Two things this morning: I’ve been reading through Lessig’s
FreeCulture, in particular the conclusion, and I received an e-mail from my College’s President on grade inflation and intellectual climate, a copy of an article from the Carnegie Foundation.

“Intellectual climate” has been a buzz-term on our campus for some time: a fitting though ironically parochial concern given the generally chilly intellectual climate of our “secure” nation. Seeing that the article’s topic was grade inflation, I was surprised that ultimately the point was that grades were not nearly as important as improving intellectual climate and encouraging “deep learning.” I.e., grade inflation occurs because students think a good GPA is what they need to get good ROI on their education. However, John Merrow, the article’s author, suggests that in fact it is deep learning that students require to be successful down the road. GPA tells you little, especially since everyone believes/knows grades are inflated.

But this brings me to Lessig: if such learning is to occur, I would argue that it will require us to rethink the nature of information, including the ethics of information(e.g. copyright).

Why do I think so?

1. The reason GPA is valued is b/c it is assumed that grades reflect a student’s mastery of a particular set of knowledge and skills. The notion of mastery itself makes certain assumptions about information as a discrete, transmittable object over which the graduated student can claim a certain ownership. If we are to shift our pedagogic emphasis to “deep learning,” then this will have to change.

Admittedly, Merrow’s article doesn’t define deep learning, but I will happily impose my own interpretation. Deep learning occurs when one recognizes that pedagogy is not about leading students to perform preformatted tasks with set goals but rather about providing them with an engagement with texts (partcularly in my field) that open opportunities for some substantial cognitive becoming. In this model, information is not an object to be owned/mastered but a process/event to be experienced.

Obviously such experiences are difficult to grade. Though my courses are considered quite difficult by students (one called me, only half-jokingly, the “count of confusing philosophy”), my grading is fairly lax. I want to give my students the opportunity to take risks and fail without being punished grade-wise for doing so. The problem is that they are all so grade-conscious and afraid of failure that it is difficult to convince them to do so. But anyway, that’s my problem.

2. And this is what I really wanted to write about. Clearly, marketplace logic dictates that a commodity’s value depends on the relationship between supply and demand. Copyright is a legal mechanism for controlling the supply of/access to data (and here I distinguish from information, which is a process resulting from the accessing of data). In an odd way, copyright is a kind of legal cryptography, a way of keeping something secret until the user pays. Of course the contradictory thing is that the copyright owners are looking to tell their secret to everyone. They don’t want to keep their secret; they just want people to pay them to reveal it.

This leads me to Cory Doctorow’s talk at Microsoft about why DRM is not a good idea. In case you don’t know, DRM is a type of cryptography for DVDs (and such things) designed to ensure copyright. Of course modern cryptography can be a very powerful way to keep things secret, but this is not a situation where the copyright owner is trying to maintain secrecy. Afterall, if you want something to stay secret, you don’t make a million copies of it and sell it on Amazon for $20. I don’t really want to get into Doctorow’s whole, very intelligent argument, but the essence of it, as I read it, is that you’re not going to do yourself or anyone else any favors by seeking to limit the spread of information.

Now I think this issue is very closely related to the challenges of the post-university. The intellectual climate of universities has always been one that has balanced the production (research) and control (teaching) of data. At the core of both however has been the idea that the professor is the one who knows, who is authorized to be the producer/ownder of research, and thus who is authorized to teach/transmit that data to students and evaluate their reception. As a student you pay, in part, for access to the data, but you could get that by buying books. What you’re really paying for is the certification, hence the emphasis on grades. Certification in turn is assured by accreditation.

However, it makes total sense (at least economically) in this model of knowledge to pay once for the expertise and then pay less for ongoing customer support. That is, as I have suggested in prior posts, you pay a reknown biologist to perpare a Biology 101 curriculum that you then sell to every small college, who then hires some cheap tutorial labor to support their reselling of the course to students. It’s really just a continuation of the textbook model. But then you end up competing with virtual universities and if you’re a brick-and-mortar college you need to sell yourself on value-added, like getting the kids out of the house and into a nicely appointed dorm.

Here is where the deep-learning comes in. It is not the data that is valuable in an education; it is the intellectual community that is valuable. And this is what costs money b/c it represents the time of professors who work to sustain that community, not only on a single campus, but with their colleagues around the world. The fruits of that labor (i.e. the research) for the most part should be free, I believe. I am sure there are some faculty whose research has true economic value, but certainly that’s not the case for most Humanities faculty (fine artists and popular writers might be the exception).

This model would not work this way for commerical artists. I’m not sure what the answer is there, but for teachers/scholars this concept of deep learning, in tandem with a new way of understanding information (and hence intellectual property), is perhaps one way to address the commodfication of the university. In short, we say, “We are paid to maintain and develop an intellectual community, into which we invite students, who learn from the experience.” Grades, credits, and curricula are all bureaucratic short-hand (and misinterpretation) of this labor. However, the university may choose to construct its relationship with other cultural institutions, academics must insist upon a model of knowledge that understands the importance of the event, rather than a commodified model of knowledge. Ironically, it may be that by insisting upon a model that, in a way, undercuts our authority by dismantling claims of masttery, we academics can best articulate our belief in the importance of a vibrant intellectual community as the foundation for education.

To return, finally, to Lessig and Doctorow: as academics, we do not seek to keep data secret. Though there is a huge publishing industry behind academia and journals are incresingly expensive, expecially in the sciences, we all realize the desperate situation of academic publishing. Furthermore, as I discussed in an earlier post, with the increasing pressure to publish, even a small, teaching-centered colleges, we are pushing beyond an information glut into an information absurdity. IF we imagined knowledge and authority in a different way, IF we imagined information as the product of an event, of a communal exchange, rather than an individual’s intellectual property, THEN perhaps we could move into a saner conception of how academics can work together to develop knowledge rather than devoting their time to making authorial claims. As a result, we might even transform our colleges into intellectual communities rather than the spas with credits that they are desiring to become.

#plaa{position:absolute;clip:rect(471px,auto, auto,471px);}