For the sheer love of it0
Posted In Blog,Education
This needs tidying up, and derantifying- but here it is!
In the ‘Rise of the Amateurs’ Charles Leadbeater argues that true innovation isn’t just for the professionals anymore. As part of a report commissioned for DEMOS in 2008 he discusses the rise of Pro-Am communities who take their pursuit of these interests very seriously just for the sheer love of it; learning skills and capacities at a very advanced level, actively participating in communities and networks of practice.
Indeed, over the last decade, many of these new ways of working are coming to define the way that innovation is happening in many contemporary organisations. Just look at how ‘engagement’ or ‘social’ or ‘crowdsourced’ marketing has transformed the advertising industry, Just look at the impact amateur astronomers have had on our understanding of the planet, (See also – Shirky, Tapscott, that guy who invented the word ‘web 2.0’ and the wealth of white,male,middle age writers basically repeating the same mantra).
This is hardly a new phenomena, people have been engaging in amateur activities throughout our history (although long before the notion of freetime enabled us to name it in such a way). In fact if you go right back to the roots of education in the UK you will find that schools had been created long before the intervention of the state. What is considerable, and what is new, is the sheer plethora and range of activities that this can now encapsulate brought about largely by the reduction of costs in resources, but also the gift economy of the web that has enabled the sharing of knowledge through amateur endeavour.
With this in mind. I’m going to argue here that we need to be thinking much more radically about ‘access’ to education over the coming years. And start to think about what we can do to encourage the amateurisation of higher education, particularly in the Arts and Humanities, through such communities of practice.
Now obviously there are some important questions here, the principle one being that largely much of this work is being done out of sheer good will and passion. This is great in one sense (dont all academics long for education for education sake); but do we need to start thinking about how we can help to maintain and benefit from these communities in a wider sense; and what role does Big Society have to play in this? If it ever moves beyond the rhetoric that is.
My real question then is do Universities have a role here? Should we be more active? Do we need to enable these organisations to have access to our monopoly on the degree, the library etc?
Lets do the math. Now, in the UK, we’re effectively talking about around £8,000 per year for tuition fees which is £24,000 over the three years (reality is that many not so well off students will need another £4,000 for basic food and shelter per year and we’re talking about students graduating with around £36,000 worth of debt). Now I’m really sorry for saying this without evidence (but there is evidence), but this will no doubt have a tremendous effect on the diversity of voice that comes into some of these subjects, especially at more modern institutions.
The real problem is the whole University system is based around ideals of exclusion to certain experiences of knowledge resources (libraries, professional expertise, advanced technologies, lectures, I even include time here, money). The peer review system is largely built around the same rhetoric. In many ways its precisely about non-sharing to maintain competitive distinctiveness, hence the huge explosion of intellectual property experts filling up our office spaces.
If the purpose of the University system over the ‘education, education, education’ years was social mobility, then surely the best option would have been to have one university in the country, let everyone sit the same exams, and be open about who had access to educational perks (personal tutoring, 8 people in their class instead of 35, a bedroom to study in, a supportive family). But the truth is there are a whole host of fundamental issues bound up in the concept and delivery of our meritocracy, not least its rather limited acceptance of certain kinds of knowledges (critical reasoning over experiential knowledge, narrativisation, rhetoric over reality, objectivity, verbal over the image- anyway- if you’re in the arts you already know this).
Are we focused on the wrong thing?
Now what has interested me in the last few months is that not one journalist, academic, student protester etc has ever mentioned that perhaps it is the University system itself that needs a radical overhaul. No one has ever addressed the question that ‘the university’ might not always be the ‘only’ and the ‘most appropriate’ and ‘efficient’ route to acquiring those skills that the protesters were prepared to go to quite lengths to protect.
Or are we just so blinded by the institution of the University that we havent even realised it is not necessarily education at stake here. Its something much bigger and much more fundamental to the reproduction of some old rhetoric. It was interesting to see actually, that most of the institutional sits-ins took place in the Russell Group institutions. Like an old empire trying to protect their castle.
So I dont think that, by focusing on Universities as the only way to get a higher education, we are really asking the right questions. I think that we need to be more radical here. I’m also not talking here about the ‘McDonaldisation’ of degrees (where industry awards degrees to their employees), I’m talking about something that could be profoundly more social, inclusive and maybe for educations sake.
If we go headstrong into the market route (and we’re almost there) something quite fundamental will change in Universities. This should be thought about considerably. But also, if we are going to be a market, then surely we need genuine choice over terms, methods and routes to delivery. So what I’m saying is that if we are going to be a market, then we need to let alternatives in, and to let them blossom- to enable a diversity within the experiences. We need to enable people to cross over institutions to enable them to benefit from the diversity of the UK system, and for those who will not go the full time, 3 year route to make their experience fit in with their lives. Maybe we can forgo their fee if they choose to do this bit in a certain way, or they feel they are already prepared to take the exam. With such vast potential in the open resources that are now available online- surely we would be fools to discourage those who were prepared to accept a higher amount of independent in return for them not taking up our seats with their bums.
Afterall, there are, back to back, literally centuries worth of taped lectures, transcribed learning objects, open source communities and open source teaching resources online. You can even get access to people, communities of practice, experts, equipment and feedback if you know what you are doing. Books are sometimes cheap and surely there are inexpensive alternatives to journal and database access (in fact- why not just refuse to study anything that isn’t open source). In fact, if your on a chalk and talk course. You could even offer to give your local Professor a bit of cash for her time- or exchange a skill.
Thinking about it like this, you could argue, that this current generation has never had it so good when it comes to being able to engage in education. The trouble is we’ve nannied them into a state of dependence on the institutions of education- instead of developing them as independently capable professionals and decision makers from an early age.
Emerging trends:
There’s a number of pioneering organisations and networks that are helping to promote the the Rise of the Amateur within education and lots of Universities have supported these at the level of opening up content. Here’s just a small few:
School of Everything helps you to connect with teachers and specialists to learn new skills
iTunes U gives you free access to over 350,000 lectures and tutorials from top universities across the globe
YouTube Edu same as above but with video
Not mentioning the thousands of communities online that people participate in every day. It wouldn’t take much for small groups of people to get together and organize learning co-ops (in fact the OUs OpenLearn Project saw active participation in this phenomena)
Just by following and engaging with a few of these activities could certainly keep your mind intellectually stimulated for a whole lifetime, and i’m sure many people do. If you were to say top this off with setting up a community group, with shared access to people and resources, and a shared interest for the same subject area (say filmmaking, photography, fine art, writing, history etc etc). The thing is this is already happening, and has been for a long time. Precisely because these are often needs that cannot be met by the education machine.
Now if Universities were clever here; they have the potential to capitalise on this. They could provide access to equipment and facilities (many university facilities are effectively shut down for over 20 weeks during the year) or how about hourly paid/day rate access to academics for group sessions. How about charging for access to the library. Or even just charging for exams and assessment and modular accreditation, that they could carry with them over a number of years, rather than students having to commit to a whole course that might easily slip into irrelevance as times change. Many young people fail to see the relevance of what they are learning- in many professions this wont become clear until they have long forgotten their 3 years of university. But if HE was to be a lifetime activity, something that we could easily dip in and out of as and when we needed it, surely this would benefit us all.
In the early 21st Century, newspapers had to come to terms with the fact that their method of distribution for journalism wasnt the most efficient or appropriate medium for them. The same thing happened years earlier in the music industry. No doubt Universities will continue maintain their market share and monopolies for a while- but the tide of change wont be held back for long. We’re already seeing a number of US based institutions start to make ground into the UK (Kaplan, Pheonix).
The cost of a degree may be about to skyrocket, but for those who are smart enough there are other ways to start thinking about this. After all, if learning can be achieved by other, more inclusive and accessible, means then surely we, if we are to maintain any chance of things being as good as they have been, need to be at the forefront of enabling this.
Also Check:
