Universities, Disruptive Technologies, and Continuity in Higher Education

The Impact of Information Revolutions

Gavin Moodie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137549426
• eBook ISBN: 9781137549433
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This book seeks to understand the effects of the current information revolution on universities by examining the effects of two previous information revolutions: Gutenberg's invention and proof of printing in 1450 and the Scientific Revolution from the mid- fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Moodie reviews significant changes since the early modern period in universities' students, libraries, curriculum, pedagogy, lectures, assessment, research, and the dissemination of these changes across the globe. He argues that significant changes in the transmission and dissemination of disciplinary knowledge are shaped by the interaction of three factors: financial, technological, and physical resources; the nature, structure and level of knowledge; and the methods available for managing knowledge.

© The Author(s) 2016

Gavin MoodieUniversities, Disruptive Technologies, and Continuity in Higher Education10.1057/978-1-137-54943-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Changing Universities

Gavin Moodie¹

(1)

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

End Abstract

Almost 20 years ago, the management guru Peter Drucker (1998) claimed that ‘Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive. It is as large a change as when we first got the printed book’. The president of edX, the massive open online course (mooc) platform founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Anant Agarwal launched the platform in a YouTube video on 2 May 2012 with the statement which has subsequently been quoted frequently: ‘Online education for students around the world will be the next big thing in education. This is the single biggest change in education since the printing press’ (edX 2012). In the same year, the chief executive officer and co-founder of the mooc platform Udacity Sebastian Thrun claimed that in 50 years there will be only ten universities left in the world (The Economist 2012).

Many others have expressed similar views (Bush and Hunt 2011; The Economist 2012; Ernst & Young, Australia 2012), often in apocalyptic terms: ‘An avalanche is coming’ (Barber et al. 2013), ‘The campus tsunami’ (Brooks 2012), ‘tectonic shift’ (Lawton and Katsomitros 2012), ‘The end of the university as we know it’ (Harden 2012; Tapscott 2013), ‘Revolution hits the universities’ (Friedman 2013), ‘Higher education’s online revolution’ (Chubb and Moe 2012, p. A17), ‘disruptive innovation’ (Christensen and Eyring 2011), and ‘game changer’ (Marginson 2012). Mooc hype faded after 2012, but even so in 2013 Clayton Christensen predicted that half of the USA’s universities could face bankruptcy within 15 years (Schubarth 2013) and a blogger claimed that ‘we’ve had more pedagogic change over the last 10 years than the last 1000 years because of these outsiders and technology’ (Clark 2013). Most claims for the revolutionary impact of digital technologies on universities argue by extension from the effects of digital technologies on photography, cinema, recorded music, and news and public affairs media. But one could also argue historically. Just as Innis (1950, p. 158) argued that the introduction and spread of paper in Europe in the thirteenth century broke the Christian church’s monopoly of knowledge based on parchment, so one might argue that digitization is breaking universities’ domination of advanced knowledge extension and transmission based on paper.

Some academics’ response to moocs ‘would probably be something between panic and disgust’, as Kremer (2010, p. 98) wrote about an unexpected meeting in his novel Smart time. But similar predictions were made about the revolutionary impact on education of blackboards (1841), films (1913, 1922, 1933), teaching machines (1932), radio (1940s), television (1960s), and computer-based programmed instruction (1960s). These are noted in Sect. 5.6 of this book. Lectures have long being criticized as a relatively ineffective form of teaching, and contemporaries of Gutenberg anticipated that printing would make university lectures and lecturers redundant. Yet lectures persisted through the Scientific Revolution until the present, having been as important in the five and a half centuries after the invention of printing as they presumably were for the three and a half centuries before printing (Chap. 6).

Some have suggested that predictions of radical educational change have failed thus far because educational institutions are deeply conservative and protect their established positions; and because teachers are latter-day Luddites, resisting modernization and automation because they always reject exogenous change, do not understand new technologies, and protect their jobs and work practices. Indeed, Wareham suggested that an article about academic staff’s response to the massification of higher education in the UK in the 1990s be titled ‘Quite flows the don?’ (Trowler 1997, p. 315). But education made a major change from ‘individual and successive’ instruction to classroom teaching in the late nineteenth century, a change that was not prompted by the introduction of a new technology (Sect. 5.5). And email and learning management systems pervade higher education (Sect. 5.6.5). But so far digital technologies have been absorbed into existing university practices rather than revolutionizing them.

This book seeks to understand why the digital technologies which are making such deep and pervasive changes to society generally have so far not had a similar effect on universities: why the digital revolution is not revolutionizing universities. It seeks to understand the effects on universities of the current information revolution by examining the effects on universities of two previous information revolutions: Gutenberg’s proving of printing in 1450 and the Scientific Revolution from the middle of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. This chapter outlines the book’s argument in these sections:

1. 1.1
   Three Information Revolutions

   1. 1.1.1
      Gutenberg Revolution
   2. 1.1.2
      The Scientific Revolution
   3. 1.1.3
      Digital Revolution
2. 1.2
   Three Factors Shaping Change in Universities

   1. 1.2.1
      Financial, Technological, and Physical Resources
   2. 1.2.2
      Nature, Structure, and Level of Knowledge
   3. 1.2.3
      Methods Available for Managing Knowledge
3. 1.3
   Evidence
4. 1.4
   Development of the Argument

1.1 Three Information Revolutions

‘Information revolution’ is understood here broadly to refer to changes in the production, processing, transmission, storage, or control of organized data that have substantial effects outside information management on society, its culture, or economy. An example is text communications between people reporting and/or discussing results of investigations or more general news. People have long written letters to communicate or discuss information or events, many with the clear expectation that they would be read or copied to others, such as the letters of Cicero (106–43 BCE), Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BCE–65 CE), Paul the Apostle (c. 5–67 CE) (Broman 2013, p. 6), and Petrarch (1304–1374) (Rüegg 1996, p. 16) (Sect. 9.3.1). Print transformed these letters as newsletters and newspapers (Sect. 9.2) which in turn have had substantial effects on politics and public affairs. The Scientific Revolution gave rise to a new form of scholarly communication, the refereed journal, which extended the reach and influence of scholars well beyond the ‘invisible college’ (Zuccala 2005). Indeed, there are currently at least 109 refereed journals that have ‘letters’ in their title, such as Chemistry Letters, Organic Letters, and Lettere Italiane (Italian letters). The digital revolution is transforming, among much else, newspapers and scholarly journals (Sect. 9.3) which in turn are changing the public’s access to and involvement in academic and public affairs.

This book first considers the effects on universities of the Gutenberg revolution. There were several earlier important changes in the means for recording and disseminating knowledge which might also be called information revolutions. The introduction of writing clearly had big implications for education, many deleterious according to Plato (c 425–c 347 BCE), as noted in Sect. 5.6.1. The development of alphabetic languages was a considerable advance since they are easier to learn to read and write than syllabaries such as Mycenaean Greek and Yi in which each character represents a syllable and logographies such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian in which each character represents a word. Codices facilitate different ordering and organizations of text from the scrolls they replaced, which Innis (1950) argues shaped empires differently to those which recorded their information on tablets.

Latin was written in scriptura continua without spaces between words, sentences, paragraphs, or chapters from the second century CE (Saenger 1997, p. 10). Scribes started separating words with spaces in Latin manuscripts from the eighth century in England, Ireland, Wales, and Brittany, where the vernaculars were unrelated to Latin; from the eighth and ninth centuries in Germany and northern Europe whose vernaculars were also markedly different from Latin; from the second half of the eleventh century in southern France; and from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Italy where the vernacular remained closest to Latin (Saenger 1997, pp. 41, 97, 223, 235). Word separation facilitated scribes copying texts quicker visually than from dictation which in turn led to tables being introduced to scriptoria; it facilitated rapid and silent reading which in turn moved reading from private cloisters to common libraries; and it facilitated authors writing rather than dictating their texts (Saenger 1997, pp. 48–50, 61, 249, 252, 261–2). Silent writing and reading were private which Saenger (1997, pp. 243, 264) argues emboldened the promulgation of texts which challenged religious, political, and moral boundaries. Word separation reflected a shift in responsibility for preparing a text for reading from the reader to the scribe (Saenger 1997, p. 243) and thereby shortened the teaching of reading which previously had extended into adolescence (Saenger 1997, p. 55).

The introduction of writing, alphabetization, codices, word separation, and indeed other early techniques for managing records and communication such as those considered by Innis (1950) each had major implications for education. Yet the book starts by examining the Gutenberg revolution because it lasted long enough to be experienced by many current students, teachers, and researchers, and so is still referred to in many analyses, as was noted earlier in the comparisons with online learning.

1.1.1 Gutenberg Revolution

Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398–1468) invented or at least proved printing with moveable type by 1450 (Füssel 2005 [1999], p. 15). It is hard to overestimate the importance of printing to society as a whole. Conversely, printing has had such profound and widespread effects that it is hard to identify its effects and appreciate the nature and extent of the changes from a manuscript to print society (Moodie 2014, p. 464). The many substantial immediate, medium, and long-term effects of printing on society have been described by several others, most notably by Elizabeth Eisenstein (1997 [1979]) in her study in two volumes of The printing press as an agent of change.

Manuscripts were—and still are—rare as well as extremely expensive. Even maintaining the existing store of recorded knowledge in manuscript required a major investment of resources, organization, and effort. Most of the dissemination of the knowledge recorded in manuscripts was not by their copying and distribution to individual readers, but by one person—usually a cleric—reading or recounting their contents to an audience (Moodie 2014, p. 464). As is elaborated in Sect. 8.3, manual copying of manuscripts was not only slow and expensive, but also uncertain. The dissemination of knowledge, by either reciting or copying manuscripts, introduced errors and inaccuracies that were repeated and multiplied in subsequent retellings and copies. The investigation of natural phenomena was particularly inhibited since inaccuracies were often introduced into copies of formulas, tables of figures, diagrams, illustrations, and maps (Moodie 2014, p. 464).

Printing transformed Europe, in multiple ways. Printing greatly increased and broadened both the books produced and their readership (Febvre and Martin 1990 [1958], p. 479; Pedersen 1996, p. 459–60). With the advent of printing people could read books for themselves rather than have them read or retold to them. The transmission of text became less the collective activity of one person reading a rare manuscript to an audience and more of an individual activity of people reading texts themselves (Ong 2000 [1967], pp. 272, 283). Printing was therefore central to the Reformation, which emphasized the penitent reading the Bible for themselves rather than it being mediated through priests and the Catholic Church (Moodie 2014, p. 464). Printing probably spread Humanism more widely and certainly faster than was achieved in manuscript—Erasmus as well as Luther was a bestselling author in the sixteenth century (Vervliet 2013, p. 78). The greatly increased availability of books made possible by printing encouraged literacy which led to an expansion of basic education which in turn further increased the demand for books, as is elaborated in Sect. 2.4.

Printing introduced new forms for producing, marketing, and distr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Changing Universities
• 2. Students and Society
• 3. Libraries
• 4. Curriculum
• 5. Pedagogical Change
• 6. Lectures
• 7. Assessment
• 8. Advancing Knowledge
• 9. Disseminating Knowledge
• 10. Progress and Prospects
• Backmatter