Britt Watwood recently mentioned my “Revolution or Evolution?” presentation in a post discussing Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s 2008 book Groundswell. Britt raises some interesting questions about the possibilities for social media to transform higher education as it has transformed other parts of our culture—from the bottom up, so to speak. Britt asks if this kind of transformation has already started happening in teaching and learning in higher ed.  In my “Revolution or Evolution?” presentation, I assumed that change would come from the “top” (from faculty), but Groundswell raises the possibility that change might happen without faculty at the helm.

Britt mentions a post by Rob Tucker titled “Disintermediation: The Disruption to Come for Education 2.0” in which Tucker notes how sites like Orbitz and Travelocity have transformed the travel industry. The travel industry comparison is an interesting one. One key factor in the transformation of that industry was that a big chunk of what travel agents did for their clients—finding and purchasing tickets—was able to be automated.  A good travel agent does more than just handle the routine tasks of finding and purchasing tickets, but apparently not enough more to sustain the industry at its former levels once the routine tasks were placed in the hands of customers.

What implications does this have for higher ed?  I was going to say that post-secondary learning is different because relatively little of the learning activities can be automated or crowd-sourced or others modified to leave faculty out of the process.  However, a big chunk of “traditional” learning activities–watching lectures, taking notes, memorizing information, regurgitating information–are pretty routine. Want some great explanations? Go watch videos at the Khan Academy and take all the notes you want.  I’m sure you can find automatically-graded quizzes online to test yourself afterward.

If faculty aren’t doing more than just providing explanations via lectures and assessing student learning in very straightforward ways (what is sometimes called the Industrial Model of education), then, yes, there’s a potential for a groundswell of sorts in higher education.  Students will find ways on their own to get the explanations they need in order to do well enough on those tests, and essentially opt out of the learning process as it’s been traditionally constructed. However, there’s more to good teaching than providing good explanations and simple testing. Good teaching involves scaffolding learning experiences for students and providing meaningful feedback to students as they explore new skills and knowledge. That kind of “value added” will be more difficult for students to obtain on their own—not impossible, but more difficult.

If faculty aren’t providing “value added” beyond the routine tasks of learning, however, then there’s much stronger potential for a “groundswell” in higher education, one in which students take on more active roles in seeking out for themselves the kinds of learning experiences that are meaningful to them.

(There’s another kind of “value added” to higher ed as we know it—peer-to-peer learning among students. However, there are plenty of social media tools that facilitate useful peer-to-peer interactions that can be leveraged by students for learning. Replicating the peer-to-peer component of higher ed won’t be a roadblock to any kind of groundswell.)

Image: “Cracks in the crater floor” by Flickr user asmythie / Creative Commons licensed