this day how the link changes everything and I can’t get my head getting


around how it changes everything. It changes fundamentally for example the

economics of media. We’ve gone from a content economy, where you took multiple

copies of things and sold them again and again, a controlled link economy and content

with no links has no value. Content gains value as it gains links. Which is to say that

if you see two channels of value they’d be recognised in this new media economy and

I think in education as well, which is a creator of content and also the sender of the

links.

And those who complain about global news and daylight where I worked in other

places, stealing content, they’re doing of course exactly the opposite, they’re sending

value and those who operate in the old economy are incapable of understanding that

and that’s what’s causing the problems. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically,

you want to think distributed; you want to be where the people are. There was a

quote in The New York Times a year ago from a college student, a total researcher, if

the news is that important, it will find me. And that’s not what we’re used to, we’re

in big institutions things where people come to us, were the font of information, the

font of knowledge, instead we now must go to them.

I presented recently the findings of a project I’m working on at CUNY, new business

models for news, at the Aspen Institute, and there Marissa Mayer of Google said of

course now you’re getting your head around this notion of the web page and website,

we should pull it apart and say ‘OK, what’s next is the creator of push pull news

stream. We can assimilate ourselves into that.’ So the notion would be distributed

according to where the people are. The fact that we are in a post scarcity economy

that tries to benefit by having scarcity, whether that’s of knowledge or of seats in a

classroom is over. If you watch Google it benefits by creating abundances and as

such breeds as many spots or adverts relevant as is possible on the web to ever need

more relevance then it takes advantage of that abundance rather than trying to sell the

scarcity of there ads to a few eyeballs.

Our president in his communistic speech to school students here yesterday, told them

all to embrace their failures, and I think that’s an important lesson for the Google age

as well, the notion of the Beta. When Google does that, releases a Beta, it’s saying

this product is imperfect, it is unfinished, help us finish it. It is necessarily a call to


collaboration. And what is education but a constant process of living in the Beta and

understanding how to benefit from that and how to make mistakes as well and how to

make mistakes part of your process. We don’t do that in education. Right now in

education, the tyranny of testing, we say ‘There is one right answer and you will all

get the same answer and that’s it’ it’s a notion of perfection. This notion of perfection

comes, I think, from the industrial age where you turn out everything the same

including our students, and that has to change.

One quick story. Mark Zuckerberg was at Davos two years ago on a counter face

programme and he was talking to a bunch of media boffins there. And one of them,

the powerful scion of a major newspaper company, and because it’s off the record I

won’t say who it was but he works in the building next door to me here in New York,

and he turned to Zuckerberg and he said ‘Mark how do we create a community like

you did, how do we do this?’ It was almost embarrassing according to Alan

Rushbridger. And Zuckerberg came back and said ‘You can’t. Full stop. That’s it.

You can’t. Since communities already exist, you don’t create them. They’re already

doing what they want to do, you should find ways to help them do what they want to

do better.’ ‘The description for that’ he said ‘is to bring elegant organisation’ I love

the elegance of that phrase ‘elegant organisation’. Great story.

He was in his art class, while he was at Harvard. He did not have a class all year, he

didn’t study, finals were a week away, he was in a panic. It’s one matter to drop out

of Harvard and start a million dollar company, it’s another one to call home and say

you’ve flunked. So he didn’t know what to do. Well he went and he thought he

needed data and he went on line and he found all these art and raved about them in the

final. And he put them all on a web page with blank boxes underneath. He sent those

to all his fellow students saying ‘I’ve put up a study now’ think Mark Twain, a fence

and a bucket of paint. And the students of course dutifully came in and filled in all

the blanks and then, because it was Harvard, they argued about it until they got it just

right. You know how the story ends. Zuckerberg got an A on the exam but the

instructor said that the students as a whole got better grades than ever in the test that

term.


When Eric Schmidt talked to the graduates of Carnegie Mellon last year, he

emphasised one view of Google is that you could always do more together than alone.

And one thing we do in education is make it a very lonely thing. Yes, we talk in class

together, but you’re alone with that essay, you’re alone with that test, you’re alone,

you get your result on your own. And the greatest skill we can probably teach them

in this new age is collaboration. Because, as Tom said this morning, what’s new in

new media, I already retweeted this, is not distribution, but collaboration over

distance.

So, as we now take some of these concepts and bring them to university. As I wrote

this chapter, I blogged about it and I was trying to figure out the structure of my

thoughts on this and, as always, my blog readers were very helpful. Bob

Glynman[ph] works for Google, he constructed education, he said, into three

components, Teaching, Testing or Certification and Research. I added a fourth,

which is Socialisation. There’s no reason in a distributed disaggregated world all

those things need to happen in the same building, in the same place, anymore. They

did for convenience in the past but everything else is being disaggregated, why not

education. If you take socialisation alone, then I always wonder whether we should

send kids off .. sorry .. I have one of those lighting systems that decrees me dead

every ten minutes, so pardon me while I make a fool of myself, I’ve got to move a lot,

pardon me. There we go. There we go. Better for the environment and my heart I

guess. Where was I? Oh, youth. So we separate this notion of socialisation from

university, you know, sending our students off for a year in Europe is probably better

than sending them to a dorm for a year.

The first and most important question I have about the university is why it should not

have a way to nurture the creativity of student there. The fact is that our greatest

companies today have been started by drop outs who worked adversity with the need

to create. How good is the university at incubating potential? Should every

university and every school for that matter have what Google has for its engineers, it’s

a 20% rule. What if one fifth of the time of every student had to be dedicated to

creating something, a book, a programme, a play, a company, a sculpture. True,

much of them or most of them are almost all of them are going to be crap, probably,

but we won’t know until we try and we enable people to create things that we act as


like a nurturer of creation. The most important thing about education today is that we

don’t nurture enough of that creation.

Instead, look at the testing culture we have, especially in here in the US, where we

test people before they learn anything, which is kind of absurd if you think about it,

we should test them only afterwards, which you do more in the UK than we do here,

but we do it to try to standardise people. Like my kids are now 12 and 17, they are

under this terrible, tyranny of testing. They’re all being stamped out like cookies and

really what they show us, I think, is that education is still built for the industrial age.

It is built for training people out all the same, so they turn out products all the same.

It’s not what’s going to build the next Google. More on that in a moment.

So, if a school operated like an incubator for young talent, what would that look like?

One brief mention about the notion of socialisation is that certainly here and certainly

in the posher schools in the UK, schools are a place that create the old boy’s network,

sexistly but all to accurately named, and I do think that’s one role that gets taken over

by the internet. We create our own networks now. Facebook may be the new

Harvard in that sense anyway.

So that’s one, socialisation. Another role of university, in kind of reverse order, is

research. Will research, should research still be conducted at the university level?

Perhaps it’s the one place where it can happen and we need more of it in companies

who are doing less of it. But it’s not sacrosanct. It’s an area of budget and factors

now, and I think we have to examine research as a function. So the fact that Channel

4 has it’s effort to create new things and try new things is an effort to bring research

into the world and it’s not just the province of the university. So how can universities

become platforms for research in many ways inside and outside the university, with

and without faculty. And by the way the ideal atmosphere in relation to research is

this collaborate networking and is the idea of opening up research being transparent,

figuring that out.

The next role is testing. And I’ve already railed on about that I think this notion that

we have to test students before they come in and that’s the best measure that they are

what they are sends precisely the wrong message throughout your education career.


As there’s one right answer, everybody has to get it. You all better be the same at the

end of the day and if you’re not the same, that’s failure. And failure is not welcome,

failure is not a learning exercise, failure is to be a matter of shame and a mark that

you are going to go less far in this world. Whereas of course failure should be sought

out, if it’s sought wisely and we learn from it. And the best thing we can do with

failure is to work. It’s true in science obviously, it’s true in media as well. There’s a

controversy going on right now here in New York, the New York Times is trying to

reveal the identity of a blogger who blogs about the New York Times. They

evidently got it wrong at the first try and they killed the post and bloggers are going

nuts because we have a different ethic of failure in the state of correction here, which

is that you leave up your mistakes, it’s the only right thing to do, because the more

you put a record out on the web and the right thing to do is to cross it out and to show

you the mistake you’ve made, be transparent about that. We don’t deal well with the

notion of mistakes and failure in education because we are built around testing and

that I think just doesn’t work.

Part of this of course is the notion of certification, is the notion of public degree and I

think that, as well, is potentially quite outmoded. In fact it’s very limiting to say that

you should be stuck with this idea that we are finished with education at 21. I’m sure

we’d all agree about that. But it’s what we do, it’s what the system sets up. And the

Lord knows I know that I’ve learned in my career, especially since I’ve gone on the

internet. There’s loads of new skills that I never learned at school about business and

technology and marketing and finance and government and all kinds of things that

I’ve learned now in public on the web and that’s a better way to learn and we’ve got

to figure out how to bring that off.

So, what’s better then, we still have to judge people, we still have to hire them, we

still have to figure out who are the right ones to do the task and I think that part of that

becomes .. goes back to the notion of creation and our portfolio. A portfolio of work

that represents us. I am now presented online, I might go online for better or worse,

find my twitter feed for better or worse. I have a portfolio online, you can figure me

out, know who I am, know how I think. And if we encourage students to create and

to create that body of work then that becomes their portfolio and it’s the best way to

judge what they do.


Now there’s the constant cries of what about the drunken pictures in college, you

know, I do believe that we have a doctorate in it, usually a short affiliation there. I

embarrass myself, you embarrass yourself, go in there and admit. It’s all there. So

what? You were wrong. In the Google age that’s the only, the more you create, the

higher up that goes about you. Your portfolio speaks loud for you. I have this

problem here in CUNY really trying to get students to understand the true value of

that and to blog because they will not only learn in public but create a brand in public.

And that’s scary for them because they say ‘I’m not ready for this, that’s why I’m in

School to learn this stuff, but I think that it’s the only way to learn. I teach interactive

journalism, my students have to have a public, to interact, so they have to go out and

do that.

In the business of testing, universities have pretty much ceded it, here in the US at

least, to industry groups. It’s not the university that tests you to be a lawyer or a

doctor, it’s the professional association. It’s not the university that certifies you as

ready to support a Microsoft product, it’s Kaplan or someone like that.

So finally we arrive at the source of the real value of the university, which is teaching.

And one lesson more [inaudible] is I think that teaching is of course a search and go

obnoxious on this metaphor real fast. But where we search, we don’t always know

what we’re searching for. So although I argue that we should hand over control, even

to the students, this is one area where I don’t necessarily agree with myself and think

that there’s still a role that handing over your education to an educator. Because you

don’t know what you’re searching for and so you’re saying ‘Help me do this. Help

me figure out what I’m looking for.’

Now that’s not the case in everything. You might say ‘I want to learn German.’ It’s

pretty clear what you want to learn, go learn it. I will learn how to support this bit of

software. Also very clear. I want to think about philosophy, I want to think about the

future of economics. That’s different. Then hand yourself over to a mentor of one

sort or another. You’ve got to find that mentor, so you’re searching for the people

involved.


I was having a discussion with the President, outgoing, of the new school, here in

New York, who was looking at the lectures that are up on line at MIT and other

universities and said ‘You know, as good as we have it, it’s hard to beat those, they’re

just great. What should we do with them?’ ‘We find a way to take advantage of

them.’ And as we speculate about that of course the idea that we should copy the UK

method of lecturer and tutor, and if those lecturers from MIT and Stanford and

Harvard that are on line are so wonderful, then they can reach thousands upon

thousands of students. The value that the university at the local level can bring is the

tutor. They get a new school as the tutors work on that class in physics and help the

student reach the highest level while also allowing the student to reach the highest

level of educator through this distributed view.

So if we think of the university as a distributor, what does that really look like then?

How can we connect to people in different ways, how can we make that scale in new

ways. Now there’s obviously, you know, business profits and I’m not sure I have

answers for that. I work in a state supported school here in the US, it’s much less

expensive than others and we are able to do that because of the support we get.

Though, if you add up what my students pay to what I get paid it’s pretty much gets

up to my salary, it just doesn’t pay for everything else, like research and resources.

So there is an economy that is emerging for the Kaplans of this world, I don’t know

what your equivalents are in the UK of for profit educational institutions. Again it’s

less probable that there’s going to be the support for a school subsidy, but here in the

US we’re college is something like $50 to $55,000 a year. There’s a big market for

commercial education and I don’t think that’s to be sniffed at, I think that they play a

role in the new eco-system of education, just as students learning from each other.

There are .. I forget the name of the great UK site where people teach you things,

teachstreet is one of them here in the US. That was Kaplan, was pure on line

learning, all working together.

So the question becomes, what does education look like, I think the thing we should

consider is what does the university as a platform look like? How do we enable a

university to set up these structures so that people can learn whatever they want to

learn from whoever they want to learn it. And include in that business structure,

include in that the functionality that enables that, include in that the services of


helping a student create a curriculum, as an incubator [inaudible]. What are all the

functions to deconstruct a university and deconstruct education and put it back

together in a distributed fashion. And I think we see some people now who are

creating this free university. There’s others that are trying to create this new

institution of education.

I was at a large US retailer here a few weeks ago and put the challenge out to them,

imagine there’s that kid in a dorm room who is looking at the availability of platforms

to build new businesses on top of that and their big competition here is Amazon and

we brainstormed about how to build a new kind of retail experience. It’s really a

media experience on top of Amazon. Let Amazon do the shipping and stuff. How do

you bring people in and educate them about the products and create social .. sorry,

here we go again. I know I’ve talked too long now. Create a social experience

around this, bring value out of that of buying products. It’s the same thing for a

university. If you were a kid in a dorm room reinventing the university, using

platforms that exist now or should exist, using Google, using the lectures that are up

at MIT, using the functionality of social sites, knowing the people like Loosemore

building amazing things. What does the distributed university and the distributed

education look like?

One last point. In my book I quoted Jonathan Rosenburg, the senior VP of

Knowledge Management at Google and he blogged about how Google hires people

because of non routine problem solving skills, in other words, what common test is

you’re asked how to solve a problem of spelling. The obvious routine answer is use a

dictionary. The non routine answer is what Google does, is to learn from the mistakes

of people, so that you can then correct them out of that. And he said ‘In the real

world, the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the

lessons you have gained from the free market. So it’s easy to educate for routine, but

it’s harder to educate for the non routine. I fear we are educating for routine, for

standard, for sameness. We are not educating a generation of students to go and

create the next Googles. They’re doing that in spite of us’. So that’s my remarks and

I hope I’ve kept to time and I’m eager to engage in a dialogue.

distributed education in the google age – jeff jarvis

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