College tuition is so-o-o-o 20th century!

An interesting conjunction of articles in the news feeds this week that set off a cascade of thoughts about where the future of higher education might be going. The short answer: forget cheap tuition - how about no tuition?

Some context: The Education Portal website lists "10 universities with the best free online courses." These range from the famous (MIT's Open Courseware project or Standford's on iTunesU) to the obscure (Kutztown University of Pennsylvania). Admittedly, the vast majority of these constitute course content, which is not the same as a course, but some are fully-realized courses.

Juxtaposed against that headline is WIRED's March 2008 cover story "Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business." WIRED Editor in Chief Chris Anderson lays out a case for the economics of free, and does so compellingly (be sure to watch the short video), in all manner of business enterprises from "banking to gambling." Alphabetically, and I think conceptually, higher education fits into that continuum.

Consider these ideas:

When Google turned advertising into a software application, a classic services business formerly based on human economics (things get more expensive each year) switched to software economics (things get cheaper). [WIRED]

It cannot be argued that higher ed is currently a "classic services business" that has been getting more expensive each year. The question is, at what point does higher ed become a "software application"? The answer may be troubling to most faculty, but I think it is "sooner than you think."

I won't repeat Anderson's economic arguments, except to point out that he is basing much of it on the rapidly-declining costs of three key technologies: processing power of computers, bandwidth, and storage. For some business segments, these have reached the tipping point of being negligible - that is, something that can be given away - for free. He also points out that Web 2.0 companies such as Google that embrace the economic potential of free are doing very well.

Now, what about college can be seen as a "software application"? Courseware, for one, as shown by the list of colleges offering open courseware online. Records management. Learning communities, which are effectively the same as social networks.

Traditional colleges are having a hard time coming to grips with this. A Ryerson University freshman is facing charges of academic misconduct for creating a chemistry study group using FaceBook. What bothers the university more, I wonder? That the students used FaceBook, or that more students used the FaceBook group than the "officially sanctioned" study groups who meet in person?

Now, a bit more about public education. States invest billions in public financing for higher education. Ohio budgets around $2 billion per year as the state share of instruction. So states are assigning some measure of "common wealth" - that is, worthy of investment for the common good. What is the common good? Two-fold, at least: an educated and engaged civic populace, and a prepared and creative workforce attractive to industry. Provide an educated workforce, the argument goes, and you attract business development, which generates more tax revenues, which pays for the investment over the long run.

Despite honest efforts to control the cost to the student, though, higher ed tuition has continued to skyrocket. Why? Because we are still delivering education in a 20th century, "classic services business" model that can't scale with the efficiency that a 21st century, Web 2.0, information-based service can.

What would be required to transition higher ed into a zero-tuition model?

First, a true, statewide system brand (not a logo - just no differentiation between a course at (whatever "at" means in the internet era) Edison vs. an equivalent course at Ohio State.

Second, last-mile broadband to rural residents, which again may be solved sooner rather than later with technologies such as WiMAX.

Third, competency-based instructional design that values learning networks, collaboration and contribution over content-coverage or activities without context.

Fourth, labor-efficient means of meaningful assessment of authentic learning.

Fifth, tiers of value-added premium services that will be paid for by individuals (tutoring, access to lab equipment, and other "extra" learning resources; licensure preparation and validation; career counseling and placement; advanced professional degrees, maybe) and businesses (talent matching services - think eHarmony for job openings; certifications; custom training and programs for employee development).

Chris Anderson again:

From the consumer's perspective … there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you're in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer.

Think about what it would mean if higher ed in Ohio "goes viral" - everyone who wants it, gets it. No barriers. No excuses (at least, no financial ones). The question changes from "how will you go to college" to "why aren't you." Workforces get trained. Citizens get educated. Learning networks crisscross the state, the nation and the world. New business ventures spring from minds connected only by the internet.

Seen in this context, it seems foolishly counterproductive to have 50-some state-funded colleges and universities in Ohio competing - scratching and clawing - for every student.

One final quote from Chris Anderson:

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

Reputation and attention are the other currencies of the free economy, not just cash. Should Ohio be concerning itself with tuition dollars and the "costs" of higher ed, or do we truly value the kind of society we can become if higher ed is accessible by all who want it? I can only begin to imagine the kinds of value that accrue to a society that chooses to educate all its citizens (we kind of think that anyway - K-12 is provided to every child, with no tuition costs; if 12th grade is no longer adequate, and there are good arguments that it is not, then why do we not extend the tuition-free education model upward?).

Oh, and to take a phrase from my buddy Steve - one more thing. How long do you think before a private institution such as University of Phoenix or Capella figures out this free thing?

Reintroducing the paragraph

One reason blogging is popular is because readers can easily post comments about what the author has written. One reason blogging is less popular among higher ed is that, until now, the tools have been limited to commenting on an entire article. The comments typically come at the end of a post, and typically in chronological order. With such limitations, it is difficult to have several lines of thinking or dicussion that remain coherent for more than a few comments.

This forces bloggers to post single-idea posts of one or two paragraphs if a discussion is expected. Either depth of writing or specificity of comments are sacrificed.

A Wordpress plugin called CommentPress from the Institute for the Future of the Book promises to free thoughtful blogging from those restraints, and to reintroduce the paragraph as a unit of thought to writing and digital publishing. CommentPress places a comment bubble next to each paragraph and allows readers to comment specifically on that paragraph. The comments are tallied under the little bubble ("2" means there are two comments on this paragraph) and the comments can be read in a floating, scrolling window. Click here for an example of how it works.

What results is a kind of digital marginalia, not merely from the author or a single reader, but as an interchange of ideas between the author and the readers. I have WordPress installed on a server; perhaps I'll post a few entries and see how it goes.

The Institute for the Future of the Book is one of many Web 2.0 software developers who are not merely taking the tools we have and putting them on the web, but rethinking what it means to be an author, or a reader, in the Digital Age. I'll have more to say about the Institute later.

Warts and all

The previous two posts are remarkable, not for what they say, but how they were created.

Acting on a tip from one of my students, who was goofing around with this as I got to class yesterday, I have become an instant fan of Jott, a web- and phone-based service that transcribes voice into text, then sends SMS messages, emails or posts to blogs, calendars or task managers.

In the past 24 hours, I have sent text messages to friends (maybe my wife, Therese, will get off my back about texting while driving!), posted the aforementioned blog entries, added several items to my Google calendar, and sent an email to a mailing group of 18 Photoshop students, all from my cellphone, by speaking, rather than typing.

Jott's FAQ says the service uses a "combination of machine and human transcription" to convert your spoken words into text. I've left the blog posts as-is to show you, warts and all, the quality of the transcription. As an added bonus, Jott includes a link to the audio file, so if something is garbled in text, your audience can hear your original message.

Currently in public beta (and my guess is a lot of the web services I'll be talking about may be in perpetual beta!) the service is free and signup is fairly painless. My guess is that once the bugs are worked out, there will continue to be a free basic service, with pay-per-feature for added controls, and maybe there will be a cap on the number of messages you can send, or the length (currently limited to 30 seconds).

What is truly amazing about this service is not so much the voice-to-text, although that's pretty neat in itself, but in how it is designed to work with all your other Web 2.0 services. I mentioned how I've been using it, and that doesn't begin to wring it out. The Google calendar trick is a wowser - call the Jott number from your cell, speak "Google calendar" and "lunch with Mike April 15, 11:30am to 1:30PM" and in a matter of a few seconds to a few minutes, the event is in your calendar, on the right day, at the right time, with a note. What a great 5-minute demo!

I showed this to my friend and colleague Mike Fleishman today and he had the same reaction I did - "My mind is reeling with the possibilities!" Yep. Sent a reminder to 18 students in two sections with one phone call. Insta-blog a thought from the car. Twitter your friends and family travel updates as you're running through the airport to catch a flight. Add tasks to your to-do list. Schedule meetings, dentist appointments six months out (did that!), birthday reminders....

Jott is definitely a technology/service to watch.

Hi, this is me again....

Hi, this is me again. I am talking to a friend of mine Mike and he does not really believe that this is going to work, so I am going to do another blog post just to prove my point, this is pretty amazing. listen

Powered by Jott

This is amazing, I am...

This is amazing, I am sending a blog entry through my cell phone and it will be transcribed into text and posted on my blogger side, if this works, this is a kind of thing that can absolutely revolutionized how people use the web. listen

Powered by Jott

Not long for this Word

Is the end of the Word at hand? Microsoft Word, that is.

While it is certainly too early to pre-write a celebrity obit, the era of the Big Box word processor may by fading into oblivion. Or, in the terms of the Hippie culture, "Why pay for it when it's free, man?"

Several new developments are no doubt generating flop sweats in Redmond. One is a surprisingly full-featured open-source word processor called AbiWord. For one, it's free. Nada. Download it, install it, get to work. The whole process of downloading and installing it took not significantly more time, and this is the truth, than launching MS Word on my Intel Mac. A 9mb download (on broadband, that's an eyeblink - as small as a single song from iTunes), double-click the icon, drag to applications, and there you go. And for that you get a full-featured word processor, does decent page layouts and web layouts. All the goodies - headers and footers, endnotes, footnotes, spellcheck, tables - all the stuff from Word you use and none of the junk you don't. Try it out, for Mac OS X, Unix, and if you must, Windows. If there's one downside, it's the ugly icons. If anyone wants to break into the open-source developer community and come up with some decent icons for AbiWord, I'm sure they would appreciate it! I know I would.



But more significantly, an evolution in the web-based productivity tools has real potential. I've been a fan of Google docs, and more recently, Zoho Writer, for awhile now. Both are decent word processors in their own right, but the fact that they are browser-based (read "free"), track revisions, and allow for concurrent multiple users to collaborate takes them to a level that dedicated applications such as MS Word haven't gotten to yet.

One drawback, of course, has been that if you are not online, you can't work on your docs. Enter Google Gears. Gears is a plug-in for Firefox that allows you to work on your documents offline, and they then sync when you reconnect. The process is almost seamless. Install Gears, create a document in Zoho Writer, then choose Go Offline and up to 25 documents are available to you offline. Unlike the "Save as..." option you've always had, working offline keeps the Writer interface, document list and so on, and automatically syncs the documents when you reconnect.

So, you're working in your office, click "Go Offline," haul your laptop to the airport, work on the docs on the plane, and then sync online when you get to the next WiFi hotspot. Sweet.

Now, wonder if it works with my iPod touch...

--Brad

I have a Dream-weaver

Just finished a 3-hour "Basics of Dreamweaver" session this morning for a roomful of almost total web rookies. What is striking to me is the moment about two hours into the session when I was explaining the function of the

tag and css when I realized that for all but one of these people, all the web design functionality they needed could be had through tools like Blogger, Flickr and MySpace.

At the same time, I'm looking at the pros and cons of installing Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and having some real doubts about whether I need it. I've recently been using an open source Word processor called AbiWord that a student showed me. Except for really ugly icons, it works great.

Even more interesting (and threatening to MS Office) is the Google Gears technology that lets users work on online documents while offline, then sync those documents when you connect. Implemented by Zoho Office in November and available or coming soon to other online web apps, this has enormous potential to change the way we work and collaborate.

The connection between Dreamweaver and MS Office is that they seem to be retreating a little bit more every day into increasingly specialized niches, and ultimately into obsolescence. Big, do-it-all, expensive applications for everyday tasks like writing, crunching numbers, making presentations and publishing on the web just don't seem like a good idea anymore.

--Brad

Lost in translation

This week I was working with a student who's first language is Japanese, and I was showing her how to login to Blackboard, the course management system we use at Edison.

We were talking about her portable translator and I showed her the Sherlock translator on the Macs, and the Babelfish translator online at Yahoo! Where she has an email account.

When we translated the login page, something curious happened that still has me wondering - everything seemed to translate reasonably well, except "click here to login" translated as "the sound of dust here to login."

Does anyone know why "click" is translated into Japanese as "the sound of dust"? A "soft" sound, perhaps? Or the sound of a small insect?

Curious.

It is awesome, though, to see an entire webpage rendered in Kanji in a matter of seconds. I think I'll incorporate language translation and back-translation into my web Development courses to watch out for idioms and other English jargon.

--Brad

Ah, yet another blog site....

My intention is to post to this site fairly regularly on interesting issues related to Internet development and interactive media.

We'll see.

--Brad