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John Thackara on Education, Service Design and the Limits of Online.
Hello, fellow Cotenistas,
Our topic is service design for higher education – and I guess most of us here are designers of some kind - so it would tempting to focus in on the ‘how’ side of things.
But for me at least, the ‘how’ stuff never makes sense until I’m at least partially clear on the ‘why’ question. Why, in other words, are we doing this - design project; university programme? What is its purpose?
The why question is not an academic one. Higher education is one of the main motors of an economy that can only survive if it keeps growing, to infinity. And yet this economy, and the education that drives it, is designed to to grow to infinity in a biosphere whose carrying capacity is finite. So that’s why the ‘why’ question matters.
Now don’t panic: I’m not about to embark on a rant about sustainability in general. But I do need to state upfront that higher education will remain a powerful cog in the doomsday machine until
The limits of online
I was prompted to make these portentous comments by re-watching Jane McGonigal’s TED talk (that someone else here also mentioned). I was absolutely knocked out when McGonigal’s World Without Oil happened. It seemed to me, then, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) portended a revolutionary use of networks and collaborative media to stimulate collaborative work in the real world. In her recent TED talk, McGonigle waxes lyrical about the potential of games to give players “the means to save worlds”. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? McGonigal asks. But then she says: “Reality is broken, and we need to make it work more like a game”. And here, I’m afraid, she loses me. Because it’s not reality that’s broken – it’s the way we perceive reality, and act in it, that’s broken.
Digital communications are in part to blame for this. They have added a new layer of insulation – a kind of blindfold - between human beings and the biosphere. Thanks to the internet, and more recently with social networking, many people feel more connected to each other. But we are now *less* connected to the natural contexts and systems on which all life – including our own - depends. Technology separates us from direct experience of the world. It therefore blinds us to the consequences of our destructive economic behaviour. Gaming is no exception. I don’t dispite its Its visceral power to engage and ‘incentivise’. As McGonigle points out, 500 million people are spending billions of hours gaming now – as many hours as they spend in formal schooling - and their number could treble within a few years. But just because gaming is engaging does not mean it is enlightening. On the contrary: it surely blinds us to just how little we understand how things in the real world work.
The way McGonigle talks about gaming and ARGs, the world’s problems could be solved if the cleverness and commitment of one billion online gamers were to be focused on real-world issues. Nowhere in this narrative does McGonigle question the limits to understanding that humans have by virtue of being – well, human. Otherwise stated: Intelligence is embodied; gaming is not. The good news is that, in reflecting on ways education might change, we don’t have to choose only between ARGs and Armageddon.
On the contrary, an alternative to the doomsday machine economy is already being made, and it involves a lot of learning at all levels. A new economy is being made wherever people are growing food in cities. It’s being made by people opening seed banks, or where schools are joining Community Supported Agriculture schemes. It’s being made where communities, with the support of scientists and experts, are removing dams, depaving roads, and restoring watersheds. Anywhere you find car-share schemes, or off-grid energy pilots – there is a new economy hotspot. You’ll find a new economy wherever people are launching local currencies – nine thousand examples at last count. In their own version of a non-doomsday economy, seventy million African citizens are exchanging airtime - not cash. Non-money trading is exploding. Thousands of groups, Thousands of experiments. For me, these are the elements of an alternative education to the doomsday machine mainstream.
These thousands of real-world projects are also educational experiences that in one way or another:
Service design for higher education
Oh yes, that’s our topic. As I stated at the top, we need an education that:
I do not have a proposed curriculum that we can discuss this week. Neither do I have a blueprint for a new kind of post-doomsday-machine university. The best I can do is describe what, for me, would be the ideal attributes of someone emerging from a next-generation educational environment. This person will be able to:
Further reading (if you are really keen):
