Collapse of Complex [Education] Models?
I'm fairly sure the Dave and George duo will be touching on the recent post by Clay Shirky on Collapse of Complex Business Models. As part of a talk of TV executives (who surely must know their foundation is now jello), he reaches back to the human history, via Joseph Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies puzzles as to why great civilizations of the past suddenly collapsed -- The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it.
This idea certainly has a lot of relevance in thinking of trends. We assume because we get more sophisticated with our tools and data that we can rely on those things to address the problems/challenges we find. My region of the desert southwest is littered with the ruins of highly advanced 14th century civilizations that, to us, look like they vanished together.
Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
Ouch.
Does anyone want to inert our educational system into this mindset? Isn't there often an assumption that education is somehow "different" from publishing, TV, telephony, travel (all industries being revolutionized by the last 10 years of tech) -- why should education be any different as a "complex society"?
So is open education really the thing that is radically different enough to change/survive this collapse? It seems to eb somewhat different, but is it different as institutions try to clamp on OE to the old system. Is the collapse inevitable? Our institutions are truly investing in the mission of preserving the institutions... (I am not advocating burning anything down, but it seems to be something we need to acknowledge--so let's preserve what is good about them?)
I'm pondering the question Shirky closes with:
When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.
7 comments so far:
Keith Hamon says: I am perplexed by Shirkey's
I am perplexed by Shirkey's us of the term complex, probably because I have not read Tainter's book The Collapse of Complex Societies, but it seems to me that Shirkey is mixing two different kinds of organizational structures under the single heading of complex.
To my mind, all large organizational structures for the past five thousand years have been hierarchical in nature, while the structures that we are seeing emerge today are networks, or rhizomatic, in nature. I think that large, bureaucratic, hierarchical structures carry their own seeds of destruction, as the costs of maintaining the infrastructure increase rapidly with any increase in size or longevity of the hierarchy. Traversing a massive hierarchical structure becomes too burdensome and problematic. Eventually, transactional costs increase until the hierarchy finds it too expensive to do anything.
Networks, or rhizomes, are different. They are not locked into hierarchical structures, though they may include them. Transactional costs remain very low, as any point may connect to any other point, without having to traverse the bureaucratic maze. Rhizomes can intersect at any point with any other rhizome to exchange energy (knowledge, money, etc.)—no gatekeeping costs as with hierarchies. A rhizome can immediately split, reform, deterritorialize and reterritorialize elsewhere as something else. (It's been painful to watch hierarchical GM try to deterritorialize itself and reterritorialize as something else).
Both hierarchies and rhizomes can be complex, but they do not necessarily suffer the same limitations or consequences of that complexity. If I understand rhizomes, or networks, correctly, then they are becoming so valuable to us precisely because of their ability to handle better the problems of complexity that have so bedeviled our hierarchies. I believe that rhizomes (ecosystems, the Internet, brains, the Universe) actually become more robust, resilient, and useful as they become more complex—the exact opposite of what happens to hierarchies.
Najmeh says: collapse or an outsourcing of capital?
Alan, I read the Clay Shirky piece - thanks for posting it.
There is however, one thing that kind of puzzles me. His argument is quite compelling, but I'm not sure if the first part of the argument (the historic fall of what he argues to be complex societies) follows to his conclusion on the complexity-driven collapse of modern institutions/corporations, etc.
The market is driven by demand (or at least illusory demand), and web 2.0 and interactive technologies have provided a new medium for investment - which haven't been tapped into yet by the mega-corporations, that outsourcing of capital from old mediums to new mediums hasn't happened yet. That may likely change in the next few years, but as far as the user is concerned, I think that's indeed a good thing. That's what's so important for us to remember - that despite all the powers of the web and web 2.0 applications, these powers don't come endlessly or unconditionally. There is always the danger of more centralized control and ownership looming ahead.
Right now, open courseware is being offered by MIT, Carnegie Mellon, universities all around the world and it's only picking up pace. Having recently watched food inc, I see that similar to a time when seeds were produced and distributed to farmers by universities. Now, seeds are owned and policed by the likes of Monsanto. There is always the potential police in everything.
cogdog says: MIT, CMU Are not the only game in town
I'm not sure I am following what this outsourcing of capital means.
What I got from shirky was that complex societies outgrew their ability to adapt, change, and thus became invested in the status quo. To me that describes exactly where education has sat, even as other industries around them changed.
I do not see at all the big money open courseware initiatives as being the force of change. Yes, MIT made a bold advance and opened up the eyes of the world to this, but it would not have happened were it not MIT and a boat load of money. I grow tired of seeing these trotted out as the sole examples of open education, especially like the recent New York Times who cast open education mostly as the Yales and Berkeleys spending 50-250k per course to digitize lectures. Its noble, grand, but I dont see that as a new model of education. Its a tweak at best.
Open sharing of content has gone on for far longer with little media attention, and it is those grass root, resource unintensive approaches that too me hold more value for effecting change.
tomhaymes says: Education and Collapse
Interesting thoughts, Alan. I have been pondering many of these issues myself lately and trying to apply my knowledge of military history which is all about adapting societies to technology. It's an interesting exercise.
In response to your post, I wonder if education is too insulated from catastrophic change for this model to apply. When is the last time we had a radical shift in educational models? We had a gradual evolution from what was essentially an apprenticeship model to a more factory-like model in the nineteenth century. That was basically a question of scale - not fundamental change in method.
I don't see any major societal shifts in education since the nineteenth century even though we have seen major societal shifts outside education. I have been trying to puzzle over what the change model is for forcing this kind of change in education. What is the crucible? In military history it is battle and/or war. In business it is the market. What about education? Any thoughts anyone?
The change in communication presented by the Internet in all of its forms is definitely pressing. However, I see very few faculty or administrators feeling that pressure.
bnleez says: Relationships and interaction
"I don't see any major societal shifts in education since the nineteenth century even though we have seen major societal shifts outside education."
I view relationships as the "crucible" of education. And since our perception of relationships (between people and things) define society, I would argue that education has experienced a shift that would be unrecognizable 100 years ago. Agreed, perhaps the appearance of the classroom and in some cases the manner in which teachers deliver content is a bit antiquated, but for the most part the dialog that goes on in schools today (i.e., between teachers and students and between students themselves) is very different than what took place 100 years ago. If students from 100 years ago were to open a textbook, they would likely to be out of touch due to the references that occur in today's world. If they turned to their classmate to converse, they would likely to be lost. If there was any reference to something going on in the world as it related to a particular class subject, the student would probably be lost as well. Most subjects today involve some degree of interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005) with respect to what has happened in the past as well as what's happening right now, all of which require some level of understanding of the society in which they live.
ElaineHuber says: Change
Tom, do you think there is little evidence of pressure because these people are just sticking their heads in the sand and hoping it (The Internet and all its baggage) will just go away? Or rather that it will just settle down - why jump on board the latest 'fad'? Just keep administering and researching and the rest will take care of themselves?
That's what I feel is happening. Change is indeed gradual in my sphere of the education world (HE) - in fact it almost appears to be negligible. There 'appears' to be much more commitment to change in the school system, but when one reaches the upper echleons of the education system, the cogs grind very slowly.
I see those academics who are actively committed to teaching and learning as being the instigators of change. They try a new activity here and there, write about it, reflect on it, move ahead. But these academics are still in the minority at my Institution.
I too am wondering, as CogDog mentions, whether this new 'Open' method of learning and teaching will be the driver of change. Will the crowd sourcing be strong enough to topple the big Institutions. What of those Major Institutions that are following this trend and offering their courses for free on the web. MIT, OU, CMU. Will they lead the attack? Will they survive? How will they survive?
tomhaymes says: Change - or the lack thereof
BNLeez and Elaine both make some good points. I will grant that education has certainly become more democratized - at least in the US (G.I. Bill, desegregation, etc.). However, what I am talking about are the basic structures that underpin the relationship between teacher and student such as:
1) Grading
2) The lecture method of instruction (still practiced by the overwhelming majority of faculty)
3) A strongly hierarchical relationship between the teacher and the learner
4) The structure of tenure and how we evaluate "scholarship" as well as teaching (assuming that teaching even enters into the equation in this area) - this reinforces faculty's resistance to change even further
These are just a few examples that have been with us for over a century and that tend to make academia rigid and resistant to change. Additionally, the accountability movements perpetuated in many state legislatures tend to reinforce these tendencies since they often focus on simple-to-measure statistics such as grades (state legislators are even less sophisticated in this area than college administrators). All of this tends to give academia cement shoes when it comes to managing change.
To answer Elaine's question, I think it's neither. The structure of the system perpetuates much of the resistance to change. Additionally, a lot of people (both administrators and faculty) don't even understand what's going on. And if they do, in many cases, they are threatened by change that, even for those of us in the technology field, is still quite unpredictable. The natural reaction is to fall back on the tried and true mechanisms I mentioned above. Whatever the cause, the result is the same: stasis.
Now, whether or not academia will suffer the same fate as Shirky describes is, I think, a debatable point. I mean, what's the alternative? I suppose, being a member of that complex structure, that I should also suffer from not being able to imagine alternative worlds... :-)