For Cog Tools, we’ve been reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which, as I mentioned in my last post, has been something I’ve been wanting to read for some time. Shirky is an interesting character who I’ve heard spoken about as a renowned historian of the Internet, but has also banned students from using devices in the classroom. All public opinion aside, I’ve really enjoyed reading his work. One thing he has me continually critically considering (alongside Wenger) is the role and value of formal education. Why am I paying an institution to read books and use free online tools? Yeah, that’s a bold, scary question, right? Even Clay has opinions about the end of the golden age of higher education*. Yet for all of the shortcoming education can have (namely access), I think Shirky’s concept thought on the root of social capital bests answers the question:
First, much of the success of the United States as a nation has had to do with its ability to generate social capital, that mysterious but critical set of characteristics of functioning communities. – Clay Shirky
Formal education brings social capital in a couple big ways. One in the certification in which is received from an accredited institution which is valued by the market and second from the ability to build a valuable social network of other connected people. Formal education is valuable to those who value both of those ideas.
There is a similar theory from Clay Christensen in which he speaks about the value of education through his “jobs to be done theory”:
School is not a job that children are trying to get done. It is something that a child might hire to do the job, but it isn’t the job itself. The two fundamental jobs that children need to do are to feel successful and to have friend–every day. Sure, they could hire school to get these jobs done. Some achieve success and friends in the classroom, the band, the math club, or the basketball team. But to feel successful and have friends, they could also drop out of school and join a gang, or buy a car and cruise the streets. Viewed from the perspective of jobs, it becomes very clear that school don’t often do these jobs well at all–if fact, all too often, schools are structure to help most students feel like failures. We had assumed going in that those who succeed at school do so because they are motivated. But we concluded that all students are similarly motivated–to succeed. The problem is, only a fraction of students feel successful through school. – Clay Christensen
So why am I paying a lot of money to read books and use free online tools? Because doing so makes me feel successful and I get an excellent network of people who, as Shirky would say, also exist as latent social capital (which is sort of a weird way to describe your friends).
Where universities especially succeed is its ability to act similarly to Meetup.
Lada Adamic, a research at HP Labs, studied the users of an online student center at Stanford called Club Nexus and found that two students were likely to be friends if their interests overlapped, and that the likelihood rose if the shared interested were more specific.
Equating it to a college, students are more likely to be able to become friends if they have common interests (which isn’t hard for people with similar age and social economic backgrounds) and are interested in studying the same subject. Meetup to me just sounds like a nice, 21st Century course catalog showing all the various degree programs that exist in your vicinity. The biggest difference between Meetup and universities (other than formal governance) is the barrier to entry.
What I don’t want this to sound like is that I think schools are just places to form social networks (although that’s a critical piece of society that I think is hard to ignore). What I want to continue to consider is how to make students successful in school? How do we not make them feel like failures by setting up assessments that might not match someone’s learning style? How do we make social the core of the educational experience? Should a school show its value, not by the test scores it can produce, but on its ability to create people both confident in their abilities and their society in ways that make them want to contribute? And how do we continue to strive to make it easy for you to have access to feeling successful?
Heiferman [founder of Meetup] assumed that people knew what they were missing and would want it back if they could get it; in an era of declining social capital, people would take steps to increase their communal participation if someone could make it easy again.
At what point does society allow education to embrace the role of being the bearer of social capital instead of simply the bearer of formative assessment? Particularly if they are complements?
*which I partially agree with but doesn’t really matter for this post