Technoculture(s)

Does the Ivy League have a networked strategy? Do we?

Big announcements these days:

• Harvard urges its academics to prefer the open access model.
• MIT and Harvard go for an online open access model of learning for millions.

Big actors, big moves. The perspective from a second rate university (as ours is) can be threatening. Let me share my experience with the waves that this type of moves have sent throughout the academic world.

The last academic course I taught the usual AI course at my university. This time, however, half of the students in the class had successfully gone through Stanford’s well-known AI course. This course is taught, among others, by one of the authors of “AI a Modern Approach” Peter Norvig. This is the text that we have used during the last years as a reference book for our AI courses. Norvig happens to be also Director of Research at no other place than Google.

Of course I could get into the traditional rant against USA dominance through networks, corporate power within the university, etc., etc., etc. And clearly we are in the middle of a very bold (I would say crude) move from our own government to discredit public universities and weaken a system that took ages to bring to decent teaching and research standards. Some would say that our own government would be happy to “open up” and “outsource” the system to foreign prestigious universities. Sure this is a fantasy ;-)

However,a similar effect is already taking place through the "open education initiatives" that big names like Harvard, MIT, or Stanford are starting. 

But, then, last course, for the first time, I could free some of my students’ and my own time from the basics of the discipline. My students already knew them. Not that we presented in a very different way from the typical AIMA approach. After all, the topics that Norvig taught were essentially the same that we had been always using for part of our course.

The good thing? Now, I have more time to share with my students my own insights from my own research and from the projects that our research group is working on.

Of course, visibility goes to the Big Names in the Gobal University System. However,if you have done your homework (research, teaching) then you are really bringing something different into this very same system.

For me it is clear that Ivy League + Research universities in the American university system understand the strategic logic of a connected world. Within a network, nodes that start from a higher reputation level, have a clear advantage, and tend to dominate the game. At the same time, whoever can offer some diversity and expertise is not completely at a loss. And this is something that less powerful actors (like our national university system) are not even taking into account when discussing “the necessary reforms of our university system”.

Which is bad.

Design, social change, and education: redesigning society from the school

Design is seen by some not just as a professional skill but a basic human competence. It has been said that many actual social problems can be improved if approached with a design attitude. "Design for social change" is a sentence that one can hear more and more. It seems to be the solution for every social problem, from proverty to pollution. However, in order to be effective as a means for social change, a certain critical mass of citizens with the corresponding competences, skills and abilities as design thinkers are needed.

Tha's why it seems to me that this initiative by Studio H, in the poorest rural county in the USA, contains important lessons. The team led by Emile Pilloton seems to have applied a holistic design thinking approach to the reality of Bertie county. In so doing, they are using it as a prototype for what can become a wider waver of change. They started to work on the education system there and move outward from it towards the rest of the society. This is a very interesting and in som moments a very moving video that explains their project.

I find specially remarkable that they recovered manual work as a way to teach to think as a designer.  It is related to some of the lessons of using actual physical prototypes not only to express your ideas but to think about what you want to do, about the difficulties around a given problem. Interestingly enough, it is also about cooperating with others in problem solving by actually "touching" the prototype of the problem.

The project in Bertie County was addressed to high-school students but other initiatives teach design thinking at an earlier age, like this initiative of the Stanford Design Institute  that proposes a design thinking curriculum for K-12 kids. Their website is full of materials and ideas to use in class.