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Education, in its current embodiment, must be a lagging indicator. Whatever purposes itfulfills, from citizenship participation to professional training, its principle function is to certify.The institution provides degrees, credits, certificates and similar awards that give anindication of an individual’s competency. The faculty of the institution is the principle certifierof specific units or blocks of competencies. The classroom, lecture halls, and laboratoriesprovide the preparation for certification. For post secondary education, the admissionsprocess provides a first measure of the institution’s assessment of the student. Rankings ofthe institutions establish a form of qualitative measure of the potential of the student and ameasure of that individual’s competencies on graduation.But, how does one ‘‘certify’’ for institutional change, or, in general, for ‘‘the future’’? Whenchange was slow, bodies of knowledge, and what pieces might be added, did not change.Yes, Calculus moved from graduate programs to the high school, but, for the most part, whatone learned in a particular grade was very similar to what one’s child would learn and whatone’s parents learned. And, as the cliche´ goes, Plato would be at home in the classroom oftoday. So, knowledge learned could be certified as being valid and true because past andfuture looked similar. The difference seems to have been in the particular institution that oneattended. Thus, what may have been learned in one institution might be of higher quality, orsufficiently ‘‘qualified’’ when delivered at a medallion institution.For example, in a conversation with a corporate recruiter of engineering students, I wasinformed that he visited a particular engineering schools for individuals whom the company anticipated would rise to management positions; whereas, other schools’ graduates weretapped because they were anticipated to function more effectively in operational positionswithin the company. A recent report by The Economist (n.d.) pointed out that studentsadmitted to ‘‘medallion’’ or prestige institutions tended to come from a particular sector ofsociety, even though a spectrum of students were accepted. The end result seems to be thatthere was little social/economic mobility between groups even in the same institutions, andthat while lower socio/economic students tended to rise in income, those from the upperincome and social arena tended to rise much faster, creating a widening between incomegroups rather than a leveling towards a middle class. According to David Snyder (Brownand Duguid, 2002), a policy analyst and futurist, emerging job skills will only require about 30percent of those individuals, in the USA, who graduate with a college degree.Even though we are supposedly emerging into a ‘‘wired world’’ and a global society, thesocial contract between students and education may be cracking. At one time, citizens weregiven to understand that basic education, through secondary school, was needed toparticipate fully in the benefits offered in the current economic climate. Citing large increasesin potential earnings for college graduates, an unwritten social contract was establishedwhich implied that if one now extended K-12 to K-16 that a larger benefit does naturallyaccrue. The social contract also implied that with such certification, one could findemployment in an organization, institution or company at a particular level and hadassurances of security and opportunity. Today, that contract is severely challenged. Cast in apositive light, individuals are given the idea of ‘‘entrepreneurship’’, individuals creatingbusinesses, being highly mobile, or being able to move from position to position withchanging opportunities and challenges. But, the sinecure of a job with a college degree hasdisappeared. A technically trained person is just as likely to be outsourced as a productionworker or downsized after a corporate merger. And, a heavy equipment operator might outearn the local banker.The situation in post-secondary education, itself, parallels these institutional shifts. Intraditional US academic institutions, better than 40 percent of faculty positions are in thenon-tenure track category. Thus, while the idea of a quality education providing a stable pathfor success for students is becoming ephemeral, the same volatility is also occurring in themost conservative of occupations, professorial ranks. When one ventures onto the globalplain, the situation becomes more complex while also becoming more unstable, for allparties, from educational institutions to the students and faculty who function within the IvoryTower.There are a growing number of venerable campuses that are opening up temporaryclassrooms in office complexes and strip malls. These campuses are staffed with adjunctsmanaging packaged courses from which they do not deviate. These courses are oftencompressed into about half the number of weeks and some often meet for extended periodsfor only one day/week. The adjuncts may be responsible for courses in several disciplines,not always in their subject area. And many of the instructors are often master’s prepared,probably at the same level of K-12 teachers but without the traditional teaching certificationrequired of the latter.De facto, what is being admitted here is that at the undergraduate level, particularlyfreshman/sophomore courses, many of the education experiences can be rolled into asecondary school program. We implicitly recognize this in the USA where a growing numberof high school students enter the university with advanced standing due to specializedprograms which either grant students credit for their high school courses or allow students totake university courses which count, also, for high school credit. The line between secondaryand post-secondary institutions is growing very thin both in the separation of courses and inthe qualifications of faculty in both sectors.Enter e-learningCurrent e-learning systems are the equivalent of mapping brick-spaced classrooms intovirtual or click-space. In fact, just like the first automobiles were called horseless carriages,PAGE 64 jON THE HORIZONjVOL. 13 NO. 2 2005the term virtual classroom conjures up images of a version of the ‘‘Little Red School House’’or ‘‘Old Main’’ on a university campus. While these physical images appear before us, it isimportant to also realize that this is also an attempt to maintain, not just the space, but alsothe social contract between the student and the institution.We know the evolution of the computer, though we have suspicions that we have yet to seewhat that future may yet yield. Given the long history of The Academy, starting with, perhaps,the Greeks, we have no idea of what the future hold for the process of education or its placein society, whether a location in physical or virtual space. For those who have ascended tothe ranks of professor, with perhaps 30 or more years within the system, to step outside andsee the future, much less to anticipate and participate, the potential can be potentially asfrightening as stepping out of an airplane at 30,000 feet, not knowing whether or not theparachute will open. It is almost as bad as having worked for 30 years to prove a theory andfinding that the premise on which it is built is wrong. The youthful cyber native meets theelder statesman, the cyber immigrant. But to believe that it is the technological masterywhere the difference lies is to misread the situation.What appears to be emerging is a model which has already been successfully evolvedwithin the corporate world in order to manage knowledge effectively for many diverse anddynamic communities which not only need continual renewal of their knowledge base butwhich must also transcend the gamut between theory and praxis. One of the first lessonsthat emerges is that content or factual knowledge wants to be ‘‘free’’. This means that whatwas once locked in the heads of scholars and ‘‘experts’’ now becomes readily available in avariety of forms on the internet. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken the leadby developing a program to put their entire course content online. They, of course,understand too well that the course content is not the Institution. Other institutions arefollowing in this path. And numerous others, following the idea of the software open-sourcemovement, are also contributing to a growing body of knowledge. Interestingly, much of thisknowledge is being vetted in numerous means to give users a level of confidence of thequality available. Research papers are following a similar path.Simultaneously, the web is finding ways to allow individuals to find, access, and packagepieces for their own needs, be it knowledge acquisition or an application driven purpose.The impact for the Ivory Tower is significant. Much knowledge is no longer locked behind thewalls of a particular institution or in the mind of a specific faculty member, diminishing theimperative to ‘‘go to’’ a university, or to ‘‘sit’’ in a classroom whether in brick or click space. Italso changes the faculty/student relationship and destroys the quantity barrier which limitedthe number of students an academic could manage, the infamous 30 ^ n students in asingle ‘‘classroom’’.Current technologies such as listservs, web logs (blogs), wiki’s of various types, and virtualconference spaces have foreshadowed the emerging systems that allow individuals to selforganize by topic areas, specific needs, and level of competency around singular topics.This allows individuals to seek knowledge at their level of competence and to rise to the levelthat meets their current need. For the academy, learning experiences are now able to becreated where students drive their own needs, based on current objectives. It stops thegeneral admonition for a student to ‘‘learn their calculus because they will need it some timein the future’’. Just-in-time knowledge is possible, as are a variety of learning methods whichcan best adapt to the needs as identified by Bloom’s Taxonomy.The development of massive multiplayer role-playing games (MMRPG’s) which have aglobal population in the thousands and whose ages spread from youths to adults showsclearly that learning does not have to be passive with knowledge provided like fuel to anautomobile. N-dimensional virtual worlds allow for experimentation and force the acquisitionof knowledge on a variety of levels from basic, factual, skill-and-drill, information to learningwhich requires value judgment and compromise between participants, as in the worldoutside of The Academy. Of singular note is that the sequential age-based knowledge stepfunctions of traditional learning have been eliminated or severely reduced.VOL. 13 NO. 2 2005 jON THE HORIZONjPAGE 65In almost all traditional systems from K-to-gray, knowledge has been sorted by ‘‘difficulty’’and educators have carved a path which has required age specific knowledge acquisitionin an assembly line fashion. The recent emphasis on age-specific competencies definedby annual student testing, particularly in the USA, becomes almost an anachronism. Ofcourse, one does not deny that there are certain skills that require some mastery. But, weknow, from small children, that they do not acquire language skills in some sequentialorder. And, many of us ‘‘grey beards’’ know that we can often tackle new subject matterwithout returning to level 100 to acquire sufficient subject mastery to learn what one needsfor a specific task.More importantly, we are beginning to understand that knowledge for tasks is oftendistributed. The networks of human biocomputers of which we become a part providemissing knowledge on an as-needed basis. The old cliche´ , that states it is not what we know,but whom we know, that is important, takes on new significance in a wired world. As we movefrom the world of bricks to clicks, we still carry a significant load of intellectual baggagewhich surrounds us with the sense that learning is an individual effort and we need tomeasure our competency totally by what resides in our own biocomputers. Years are spentto create autonomous human biocomputers that not only acquire large databases but alsohave the skills to reach out across the large bodies of knowledge in click and brick space toenhance the individual’s knowledge base. Yet, we know that all major discoveries in, forexample, the sciences, are built on the shoulders of the past and, more importantly, ourcontemporary networks. Yes, we have unique, emergent ideas; but we also know, whentrying to unpack that ‘‘inspiration’’ that we usually find critical pieces of the puzzle whichcame directly or indirectly from our collegial associations.The ramifications are significant. First, the traditional academic environment abhorscollaborative learning for many reasons. Often it is because testing of an individual’sknowledge becomes clouded and thus certification becomes difficult. Of course, this is avestigial sensibility from our linear educational models. The real world requires thatcompetency be demonstrated in a problem situation. The resources, whether drawn from anetwork or from an individual, become almost moot. This, of course, creates one of the majorbarriers to the educational transformation. It is also one of the major arguments which hasbeen raised against both open access knowledge and the variants of the open sourcesoftware movement. Previously published in: On The Horizon, Volume 13, Number 2, 2005