The Auricle

by Derek Morrison, 21 November 2009

Here’s a reflective activity. If you dear reader haven’t done so then read the following in the order suggested (the really motivated can also follow the embedded hyperlinks 🙂

1. Digital Britain report published – read carefully (Auricle, 21 June 2009)
2. ‘Ooooo’ comes after ‘Eeee’? (Auricle, 24 & 25 June 2009)
3. Higher Education Framework Published (Auricle, 4 November 2009)

Reading the above should now have helped establish a framework for reading Charles Leadbeater’s

4. The Digital Revolution: the Coming Crisis of the Creative Class (PDF)

Whether you always agree with him or not Charles Leadbeater is certainly perceived as a “thought leader” with a particular focus on reflecting and researching the economic and social impacts of the technological developments that are facilitating mass collaboration. The first edition of his We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity was published in March 2008 with an updated 2nd Edition of We Think published by Profile books in February 2009 . Leadbeater’s web site also provides the first 3 chapters plus the complete first public draft.

In essence his We Think could be a bible for Web 2.0 accolytes but one which tries to get beyond techno-ideology. In his book and via other multple media channels he suggests that the advent of computers, internet, and the web has generated new approaches to “creation” in which innovation is not restricted to the few. What can now be traded is ideas and symbols and so were are emerging from the “economy of machines”. With the latter it made sense to “own and control” but now we need to “share and spread”. There are now streams of new ways emerging for interacting on a global scale but yet this has not impacted on the command and control mindset of managers of ‘traditional’ top-down organisations or businesses. Consequently, such organisations and businesses are being destabilised plus local and national policy and legislative frameworks also have difficulty in adapting.

Making money in an emergent era of open collaborative development requires new ways of thinking and behaving, e.g. artefacts produced by collaboration may be made freely available to all with income being generated by adding value through services or expertise. Leadbeater also argues that while that even Wikipedia has demonstrated that some level of governance is necessary to prevent chaos in collaborative enterprises as they scale. However, such governance is not the same as monopolistic control with even big companies, e.g. Microsoft, deriving benefit from becoming more open in some ways. Nevertheless, we are still at the beginning of working out the balance of governance and freedom for this digital ‘commons’ we have created.

As would be expected given Leadbeater’s interests he also has a significant presence on YouTube.

Although his The Digital Revolution: the Coming Crisis of the Creative Class paper was a polemical response to the interim edition of the UK government’s Digital Britain report I think it also provides a useful alternative lens through which to consider at the implications and issues of the digital revolution for Higher Education. Leadbeater makes some interesting but unsettling points in his paper some of which I have recast for the purpose of this posting:

• Increasing broadband uptake will accelerate the disruption of traditonal business models because people will collaborate and share more even more effectively than they are now.
• Politicians are not yet admitting that if the digital revolution is to succeed it they will need to accept that there will even more disruption of established business models/
• New technolgies, business models and “consumer” habits and industries will emerge from a crisis which will act as a vital spur to innovation.
• Habit change precipitated by crisis leads to mass take-up which creates new opportunities.
• Technologies transform society when they become aspirational for “consumers” who adopt new lifestyles around the technologies.
• Universal access to broadband is insufficient for the digital revolution to stimulate significant economic development – universal access to fast broadband. spare capacity, and polcies which stimulate, not inhibit innovative use is required.
• The UK government has yet to understand, never mind embrace, the changes in culture being brought by the web, i.e. towards collaboration, editing, adapting, sharing, re-purposing, re-distribution.
• People engage with modern media as ETD experiences or mixtures thereof, i.e. Enjoy, Talk, Do. There is a generational bias shifting to the right but with an economic/industrial bias towards the left
• Current digital service provision is still grounded in a central supply paradigm and not in stimulating genuine people engagement, creativtiy or the “mutual media” which can promote better outcomes in science, education and health
• Digital Britain appears to major in perceiving the web as a danger to the established order with legislation being required to constrain these perceived social dangers or threats to incumbent interests.
• Big, high fixed cost organisations are at most risk in an economic crisis, i.e. “boulders”
• More and more “pebble” enterprises, will however, emerge and so what will be needed will be the ‘new’ Googles, Flickrs, Facebooks, or Wikipedias to realise the value from these “pebbles”.
• Hybrids will also emerge. Boulders will need to find out how to work with pebbles and some pebbles will become boulders but ones that know how to speak “pebble”.
• A whole new generation of pebble or hybrid organisations delivering public services could emerge but Digital Britain has little to say about this.
• Digital Britain is “boulder” rather than pebble or hybrid focused.
• The government’s own Power of Information report (February 2009) offered much more than Digital Britain.

For proponents of Web 2.0, government decisions and announcements since he wrote this paper would reinforce Leadbeater’s arguments that much policy energy appears to being expended in protecting current models and practices rather than embracing and exploting the opportunties on offer. But I suspect all enterprises that are or have become “boulders” should reflect deeply on whether their boulder status is actually now an affordance or a constraint. There are a few examples of the message getting through in the commercial sector. For example, Apple (with its iPhone apps) seems to be getting the hybrid boulder/pebble model and YouTube is totally “pebble” dependent.

But education? Boulder? Pebble? Hybrid? My brain hurts.

Neverthless, despite the headache, if we sustitute Leadbeater’s references to business and consumers for whatever alternatives you think best apply to Higher Education then we should be prepared to be unsettled. Suddenly we become the vested interests and the potential “boulders”. See. The strategic and policy frameworks politicians and institution leaders are viewing the world through suddenly matter a whole lot. Even if you don’t completely agree with Leadbeater it may be wise to nurture those “pebbles” lest some more agile Davids develop an open-source-informed slingshot for slaying Goliaths.

See also:

Charles Leadbeater’s notes for his Five Futures for the Internet talk at the British Library’s Internet & Society in the 21st Century strategy seminar offers some simple but poweful insights, e.g. Think “with” and not “for” or “to”.

Postscript
Leadbeater’s approach to authoring and disseminating We Think offers an exemplar of the ethos. He invited comments on his first draft and received 257 responses. 20-30 of these were high quality inputs which he asserts had a direct impact on the shape of the final book.