Collective intelligence. What’s that? An abstraction for sure, but it manifests itself more concretely when communities of users voluntarily engage with a site and system because they feel a sense of ownership and value in taking part. As a result such a site and system grows organically. The ‘product’ become the collective activity of the users. In this post I begin to explore the question: if synergies between ICTs, and a global network infrastructure have given birth to ‘collective intelligence’ is there an inherent and unresolvable tension between that trend and the adoption of a more corporate ethos by Higher Education institutions? In, Stephen Downes’ recent article E-learning 2.0 (17 October 2005) which was, as usual, a stimulating read, Downes quotes from Rob Paterson’s online essay:
Is not the new “big idea” of our time to disintermediate the institutional middleman and to enable direct relationships? Are supermarkets eternal? Do we need factory universities to learn? Is our health dependent on a doctor? Is the news what we see on TV?
Part of me wants to agree with Paterson, but another part of me is less sure. Paterson certainly asks some relevant and challenging questions, but I suspect the traditional institutions of learning probably still have some mileage left in their tank. Paterson is perhaps making the assumption that the only reason students go to university ‘X’ is to learn. They also go to institution ‘X’ for other less tangible reasons sometimes related to that awful term ‘the brand’. Arguably, brand ‘X’ gets you access to a better position in life. Arguably, brand ‘X’ enables you to earn more money. Arguably, brand ‘X’ is more likely to ensure you are employed where you want to be employed. But, hey, I could be wrong and it could be that it’s the contributors, analysts and exploiters of collective intelligence that the captains of industry and government will come to value more than graduates of institution ‘X’.
The real question is whether our institutions will adapt quickly enough or not. Downes perhaps hits the nail on the head when he says:
As we approach the halfway mark of the new millennium’s first decade, the nature of the Internet, and just as importantly, the people using the Internet, has begun to change. These changes are sweeping across entire industries as a whole and are not unique to education; indeed, in many ways education has lagged behind some of these trends and is just beginning to feel their wake.
Apart from the danger that our institutions won’t adapt quickly enough I believe there is also the risk that they may attempt to adapt inappropriately.
What do I mean?
Let’s revisit a couple of quotes I’ve used often in previous Auricle posts.
� the application of the new technologies is generating a myriad of demands for re-institutionalisation of the university as a far more �corporate�, one might even say concrete, kind of organization � (in Cornford J (2000) The Virtual University is (paradoxically) the University Made Concrete.
… universities may be increasingly forced to consider institutional changes in order to maintain alignment with the system. (in Implications of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems for Universities: An Analysis of Benefits and Risks, Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, Issue 3, p13, April 2005). The OBHE is a subscription service.
But now, if you haven’t already done so, read Tim O’Reilly’s recent article What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software (30 September 2005). The problem with this paper is that because it comes from the software and systems stable it’s most likely to be read by ‘techies’ whereas, I think, it really needs to be required reading for all managers.
OK, the primary purpose of O’Reilly’s article was to attempt to clarify the much hyped concept of Web 2.0, i.e. the ‘second generation’ Web, but a sizeable chunk of the article is devoted to the concept of collective intelligence, and that really deserves an article all by itself.
As O’Reilly’s paper points out a number of businesses and organisations have already got the collective intelligence message.
Flickr got the message. People can upload images, add primitive, but nevertheless effective, metadata in the form of ‘tags’ and they can make the images available to friends and relatives or even offer their works-of-art for public reuse. Not so much a taxonomy driven model, but to the potential chagrin of taxonomists, librarians, computer scientists and information scientists, it’s a ‘folksonomy’ driven model … Like HTML, scruffy works again! 🙂
Amazon also got the message a long time ago. People don’t just buy books from Amazon they comment upon/review and rate them and, with Amazon’s marketplace, they can even sell their own stuff.
And of course there’s also that doyen of community authorship and editorship Wikipedia to consider.
Google of course got it a long time ago since their page rank system is dependent on what the readers consider important.
EBay depends on it. Without engagement, ‘content’, and comment from users this particular internet business would be nothing.
So what’s my point and what’s this got to do with e-learning and Higher Education?
If we accept the Cornford/Pollock argument, and I’m sympathetic to the argument (if not to the potential consequences), then, in order to fit in with the requirements of technical systems our educational institutions (and associated bodies) are destined to become increasingly corporate in their ethos. The traditional corporate model tends to be, in the main, grounded in a tight command and control mindset in which policies and protocols emerge from the executive at the centre to be implemented by the managers and operatives at a functional level. There’s little scope for ‘community intelligence’ in such a model. Any ‘intelligence’ gathering becomes the province of the market research or customer relationship departments and any communication with the exterior is perceived to be the responsibility of the corporate communications department, or equivalent.
It’s that ‘traditional’ corporate mindset that’s the problem. That assumes, however, the corporate ethos is static and resistant, perhaps fatally, to change. The irony would be that, if Cornford and Pollock prove correct, that our educational institutions adopt an ethos which the more successful and flexible companies will already be in the process of abandoning. In such an unfortunate scenario, the net result of adopting an obsolete corporate model will be to eschew collective intelligence in favour of attempts at tighter control, filtering and information flow driven by the needs of institutional IT systems with justifications based around protecting the institutional brand.
The problem is that collective intelligence isn’t necessarily something the institution has any control over; indeed, it’s more likely to be happening outside the institution. For example, although I know I’m stretching the definition of collective intelligence here, consider the first UK National Student Survey at the Teaching Quality Information (TQI) site. The BBC news site also gives a useful overview of this 2005 survey. Or what about the Scottish Funding Council’s Survey of Student Experience 2005 p16. The ‘intelligence’ in the latter puts the number of contact hours, relevance of the course to a job, and support from teachers right at the the top of the list before computer and library facilities; so much for assumptions about the technology reducing the desire for teacher-student face-to-face contact time then. What’s interesting here is that the catalysts for this particular form collective intelligence were themselves official bodies undoubtedly responding to government urging about acquiring and publishing feedback from actual users of public services.
Arguably, the more successful corporations have recognized that, in a fast changing world where no single entity can hope to dominate the information space or hope to maintain a corporate Web site of any dynamism and quality, then a rigid command and control model is no longer appropriate.
As the O’Reilly paper highlights, it’s the growth of weblogs which have done much to facilitate the Web-based collective intelligence model. What’s important to grasp here is that the weblog can be a part of a huge network of persistently identifiable, chronologically organized, syndicated, cross-linked distributed repositories of dynamic information, essays, commentary and opinion. As such, weblogs can have a profound effect on the results returned by search engines. For example, let’s say you don�t much care for your credit card company, your bank, or your college. So you post an article on your weblog describing your experiences. And what do you know, people who�ve had the same experience read your blog article or are automatically notified by your syndicated RSS feed and refer to it in their blogs. Within a week people searching for information about the object of your concern don�t just come across information published by the company/college but also the critical commentary of yourself and other unsatisfied customers, i.e. the former passive audience is now in charge. If there�s a lot of commentary and cross-linking the criticism can come right at the top of the search results ahead of the �official� information. Of course the danger here is one of vexatious criticism becoming malicious (libel is still libel on the Web) and perhaps even criminal but, as O�Reilly�s paper points out, collective intelligence does not just mean amplification, it also means filtering, i.e. “the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value”.
Considering the above it’s little wonder that the more knowledgeable corporations are attempting to participate and adapting their policies and processes. The growing number of corporate weblogs provides some early evidence that they are becoming aware of the threats and opportunities. Threats, because if they don’t fill the information space, someone else surely will. Opportunities, because by opening up the communication channels far beyond that of the customer relationship database, while at the same time redefining who is responsible for communication (and what forms communication can take), they can acquire direct customer feedback and participation.
Let’s consider one corporate example.
Perhaps the most interesting of the corporate weblogs is Sun Microsystems not so much for the content (at least in the context of this Auricle posting) but for the Sun Policy on Public Discourse publicly displayed on their employee weblog site. No apparent heavy hand here, merely the message not to affect the share price, don’t do anything illegal, and above all, don’t rubbish the company products or services. All-in-all, that appears pretty reasonable and Sun at least seems to be demonstrating confidence and trust in their employees.
And Sun Microsystems are not alone. Other household names have also realised that blogs authored by their employees provide an opportunity to interact with an audience informally and more meaningfully than is possible via the standard corporate website. Far from compromising the image of the company they have found an opportunity to provide a human face and inject personality into otherwise turgid and relatively static corporate fare. As well as providing a constant flow of information, analysis, and opinion there is also a flow of information back into the company. Also, as indicated earlier, by providing high quality dynamic content with links to other resources the pages get visited a lot with the result that the relative page ranking on search engines like Google go up. Among the other ‘big beasts’ who’ve embraced blogging we find Microsoft (~700 bloggers), Macromedia, and the German software company SAP. If this short list is insufficient few then try TheNewPR Wiki where you’ll get overwhelmed by the numbers of companies who seem to have woken up to the possibilities of letting their people communicate informally and directly.
But … there can be a cost when it becomes less clear who a blogger is working for. For example, read As Corporate Ad Money Flows Their Way, Bloggers Risk Their Rebel Reputation (New York Times, 26 November 2005) and shudder.
Weblogs are but one example of what Downes’ e-Learning 2.0 article calls ‘socially open’ (SO) solutions:
It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts
But there are other powerful members of this SO genre. Wikis, i.e. community editable/maintainable Web documents/pages) are an obvious example. Wikipedia is probably the best known public example of how collective intelligence is enabled by appropriate tools and environments.
What’s also interesting here is that this emerging genre of SO solutions enables a community intelligence infrastructure to be built that doesn’t necessarily have to depend on the provision of a centralized institutional IT infrastructure. For example, consider the increasingly successful Facebook.com launched in early 2004 by three Harvard students or the UK’s ELGG the creation of David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller, originally students at the University of Edinburgh. ELGG describes itself as:
” … a personal learning landscape with the goal of connecting learners, instructors and resources creating communities of learning.”
What’s interesting about all of these SO solutions are that they are also examples of actual or potential disruptive technologies; a point highlighted by MyST Technologies’ Andy Seidl who in September 2003 reminded us in his blog post RSS: Disruptive Technology Hiding in Plain Sight of Christensen’s description of how technologies emerging from outside the mainstream have the power to disrupt normal processes and practices in the mainstream:
“Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.” Christensen C (2003), The Innovator’s Dilemma, HarperBusiness.
A good example of the disruptive effect on the commercial status quo was offered to us by John Hiler in his June 2002 article Blogs as Disruptive Tech: How weblogs are flying under the radar of the Content Management Giants that:
” � weblogs are a violently disruptive force in the content management sector � Blogware has grown from its simple origins to an increasingly powerful content management solution � ”
I’m pretty sure that John was right, but we still get IT managers buying into expensive content management systems when less complicated and ‘free’ solutions are perhaps more likely to meet many of the needs of end users.
But there is hope. There are educational institutions that realise the value of systems, tools and environments which enable the users to generate, edit, and comment upon content.
In Williams and Jacobs’ 2004 paper Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector we find:
“Universities � begin fostering communities � about issues, subjects, disciplines, professions. Student membership of these communities should become integral to their course completion � whole components become (instead of �study�) knowledge-based community provision (Allen 1999).”
and
“Blogs are perhaps the most obvious realisation of Allen�s vision to form an academic discourse that reaches beyond the scope of a university subject and which augments the knowledge creation occurring throughout a student�s enrolment in a higher education programme.”
(Williams JB, Jacobs J (2004), Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2004, 20(2), 232-247)
My Auricle article E-Learning Frameworks and Tools: Is it too late? – The Director’s Cut (15 September 2004) expressed concern that, despite the relatively short experience we have all had of this thing we now call e-learning, legacy decisions made it difficult for institutions to embrace new opportunities that did not fit with existing policies and enterprise platforms, i.e. as Cornford suggested in 2000, in their desire to ‘virtualize’ institutions have, paradoxically, become more ‘concrete’ as their use of technology increased.
The key question is whether Cornford and Pollock’s view of the emergent, more corporate oriented, university can be influenced by the opportunities offered by the e-Learning 2.0 vision offered us by Downes? The challenge here is how to help those at the academic coalface and the institutional leadership become aware of, and receptive to, the opportunities of SO solutions instead of perceiving them as a threat to be controlled.
As I draw near my conclusion of this post, I have a couple of questions I don’t find easy to answer.
First, what happens to student-centredness and a focus on the student experience if our educational institutions are, as Cornford and Pollock suggest, becoming more corporate in ethos? Is student-centredness mere rhetoric for public consumption while the corporate machine grinds relentlessly on? Perhaps not.
Here’s something to ruin your appetite 🙂
Substitute the word ‘customer’ and ‘client’ for student and I’m sure successful corporations would shout from the rooftops that they were successful because they were totally focused on the needs of the ‘consumer’ of their product and service. In the same way an educational institution with a corporate ethos could easily claim they were student-centred both at strategic and operational levels and may even go on to produce the ‘evidence’ that they were so.
Second, where then communities of practice in a corporate ethos? At this point it may be worth revisiting Diana Laurillard’s article, Rethinking Teaching for the Knowledge Society (Educause Review, Jan/Feb 2002, Volume 37 Number 1). I read this article when it was first published and I found it inspirational. Now, however, I find difficulty mapping this to the future Cornford and Pollock see for us or in the industrial model of learning, some foresee, that I addressed in my earlier Auricle post E-Learning industrialization – will the customers like it? (13 November 2005). Maybe others will see less conflict in the concepts.
It’s ironic that, as highlighted in this post, that some commercial companies have created very successful businesses based on facilitating and, yes, exploiting, collective intelligence via SO tools, environments, and services. Yet, the same opportunities have yet to be grasped by our mainstream educational institutions. It’s ironic, also, that some ‘died in the wool’ corporations with a command and control ethos have apparently embraced SO tools like weblogs but, yet, these have still to mainstream within higher education. So I’ll finish by repeating the quote from the Downes e-Learning 2.0 article; a quote I think merits reflection by us all:
As we approach the halfway mark of the new millennium’s first decade, the nature of the Internet, and just as importantly, the people using the Internet, has begun to change. These changes are sweeping across entire industries as a whole and are not unique to education; indeed, in many ways education has lagged behind some of these trends and is just beginning to feel their wake.
Feel the wake folks … feel the wake!
