By Steve Eskow
Staff Writer
3 November 2008
I’m a chronic reader of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Part scholarly journal, part newspaper and gossip column and help wanted advertising, each week its reporting brings to me the doings and thinking of faculty, students, academic administrators and education officials and accrediting agencies and all the shapers of academia in the colleges and universities in the US and around the world.
Lately I’ve been bemused by that 375-billion dollar question asked in the October 3, 2008 issue:
“The 375-Billion Dollar Question: Why Does College Cost So Much?”
The article itself never really gets around to answering the question. But each issue of the Chronicle provides pieces of the answer—and often analyses that are quite convincing.
Here is the answer of Honor Jones, a student. Her piece in the May 8, 2008 Chronicle is titled “Invest in People, Not Buildings.”
“Everywhere I hear the sound of dump trucks. It’s my fourth year at the University of Virginia, and they haven’t stopped building since I got here. A new commerce school, a new theater. If UVA is any example of the state of public education in general, we need to evaluate our priorities before another brick gets bought.”
In his “Meditation on Building” in the October 20 Chronicle faculty member David Orr paints this grim picture:
“It is estimated that the construction, maintenance, and operation of buildings in the United States consumes close to 40 percent of the country’s raw materials and energy and is responsible for about 33 percent of our CO2 emissions, 25 percent of our wood use, and 16 percent of our water use. In 1990, 70 percent of the 2.5 million metric tons of non-fuel materials that moved through the economy were used in construction.
“Further, by one estimate we will attempt to build more buildings in the next 50 years than humans did in the past 5,000. Most of this development will be driven by individuals operating in a market system that does not account for losses of farmland, forests, wetlands, or biological diversity — or for the human need for community.”
So: to students—some thoughtful students—and to faculty—some ecologically sensitive faculty—the university invests in buildings, not people, not the environment. The counter, of course, might well be: how else does the university house its students and the apparatus it needs for learning? How would the critics provide spaces for instruction, for housing, for study, for recreation? Are there alternatives to the buildings, or are the critics beneficiaries of the structures they deplore?
Which brings us to the question of the new information and communication technologies and how to bring their benefits to the university.
Xavier University’s answer is typical: build a building around the new technologies, and have the students come to the building to use them.
From the Chronicle, January 1,2008:
“A $28-million building called the Learning Commons will be erected to house the organization and serve as a center for various educational programs. Users will be able to get technical help, use multimedia software at any one of a bank of computers, view the library’s online holdings, and have their reference questions answered.
“The library, which will be attached to the new building, is being refashioned as simply a warehouse for books.”
The Xavier officials, of course, could not have seen the October 17, 2008 issue of the Chronicle and the story headlines “Colleges Struggle to Keep ‘Smart Classrooms’ Up to Date,” which describes such a “learning commons” shared by the University of Colorado at Denver, Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the Community College of Denver.
“Professors who hold classes there say that years of financial neglect have left the smart classrooms nearly unusable.”
Xavier, then, might find that its $28-million is only the beginning of its commitment to keep its Commons smart and usable.
We need—need desperately—a new Learning Commons: a new Agora.
There are those who point out that we already have such a commons in the Internet itself. It is a worldwide commons that need not be enclosed in buildings: indeed, its possibilities for serving students and teachers and researchers are limited when it is enclosed.
The new Agora of the Internet is classroom, lecture hall, library, and students can take the Agora with them and listen to lectures and read books and engage in dialog with teachers and students who are scattered in time and space.
MIT, Yale, Stanford, Rice have put syllabi and lectures online.
David Wiley, then at Utah State, let unenrolled students take one of his online courses, and gave them his own unofficial certificates to show employers: this as a public service. And Stephen Downes and George Siemens allowed more than 2,000 unofficial students to take their online course “Connectivism and Connected Knowledge.”
There is a new Agora in the process of creation, a new Commons. And it will flourish free of the constraints of buildings, and, if we let learning move to where it is needed, we will enrich the lives of all those who can’t find their way to our buildings, or can’t afford the price of admission.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Chronicle, Colleges, Community College of Denver, Connectivism and Connected Knowledge, David Orr, David Wiley, faculty, George Siemens, Honor Jones, Internet, Invest in People, Learning Commons, library, Meditation on Building, Metropolitan State College of Denver, MIT, New Agora, Not Buildings, Rice, Smart Classrooms, staff writer, Stanford, Stephen Downes, Steve Eskow, Struggle, The 375-Billion Dollar Question, The Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Colorado at Denver, University of Virginia, Up to Date, Utah State, Why Does College Cost So Much?, Xavier University, Yale |
John Mark Walker: "If educational communities can continue to push platform integration and content portability, in the future, students may be able to design their own personalized degrees from smaller, modular chunks that cross institutional barriers" (
Richard Koubek
Judith McDaniel
Tim Fraser-Bumatay: "Although the format leaves us far-removed physically, the online forum has its own sense of intimacy" (Judith McDaniel, "
Ryan Kelly: "For me to be able to work with people clear across the country for an extended period of time opened me up to new things" (Judith McDaniel, "
Daniel Herrera: "As a Mexican American, I know that words of identity are powerful; so to discuss white privilege with my professor and classmates in a face-to-face class would have been terrifying and impossible" (Judith McDaniel, "
Cathy Gunn: "Traditional methods for effecting change at my institution aren’t getting us even to a trickle yet, let alone to thinking about or planning for a wave!" (
Educational Technology and Change Journal 
Just a small point – Last name is Siemens, not Steiner.
George
Hi, George. Thank you very much for the correction. Our apologies for the typo. Best, Jim
The same argument can be and should be made for businesses, where possible. Let telecommuting happen in work as well as in education.
Thanks for the correction – having had long arguments with George Steiner about his philippics against computers when I was translating some of his books, I was rather puzzled by the first version. In one of these arguments Steiner had boasted that he had framed a letter from Faber saying he was their last author who insisted on handing typewritten texts instead of digitized ones…
Recently I joined the CCCOER (The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources) network. It is a joint effort by the League for Innovation in the Community College and many other community colleges and university partners to develop and use open educational resources (OER) and in particular, open textbooks for community college courses, since the demographic features of our students (a 2-year tech college) are very different from those of the typical 4-year universities in terms of the SES- at least, if not the most!
OER has done a great leap intendting to narrow the digital divide in domestic and global domains.
Ideally, educators pool their expertise to create a culture of shared knowledge, everyone benefits.
Open textbooks is such a step moving from ideation to fruition. It can be a prelude toward the open e-university as Steve Eskow proposed in the previous posting regarding student Jones’ and faculty Orr’s “Invest in People, Not Buildings” and “Meditation on Building”, and his “The 375-Billion Dollar Question and the New Angora.
Discourses have been opened up for input such as time, energy, models of collaboration, compensation/altruism, intellectual property right issues and other relevant issues for such a grand scale of work-in-progress.
One of the major issues from my lens is that information is free, but education costs money. Each educational setting has its own equilibrium ecology. There are hundreds and thousands of business having symbiotic relationships with various type of Educational enterprises.
If the educational system and their hierarchies become flat (how and when), the rest of dependent and co-dependent business/enterprises will lose their horizon. This is very much against the capitalist grain.
That’s why we are dubbed as Ed-utopians, hoping the world is flat, and information technology is like sunshine and air for most of people. It sounds that I am worrying too much- who takes care of “Cultural Inc.”?
This can also be part of the reasons that the sustainable/open education is an enemy to the edu-capitalism or edu-imperialism, if we are not too far away from the ed-utopia?
Testing: now is the time.
My test comments have disappeared.
Hi, Steve. Your comments are still here.
If they don’t appear when you return to the home page, try refreshing your screen. That should update the page for you.