TITLE: More on the Future of News and Universities
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 05, 2011 4:34 PM
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I remain endlessly fascinated with the evolution of the
news industry in the Internet Age, and especially with
the discussions of same within the industry itself.
Last week, Clay Shirky posted
Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis
in response to Dean Starkman's essay in the Columbia
Journalism Review,
Confidence Game.
It's clear that not everyone views the change enabled by
the internet and the web as a good thing.
Of course, my interest in journalism quickly spills over
into my interest in the future of my own institution, the
university. In
Revolution Out There -- And Maybe In Here,
I first began to draw out the similarities between the
media and the university, and since then I've written
occasionally about connections [
1
|
2
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3
]. Some readers have questioned the analogy, because
universities aren't media outlets. But in several
interesting ways, they are. Professors write textbooks,
lectures, and supporting materials. Among its many
purposes, a university course disseminates knowledge.
Faculty can object that a course does more than that,
which is true, but from many peoples' perspectives --
many students, parents, and state legislators
included -- dissemination is its essential purpose.
Universities aren't solely about teaching courses.
They also create knowledge, through basic and
applied research, and through packaging existing work
in new and more useful ways. But journalists also
create and package knowledge in similar ways, through
research, analysis, and writing. Indeed, one of the
strongest arguments by journalism traditionalists
like Starkman is that new models of journalism often
make little or no account of public-interest
reporting and the knowledge creation function of media
institutions.
Most recently, I wrote about the possible
death of bundling in university education,
which I think is where the strongest similarity between
the two industries lies. The biggest problems in the
journalism aren't with what they do but with the way
in which they bundle, sell, and pay for what they do.
This is also the weak link in the armor of the university.
For a hundred years, we have bundled several different
functions into a whole that was paid for by the public
through its governments and through peoples' willingness
to pay tuition. As more and more options become
available to people, the people holding the purses are
beginning to ask questions about the direct and indirect
value they receive.
We in the universities can complain all we want about
the Khan Academy and the University of Phoenix and how
what we do is superior. But we aren't the only people
who get to create future. In the software development
world, there has long been interest in apprenticeship
models and other ways to prepare new developers that
bypass the university. It's the software world's form
of homeschooling.
(Even university professors are beginning to write about
the weakness of our existing model. Check out Bryan
Caplan's
The Magic of Education
for a discussion of education as being more about
signaling than instruction.)
I look at my colleagues in industry who make a good
living as teachers: as consultants to companies, as the
authors of influential books and blogs, and as conference
speakers. They are much like freelance journalists. We
are even starting to see university instructors who want
to teach focus on teaching leave higher education and
move out into the world of consultants and freelance
developers of courses and instructional material.
Professors may not be able to start their own universities
yet, the way doctors and lawyers can set up their own
practices, but the flat world of the web gives them so
many more options. As Shirky says of the journalism
world, we need experiments like this to help us create
the future.
In the journalism world, there is a divide between
journalists arguing that we need existing media
institutions to preserve the higher goals of journalism
and journalists arguing that new models are arising
naturally out of new technologies. Sometimes, the first
group sounds like it is arguing for the preservation of
institutions for their own sake, and the latter group
sounds like it is rooting for existing institutions to
fall, whatever the price. We in the university need to
be mindful that institutions are not the same as their
purpose. We have enough lead time to prepare ourselves
for an evolution I think is inevitable, but only if we
think hard and experiment ourselves.
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