Education 2.0: What Higher Ed Can Learn From Social Media
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
Columbia University, Rodin's Thinker, via flickr user wallyg
Yesterday, Mark C. Taylor, chair of Columbia’s religion department, wrote in a NYT Op-Ed piece, End the University as We Know It:
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
From this controversial opening, Professor Taylor argues for a hgher education system that follows an interdisciplinary, collaborative model that mobilizes scholars around problems and produces scholarship in a more consumable fashion.
Social media applications/tools have enabled its users to do what Professor Taylor is advocating. Twitter enables the rapid mobilization to address problems. Wikis result in information in a consumable fashion via real time collaboration. All of this consumer generated media (CGM) creates a body of knowledge whose value comes from the integration of various perspectives. Holding the appropriate context and understanding how the various pieces fit should be a driving force in these collaborative processes.
Do graduate students and scholars miss the point if they think that their training prepares them only for the profession of their graduate degree, be it academia, journalism, law, planning, business, etc.?
Yes. Absolutely yes if they cannot connect what they know and what they are learning to value creation and problem solving. Thinking about the process of learning, what is being learned and what that means are some of the values of a liberal arts education. Does this create students who can apply their skills in different contexts? Will these students have more options than those who cannot?
Professor Taylor leaves us with valuable advice:
“Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.”
Applying this entrepreneurial perspective higher ed will enable it to evolve with society.