What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [114]
The next role of the university is testing and certification: the granting of degrees and anointing of experts. The idea of a once-in-a-lifetime, one-size-fits-many certification of education—the diploma—looks more absurd as knowledge and needs change. Are there better measures of knowledge and thinking than a degree? Why should education stop at age 21? Diplomas become dated. Most of what I have done in my career has required me to learn new lessons—long past graduation—about technology, business, economics, sociology, science, education, law, and design. Lately I’ve learned many of these lessons in public, on my blog, with the help of my readers. That is why I urge other academics to blog and be challenged by their public. I believe that should count as publishing. Blog or perish, I say.
Our portfolios of work online, searchable by Google, become our new CVs. Neil McIntosh, an editor at the Guardian, blogged that when he interviews young candidates for online journalism jobs, he expects them to have a blog. “There’s no excuse for a student journalist who wants to work online not to have one,” he wrote. “Moreover, the quality of the blog really matters, because it lets me see how good someone is, unedited and entirely self-motivated.” Our work—our collection of creations, opinions, curiosities, and company—says volumes about us. Before a job interview, what employer doesn’t Google the candidate (a practice banned by law in Finland, by the way)? Our fear is that employers will find embarrassing, boozy pictures from spring break, but that’s all the more reason to make sure they also find our blogs and collected works.
Sometimes employers will require certification. That, as Wyman says, is where testing comes in: exams to make sure our new doctors, lawyers, and PC support staffs know their stuff. But these exams are often given by professional organizations—medical boards and the bar—rather than schools. Preparation for those tests is undertaken by test-prep and commercial-education companies such as Kaplan. Universities ceded the market to them. Still, testing makes sense; it is our guarantee against the citizen surgeon (or that the citizen is qualified). It does make more sense to test students after they’ve learned a subject than before. Tests given before education commences—entrance exams—might better serve students if they discovered not what students know but rather what they need to know. Between SATs and exams mandated by No Child Left Behind laws in the U.S., we are succumbing to a tyranny of testing that commodifies learning. The system tries to turn out every student the same.
Finally we arrive at the core, the real value of a university: teaching. Here I violate my own first law when I say that complete control of one’s education should not always belong to the student. For when we embark on learning, we often don’t know what we don’t know. Or in Google terms, we don’t know what to search for. The teacher still has a role and value: If you want to learn how to fix a computer or operate on a knee or understand metaphysics, then you hand yourself over to a teacher who crafts a syllabus to guide your understanding. When it’s clear what you want to learn—how to edit a video with FinalCut, how to speak French—it’s possible for a student to use books, videos, or experimentation to teach herself. The internet also makes it easy to connect teachers with students—see Teach-Street.com, which in only two cities has 55,000 teachers, trainers, tutors, coaches, and classes, according to Springwise. I wouldn’t go there to learn surgery, but I might to get help with my stale German.
One benefit of the distributed, connected university is that students may select teachers. Instructors won’t be able to rest on tenure (I speak as someone who has it) but must rise on merit. Today, instructors are graded on sites such as RateMyTeachers.com, but students are still prisoners to their school’s faculty. If they could