In The Third Industrial Revolution, Jeremy Rifkin argues that we are
now in the midst of a new industrial revolution—one that is significantly
different from the previous ones and that already is transforming the economy
and daily life. Rifkin’s analysis
of the new social order has significant implications for higher education that
potentially are as far-reaching as the original industrial revolution of the 19th
century, which stimulated the development and growth of the public college and
university system in the United States.
The
first Industrial Revolution, in the late 18th century through the 19th
century, was built on coal and oil.
It fueled a revolution in transportation and manufacturing. In the United States, one implication
was urbanization, as manufacturing centers were created in cities like
Pittsburgh and Chicago. Another
was immigration, as working class people came from across Europe to seek new
industrial jobs. One response
was the land grant university, created to increase the supply of professionals
in the “practical and mechanical” arts and to enhance agricultural productivity
in order to sustain urbanization.
Another response was the system of “normal schools”—teacher education
institutions that became the foundation of our state college and university
system—created to ensure the supply of teachers to educate the millions of
immigrant children.
The
second industrial revolution began in the early 20th century and was
driven by gas and communications, both of which required highly centralized
top-down structures. This
revolutionized transportation and created the mass media that dominated the
latter half of the 20th century.
The
third industrial revolution began after World War II. It, too, is driven by energy and communications. As Rifkin notes, “Communication
technology is the nervous system that oversees, coordinates, and manages the
economic organism, and energy is the blood that circulates through the body
politic, providing the nourishment to convert nature’s endowment into goods and
services to keep the economy alive and growing” (p. 35). However, unlike the previous
revolutions, neither energy nor communications are organized as centralized,
top-down ventures.
Communications are dominated by the Internet, with its multiple sources of
input and access; energy, increasingly, is dominated not by oil and gas but by
renewable sources—solar and wind, for instance—that enter the system at
multiple points, such as the solar panels on a suburban residential roof. Today’s electrical grid, increasingly,
is a network in which users are also providers. People subscribe to an electrical provider, but also produce
their own solar and wind energy, some of which is sold back to the
provider. As Rifkin notes,
“The democratization of energy will bring with it a fundamental reordering of
human relationships, impacting the very way we conduct business, govern
society, educate our children, and engage in civic life” (p. 2).
At
the same time, this Third Industrial Revolution is increasingly dominated by
the Internet, which is redefining how individuals identify themselves in
association with others. "Today,”
writes Rifkin, “distributed information and communication technologies are converging
with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a Third
Industrial Revolution and paving the way for biosphere consciousness” (p.
234). One of the
implications, he notes, is an increasing awareness that individuals are part of
a global community:
“For a younger,
educated generation that is becoming part of a global community and is as
likely to identify with Facebook as with traditional tribal loyalties, the old
ways are an anathema. The
patriarchal thinking, rigid social norms, and xenophobic behavior of their
elders is so utterly alien to the generation that has grown up in social media
networks, with an emphasis on transparency, collaborative behavior, and
peer-to-peer relations, that it marks a historic divide in consciousness
itself” (p. 17).
This
networked social environment is fostering a new economy marked by collaboration
that is “fundamentally at odds with classical economic theory, which puts great
store on the assumption that individual self-interest in the marketplace is the
only effective way to drive economic growth” (p. 126). Instead, Rifkin argues, “The new model
favors lateral ventures, both in social commons and in the market place, on the
assumption that mutual interest, pursued jointly, is the best route to
sustainable economic development” (ibid.).
Rifkin
identifies five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution, which he maintains
are tools that “can enable us to re-integrate into the natural world” (p. 238):
- Shifting to renewable energy;
- Transforming the building stock of every continent into micro-power plans to collect renewable energies on site;
- Deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies;
- Using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet (when millions of buildings are generating a small amount of energy locally, on site, they can sell surplus back); and
- Transitioning the transport fleet to elect plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.
The TIR and Education
The idea of a Third Industrial
Revolution has been building for several decades. As far back as 1970, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock suggested that things were changing in some of the
same directions that Rifkin reports.
For instance, Future Shock
predicted a new “ad hoc” generation that would be less willing to
affiliate. He also worried about
the dangers of a glut of information.
We were still two decades away from the Internet and a clearer vision of
where the Information Revolution might take us. It was not long, however, before experts began to worry
about the role of education in this new age. As early as 1986, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching reported, “The undergraduate college, the very heard of higher
learning, is a troubled institution . . . Colleges appear to be searching for
meaning in a world where diversity, not commonality, is the guiding vision”
(p.16).
Today—with
two decades the first Internet browser introduced the World Wide Web—the issues
are much clearer. Rifkin’s
analysis suggests that the Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) will be as
important to the future of public higher education as was the first. To see the full potential, we
need to look at all three legs of the public higher education stool: instruction, research, and engagement.
TIR and Instruction
Rifkin argues that the Third
Industrial Revolution calls for what he dubs a “lateral” approach to education. He notes that, “the dominant, top-down
approach to teaching, the aim of which is to create a competitive autonomous
being, is beginning to give way to a distributed and collaborative educational
experience with an eye to instilling a sense of the social nature of knowledge”
(p.241).
I
discussed the impact of the Information Revolution on general education in a
blog posting in 2011. However, we need to think more broadly
about how to adapt the curriculum to meet the needs of a new society. The roots
of this approach can be traced back John Dewey’s early progressive education
philosophy. However, more
recently, the move to a more learner-centered, inquiry-based collaborative learning
environment has arisen out of two decades of experience with online learning. We are seeing pedagogical innovations like blended learning,
which mixes online and classroom experiences; the flipped classroom, which uses
out-of-class media for knowledge transfer, leaving classroom time for
discussion and collaboration; and communities of inquiry, which build the
educational experience through the integration of the learners’ social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive
presence.
Recently,
the Ontario Online Learning Portal published on its website an article entitled
“A New Pedagogy is Emerging . . . and Online Learning is a Key ContributingFactor” that describes an emerging pedagogical model emphasizes the development of seven
dynamics in the learning environment:
- A commitment to blended learning.
- Collaboration and building communities of practice that encourage students to share experiences, discuss ideas, learn from each other, and otherwise collaborate to build knowledge around information.
- The flipped classroom—using multimedia and open education resources, rather than classroom sessions, to deliver organized.
- Increased learner control, choice, and independence.
- Anywhere, anytime, any size learning, such as the development of smaller “just-in-time” mobile learning modules that can be aggregated into courses, certificates, degrees.
- New forms of assessment, including e-portfolios, peer assessment, and the use of learning analytics.
- Self-directed and non-formal online learning
Institutions must both encourage and support faculty
innovation by providing instructional designers and professional development
opportunities that will allow these innovations to move more quickly into the
mainstream so that our institutions can better serve students.
TIR and the Research Mission
The lateral quality of the new
environment can also have significant impacts on research. The Internet makes it easier for
researchers to collaborate across institutions and to maintain connection with
practitioners and users of their research results throughout the research and
development process. One example
of this at work is the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) . Now in its second decade, this network
of 17 research universities on five continents is committed to creating
. . . new, multilateral
opportunities for international collaboration in research and graduate
education. It is a flexible, dynamic organisation that uses the combined
resources and intellectual power of its membership to achieve collective
international objectives and to stretch international ambitions.
WUN uses a variety of
technologies—from email discussion lists to desktop videoconferencing—to bring
researchers together into communities and to share resources and files within a
community.
The
new environment encourages the creation of lateral research communities. These can be cross-university
collaborations among researchers, inter-disciplinary collaborations that attack
multiple aspects of a single problem, international or cross-cultural
partnerships, or multi-faceted collaborations that bring together academic
researchers, professional/practitioner communities, and other agencies—industries,
government agencies, community organizations, etc.—to contribute problems,
possible solutions, theories, data, etc., all directed toward continuous
improvement.
TIR and University Engagement
The idea of lateral connections is
a perfect match to the University’s public engagement mission. At the end of the 19th
century, a major focus of engagement was the need to help farmers increase the
agricultural productivity in order to sustain the combined forces of
immigration and urbanization that were essential to large-scale
industrialization. The Cooperative
Extension Service was formed to ensure that research expertise was present in
every county to assist farmers.
Today’s technology allows us to be much more effective in reaching and
serving communities—themselves often distributed thinly across a state (or
across multiple states). MOOCs and
other digital resources allow us to create communities that include both
academics and practitioners and to share knowledge, practical problems, success
stories, and other experiences within the community. This can be applied well beyond agriculture—think rural
community sustainability, urban redevelopment, small business development,
environmental safety, etc. The
user communities need no longer be defined by geography. Nor must we be limited to local faculty
capacity in order to bring the best knowledge to the community.
I
wrote about this opportunity in a recent blog posting. There are many opportunities here for
the University to engage the community in this new environment. Lateral engagement means developing
meaningful, multi-point relationships—true communities—among faculty, community
organizations, and individuals for training, research and technology transfer,
and community/organizational development.
Next Steps
Most
public colleges and universities can already point to some examples of these
new lateral relationships in teaching/learning, research, or engagement. The challenge facing us as a field is
to think and act more strategically—to embrace the Third Industrial Revolution
and organize our resources to support it in our states and regions. Higher education is an inherently
decentralized social organization.
The key to succeeding in this new environment is not simply to mandate
top-down changes, but to create an organizational and policy framework that will
encourage and support new lateral relationships in each of the three main
missions of teaching/learning, research, and engagement.
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