What if We Ran Universities Like Wikipedia?

I am an experienced Wikipedia editor, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fred_Bauder What we do is summarize generally accepted knowledge and make it available to the world. That seems a reasonable goal for a university. For example, a university could publish on the internet up to date summaries of the knowledge in various academic fields. This could be a part of coursework as each class moves through their academic courses. Neither students or faculty would be required to participate (one of the secrets of wikis is that less than 1% of any population will really get into it). These texts could be published independently or on the Wikipedia site WikiBooks http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page Another possibility is creating coursework in a similar way and publishing it on Wikiversity http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page or independently

Much of the learning experience involved has to do with the issues with respect to point of view and bias which are immediately encountered. And with respect to whatever mechanism is adapted or invented to deal with those issues. This is the practical aspect of participating in a wiki, learning to work with others, including others who have different perspectives. Being who and what you are, you should probably handle wiki participation as you do other coursework, i.e. the students pay, and are expected to do substantial work. (They can play around on Wikipedia later if they get into it.). You could print and sell the texts and on-line courses if you wish or give them away. The point is to engage the students in intense learning experiences.

By the way, the language, “And instead of tenure, it would have professors “whose longevity would be determined by the community” is quite alien to peoples experience on Wikipedia. An experienced researcher on Wikipedia can edit anything they are capable of researching and understanding. Even now there are substantial voids in our coverage. For example the article, “Information seeking behavior” which I am starting to work on is pitiful despite there being a great deal of published research regarding it.

You mean having academics writing the wikipedia while htey are on unemployment benefits?

I say let’s go directly back to the monastic model. Why do we want to hear from the typical serf. Why do we want to get anyone else involved in the process of knowledge or the disseminating of knowledge we know all the answers and we should do everything we can to keep it that way. Why try any form of initiative like restructuring something when someone as insignificant as the person we are trying to interact with, has shown a need for another route. Who do they think they are? They will simply have to sit down and be quiet and learn. Dewey – student experience – what did he know? Another who rose from the ranks through that foolish “socratic” method. We will make sure that never happens again. Right to the bitter end.

What if we let the inmates run the asylum?

This is just deregulation, which hasn’t benefited any other sector, except for the few people it’s made filthy rich.

And this?! “it would have professors ‘whose longevity would be determined by the community.’” Great idea – maybe death panels to decide who ought to be sent to the glue factory?

Idiocy. Faculty governance worked very well, thanks, and we’d like it back. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is the thing faculty members are constantly telling students not to cite because it’s often wrong, dumbed down, or illiterate.

Indeed one of the dumbest questions ever posed about higher education. There’s so much wrong with it that I can’t even begin.

Nothing could lend more credibility to the idea of “open source” for a university than the level of vitriol spewed at Mr. Perry. Not since the invention of movable type has orthodoxy been so seriously challenged. It is not only the academy that is “under siege.” Every institution, professional association, trade group and closed society will be transformed with or without their consent.

Ask a stupid question…. Wikipedia is an unmitigated social and intellectual disaster. Grow up, already!

The simple fact is that NOTHING ELSE IN OUR SOCIETY IS AS DISFUNCTIONAL AS EDUCATION.

This includes higher education. There is no other sector where costs are rising as quickly, OR where quality is falling as quickly. Even medical care is in 2nd place in the first category, and not at all in the second.

Wikipedia has its problems, and plenty, but it’s not so clear that Higher Ed has fewer. And, granted, it’s probably not a great idea to jump from one leaky boat into another, but you should at least realize yours is heading downward. There’s been precious little of that so far in this discussion.

It’s common for people on sites like this one to distinguish The Academy from the Real World. Wake up and smell the mountain-grown free trade organic, people! The more you insist on being separate from the Real World, the more pressure there will be to cramatically change The Academy.

This is not a hard idea, people.

One poster mentioned the idea of faculty moving back and forth between The Academy and the Real World. If this idea scares you (and it probably will), ask yourself “Why?” If you allow yourself to really answer the question honestly, it might come out something like “I would have to produce something of value to society.” I’m open to explanations of what’s so bad about that.

The question should probably have been more like: “Since the way we run universities now is such a train wreck, what’s a better way?” But that wouldn’t have been such a catchy headline.

Who says we aren’t running higher education more or less like Wikipedia? No individual school is particularly Wikiesque, but taken as a whole . . .

Don’t shoot the messenger, people. Poor Marc is stuck at the Educause conference, where adults actually believe that the solution to the problems in education is more wikis and podcasts.

Hang in there, Marc.

Wow. Kelly_Roberts is right. These are people for whom process is paramount and substance is something of a garnish. These people lap up wikipedia like dogs returning to their vomit because it gives stupid people access to what used to be intellectual conversations.

“Are there really so many closed minded professors that believe there is no other alternative…”? No, there are very few professors who are closed-minded and believe there is no other alternative. However, most professors are sensible enough to realize that a *viable* alternative is not going to be one that’s already been proven not to work even within the insular world of the organization that created it.

It’s not “arrogance,” it’s common sense. Open-access and editable-content methodologies are already being integrated into curricula throughout academia, and are even appearing in a few administrative contexts now. But the successful ones are going to be the ones that have as little similarity to Wikipedia as possible.

afb123 – Do you intend for your vision to be dystopian or utopian? (I know some who would view it each way.)

The first question every level of education needs to answer is “What if we ran schools as if kids learned in different ways?”
If we can’t even do that, why bother trying to figure out a run an educations system like anything else?

It is not so much an if as much as it is how much? Top-down and hierarchical, this is exactly how education is run. How much? Do you keep Steven Hawkins or the famous football coach @ $750,000 a year under contract with bonuses for minimum of 5 years?
The ‘brilliance is in its peculiarity ‘yes these are very peculiar times. I thought my position as Dean in a for profit was safe because of the years of triple schedule teaching I did and numerous other sacrifices I made. Peculiar thinking? Probably in that holding an MFA and not knowing the guy above me didn’t even have a GED.

Wikipedia……..tell me you never went there simply out of curiosity.

Curiosity kill something……I’m just not sure anymore what…maybe education as we know it.
gsudd

@g8briel: “I find that most of the people who pick on Wikipedia have very little knowledge about how it actually works.”

Trust me, I have quite a lot of knowledge on how Wikipedia works. Articles develop in many different ways, some good, some bad, but mostly bad. For any article of real importance, it’s basically a sausage factory. Many of the more prominent editors treat the whole thing like a pseudo-intellectual role-playing game. The best articles are actually about pop culture, since there you have a confluence of Wikipedia’s primary demographic and the fact that expertise, or even education, isn’t really necessary to gather the desired information. There are exceptions for some academic topics – military history is one, because most of the editors are military people who understand the importance of discipline. Zoology is another, though nobody can quite figure out why.

What Staley is seemingly advocating has nothing to do with content development – he’s advocating a new process, a new way of organizing a learning environment that would effectively eliminate the tenure system and put more control in the hands of students. I can understand why some people might want to scrap the tenure system, but the recent history of academia (since the 60′s and perhaps earlier) has been all about giving more control to the students. I have nothing against students, but frankly, they have enough control as it is. If we’re going to adopt open-access/editable-content principles in academia, maybe we should use them to improve what we have, rather than replace it all whole-hog with something that’s *already been proven not to work.*

Amen, rich_lancaster–I’m not afraid to say it, students have too much control. Why on earth would we want to give even MORE control to a population that frequently relies on Wikipedia alone for its information (and usually without attribution)? And they’re about to have more control in Texas if the legislature gets its way with HB 2504 wherein universities need to “develop a plan to make evaluations available on the institution’s website.” Can’t wait for that one!

I have to agree that asking a “what if” comparison question between a collaborative knowledge network and universities, regardless of Wikipedia’s shortcomings, is fine for critical thinking and debate. I wonder if some of the questions like this that we professors pose in class would get flamed by students and then we would call students “close minded”, not open to different perspectives, or too conservative in breadth of thought.

Part of the debate here seems to be the definition of Wikipedia. Facts, especially generally accepted facts, are neither a characterization of the world nor the purpose of education. The world is emotion, color, imagery, disagreement, acceptance, conflict, and most of all, knowledge in action. Wikipedia cannot represent this world with some text and graphics. We should credit Wikipedia for being a fairly reliable repository of facts and a true marvel in collaborative knowledge exchange. And we might ask ourselves, “can a more collaborative model improve Higher Ed?”

If Wikipedia falls short of a university, however, the value of our research falls just as short. Use Google Scholar to peruse the rough number of times most work is cited. Except for important and seminal work, it’s very low. No one, except for a few people in your field, reads your research. You’re drinking your own Kool-Aid when it comes to thinking that most research has impact. Even smart people in the applied areas of many fields rarely read our research. It is not accessible and has little practical value (some areas of the natural sciences, aside).

Finally, I think the poster was referring to Ed Bradley of 60 minutes, not Ben Bradlee.

I think wikipedia is as good as it gets as far as publicly curated databases go — The entries are simplified, but what makes it powerful is the cross-referencing — whenever I want to know about a topic, I go to Wikipedia and find out what other topics are related. Then I start my research in the library.

For universities, you could tap into this by making all academic articles public and making them cross-referenced the way a wiki is, perhaps with general pages, which essentially could be taken from a text book. For graduate school, you could have a similar situation where after completion, the text of every thesis was cross-referenced with every other thesis through key words. Would be a lot to sort through, but would be quite a database of information.

None of these, however, solve the problem of accessibility — having the background knowledge to read the specialized papers. So, what you are really talking about is just getting more people reading and writing wikipedia, but that in itself will not improve content beyond “general” knowledge, and it certainly won’t provide a higher education.

Academic education is about learning to think critically which means getting rid of all the pre-conceived “opinions” in your brain. A big wiki may well just reinforce those opinions rather than challenge them.