Which Universities will be Content Producers and Which will be Content Users?

Wandering thoughts on academia.....

Our cyberworld seems to some academicians, to be spinning out of control.

While we typically require print textbooks, our students search the web for course materials that are free, available, and useful. The author of the text I use has some materials online, and many texts are paired with online lecture notes in PowerPoint. Some faculty use those materials when lecturing, rather than developing their own notes.

This trend still keeps universities in the "come to campus, pay for our course, let us impart the knowledge" mode, but I wonder for how long. Experiments by Stanford and MIT with freely available course ware and even lectures have now raised a different question. Would you take an artificial intelligence course at your local university or one from a top-tier university, led by a professor not only accomplished at research, but at actual real-world challenges?

Let me be very clear - nothing replaces the interactions, whether cyber or actual, with a live person teaching a course. I've taught distance education courses for years, and developed good academic relationships with students thousands of miles away who never set foot on campus. I think that personal interaction is a larger part of the educational experience than most of us know how to measure, but it is certainly of value. (Will parents and applicants understand this? )

Given the increasing availability of material online, is our classroom model of education broken? Can students learn from online materials better than they can learn from individual faculty who cannot deliver the volume of material required for modern education in lecture format? Is the professor becoming more of a tutor, to follow the English system of education, than an imparter of knowledge? Should research universities leave the content development to a few top-tier universities, along with universities primarily focused on teaching, and focus on research and tutoring the very bright, who can learn independently?

I love teaching, but the part I love most is the active learning, where students are participating as I am suggesting and posing challenges, rather than imparting knowledge rapid fire through a series of PowerPoint slides. I would love for the students to work their way through online materials and then come to class for the discussions.

The catch is that developing these materials is a massive amount of work. When a professor develops them, how broadly can they be used? How will an institution or society as a role reward her? Should she stick to her research and be a course content user rather than a content producer? The pull for me now is to become a content producer. But I'm also a researcher and this might detract from my research. Are there going to be two classes of faculty in the future? And will they coexist in a single institution?

We are in the midst of a revolution in education, similar to what occurred when the printing press was invented and readers could become teachers. This revolution in some sense levels the playing field for students, who can get an education courtesy of the Internet. But for institutions, it poses a very important question: Is an institution a net content producer or a net content user? Should it be both? What is the future like for net users?

Artificial Brains - When will it happen?

I just had to start blogging. An article surfaced in the Financial Times today with a string of futuristic predictions that are optimistic, ending with a prediction that is worth noting.

In Futurephile: Computers to be 'aware, Joia Shillingford says

What will happen in 2050 and beyond? By 2050, there will be computers that have the processing power of all human brains on earth. That's a lot of brains working on a lot of problems.

Could Joia be a bit optimistic? We have been working on this prediction for several years (see an early publication of ours addressing this question.) The scale of a brain, the complexity of the dendritic arbor in cortical neurons, the connectivity in the cortex, the elegant folded spherical shape that minimizes delays, and the plasticity (changeability) of the neurons all must be captured. Our BioRC Biomimetic Real-Time Cortex project is all about this. We believe a synthetic cortex (a single one) might be possible in 2050, similar in scale and complexity to the LHC project. We are skeptical about such cortices populating the planet in the billions by that time.

Despite my pessimism about an entire synthetic cortex, progress will be accelerated by the visionary DARPA SyNAPSE program set to launch soon.