School of Everything vs. Anarchist University

Today I came across an interesting learning initiative out of the UK that reminded me of a similar phenomenon I came across in Toronto in 2003. The School of Everything (http://schoolofeverything.com/) is a peer learning network which re-launched its website and business with significant new funding on September 1, 2008. According to the site:

School of Everything connects people who want to learn with passionate teachers in their local area. The award-wining site is free to join for both people who want to learn and people who want to teach. Teachers register online and create a personal page giving information on their lessons, the qualifications offered and the format in which they teach - for example workshops or one-to-one sessions. Potential pupils find their perfect tutor simply searching by subject, learning category and location. They can then send them a message, arrange to meet and begin learning their new subject.

Some are referring to the School of Everything as the ‘ebay of learning’ which is apt given that the SoE creators expect to generate a profit by charging a commission on the teacher-pupil transactions facilitated through its site. Think of it as a global marketplace of ideas, with a catch – the exchange of ideas (i.e., learning) is envisioned to occur in face-to-face local interaction rather than virtually. It strikes me as an excellent idea – one that harnesses the power of peer-to-peer technology but ultimately brings teachers and pupils together in person where genuine teaching, guidance and mentoring actually takes place. And it has potentially broad appeal with expertise ranging from yoga to philosophy to cooking to driving instruction.

The model of self-organizing learning communities that the School of Everything embodies brought to mind Toronto’s Anarchist University which I first came across in 2003. At the time, I was a graduate student looking for any and every way to procrastinate while I should have been writing chapters of my dissertation. The teaching and learning opportunities promised by the AU offered just the sort of thing I was looking for, and might have even impressed the advisor who (on Mondays and Thursdays, anyway) is an analytical Marxist .

According the AU site (http://anarchistu.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Anarchistu/AnarchistU),

The Anarchist U is an open, volunteer-run, non-hierarchical collective that organizes community events, workshops and a variety of courses on arts and sciences….We offer an open, collaborative, radical way of learning built on democratic models of education, structure and process. We are working to build a vibrant and productive community free from the struggles for power, profit and prestige that are the consequences of existing social and economic structures.

Setting aside the all-too-easy jokes that can be made about anarchist models, structures, and processes, AU was, in some ways, ahead of its time. It brings teachers and pupils together voluntarily; it involves collaboration, negotiation and consensus-processes to develop mutually acceptable programs of study; and it offers learning for its own sake (i.e., there are no diplomas, degrees or credentials; only the experience of having taught and learned).

But unlike the SoE, the AU does not enlist the power of the market – indeed, market critiques are built into the school's founding ideology – which may serve to explain why it has struggled over the years to sustain its activities and community profile. Now don’t misunderstand me here: I sympathize with the anarchist eschewal of markets to the extent that they produce unequal and unjust distributions of resources and power. But where market mechanisms can be enlisted to serve democratic, peer-to-peer learning opportunities and support genuine community-building, even anarchists and their sympathizers should take notice.

With that in mind, the AU and its core faculty should think about creating an account on SoE to offer its educational services to others in the Toronto area. A quick search of offerings on the SoE site produces nothing in the area of anarchism, anarchists or anarchy which means that the AU can offer something new and would likely garner a few cheesy quips in future press coverage of the SoE. Moreover, given that AU courses are free, the market should reward them with significant enrollment (provided a high level of quality is maintained). Maybe some months or years from now we will be able to enroll in an AU course titled (with apologies to Dr. Strangelove fans), “How I learned to stop worrying and love the market.”

The Supply Chain of Research (Part I)

A couple of years ago, a doctoral candidate at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Daniel Gruber, published a short, but excellent, interview that he conducted with Malcolm Gladwell, the author and New Yorker journalist (Journal of Management Inquiry, December 2006). In the interview, Gruber and Gladwell discuss the simplifier and synthesizer functions that Gladwell uses to pursue his goal of getting non-academics excited about the “academic study of ideas.” While many academics publish insightful, but nevertheless often technical and dry, papers, Gladwell makes the insights more accessible by finding and telling compelling stories which draw people in to listen.

Gladwell’s responses in the interview provide some reassurance to those people (like me) who find themselves in the spaces and places in-between academia and the broader popular public sphere. Think tanks and journalists are the two most prominent examples of in-between institutions and individuals that I can think of off-hand, but there are others. The work performed by these intermediaries in interpreting and making sense of the basic and applied research done in universities constitutes a critical function in what one professor at the Ross School – Andrew Hoffman – calls the supply chain of research:

Basic research supports applied research, which supports policy development, which supports managerial change, and so on. The links and ties in this chain are many and diverse, all of which lead to change within the world of some form of practice. (Hoffman, JMI, 2006: 411).

(For the record, Hoffman does not think that the work of translation, interpretation or sense-making should be left to others. Academics who produce research should simply learn how to convey their findings to broader lay audiences).

Setting aside Hoffman’s call for all academics to take on the heroic task of communicating their findings to a popular audience (which would likely distract from their real strengths), there may be a need for institutional innovations which would strengthen the “links and ties” in the supply chain. Let’s face it: With few exceptions, policy-makers and business leaders simply don’t read long, complicated, jargon-laden papers for insights that they can apply to their crafts. If a message is to reach and persuade them, it has to be written in a style they’ll understand. And, for academics, the tenure incentive structure encourages a writing style which uses the technical, almost impenetrable, language of disciplinary journals. We might lament these facts (as I often do) and we might do what we can to change them, but for the time being, they are the demands of realism to which we must, at least temporarily, reconcile ourselves.

With that in mind, universities, granting institutions, governments and businesses should explore, and get serious about long-term funding for, other ways through which links and ties in the supply chain of research can be created and strengthened. In the area of business, management and organization studies, for example, there are promising models of knowledge translation and diffusion in the form of journals written in more accessible language – such as the Harvard Business Review – and a growing trend towards on-campus press offices which attempt to make academic research more understandable and widely disseminated to a lay audience.

In Canada, while the granting institutions (such as CFI and SSHRC) have adopted the language of “knowledge translation” and “knowledge transfer,” it remains to be seen how much those institutions will supplement funding for conventional academic research with funding for experiments in knowledge translation and diffusion. In addition to supporting HBR-type initiatives and press offices, granting institutions (and universities for that matter) might want to consider strengthening and expanding writer-in-residence programs where the writer-in-residence takes on the role of better understanding and then translating the research done in the institution/department for a broader audience. And recognizing my conflict of interest here, improved support for partnerships between non-profit think tanks and certain media organizations and journalists, might also lead to better diffusion of the research produced in universities across the country.

Then again, maybe James March was onto something when he asserted in (of all things) an HBR interview that there should be better support for irrelevant ideas. My own education and academic experience as a political philosopher has given me a great appreciation for the intrinsic merit and beauty of (irrelevant) ideas. But I still think my roommate at MIT was onto something when he said that you should be able to explain your research to three kinds of audiences – your advisor (in 20 minutes); a non-expert, but educated, audience (in 10 minutes); and the unfortunate guy sitting next to you at the local pub (in 5 minutes, or the time it takes him to down his pint and move on to something else).