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Newport’s positive formulation of deep work betrays a certain ambivalence at the heart of the book.
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Deep WorkDeep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport. New York:  Grand Central (Hachette), 2016.  296 p.  ISBN 978-1-4555-8669-1 $28.00 list

Cal Newport became a guru of study hacks after publishing Study Hacks, two other books, a dissertation, and six articles.  Clearly “do as I say and as I do,” he knows his subject.  Deep Work extends his thinking to sharper critique of the glut of social information that distracts many people.

Newport is especially sharply critical of Facebook (including the new Facebook headquarters building), Twitter, and the well-recognized Fear of Missing Out (FOMA) that can drive compulsive distraction and seriously erode the quality and quantity of work.  His critique is well-sustained, but its claims to be counter-cultural or disruptive are overblown: numerous other writers have critiqued the culture of distraction, including Neil Postman, Nicholas Carr, and Sherry Turkle.

Newport’s positive formulation of deep work betrays a certain ambivalence at the heart of the book.  Deep work is “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits.  These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”(p. 3)  By contrast shallow work is “noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”)(p. 6) His hypothesis: "the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare . . . [and] valuable . . . . The few who cultivate this skill with thrive."(p. 14)  His goal: to help you be one who can work deeply, a noble aim.   His examples are not always convincing, however.

His leading example (which opens the book), Carl Jung’s creation of Bollingen Tower as a retreat for his writing, is more multi-faceted than Newport suggests.  Jung retreated to his tower to write without distraction, but based in large part on his interaction with patients in Zurich.  Later Newport identifies Jung’s “bimodal” pattern, contrasting the Tower with Zurich, a “busy clinical practice,” “gave and attended many lectures,” “active participant in the Zurich coffeehouse culture,” all suggesting to Newport the hyper-connected, digital-age knowledge worker: “replace ‘Zurich’ with ‘San Francisco’ and ‘letter’ with ‘tweet’ and we could be discussing some hotshot tech CEO.” (p. 107)

I think this is a serious, ideologically-driven misunderstanding of Jung’s life in Zurich, and life's work.  Jung’s own writings are filled with episodes, instances, and cases from his practice in Zurich.  To suggest that Jung’s work in Zurich was “shallow work” devalues his clinical practice and Jung’s whole motivation for developing depth psychology and disputes with Sigmund Freud.  The ideas and art work Jung picked up in his Zurich life provided some of the critical raw material from which he fashioned his singular and valuable insights in the Tower.  Suggesting that Jung’s beautifully written letters are the work equivalent of contemporary tweets is simply preposterous and and fundamentally misconstrues Jung’s life’s work.  Valuable as Jung's deep concentration in the Tower was, it never would have amounted to much without his corresponding life in the city.

Newport's other examples (Adam Grant, Jack Dorsey for example) probably work better, but tend towards the two-dimensional.  This valuable book has to be read with caution.

Cal-newport-media-kit-smallIn the end, I am left with the uneasy sense that Newport’s beloved “deep work” is really what computer scientists do.  (He is an associate professor at Georgetown.) His concept of deep work is less applicable to those whose work is primarily leading people and organizations.  I know in my own work as a library director that sometimes I have to work on a project uninterrupted.  Some interruptions are shallow, but some definitely deep: the work I do listening to coworkers, helping them develop their ideas, skill and insights, indeed pushes my cognitive and emotional capabilities, improves my abilities, is hard to replicate mechanically, and (I hope) creates value.  Every encounter with a colleague is not deep work, but I always have to be alert to the moment when it turns deep, sometimes on a dime.

I completely accept Newport’s critique of the numerous, superficial distractions of social media, e-mail, and news, and the confusion of busyness with productivity.  But his concept of deep work needs broadening and humanizing. This seems to be the work of a very confident and highly creative young professor appropriately characterized as brilliant, creative, and important, but whose very brilliance and confidence may have drawn him towards an unnecessarily narrow conception of generosity, significance, and depth of insight.  I wonder how his ideas will change over time, work, and experience.  I would really like to find out, because it will be important.

At Sacred Heart University I have been leading the first phase of a strategic directions initiative to articulate the highest-level aspirations of the organization, and to mark ways that the Library can leverage its expertise and strengths to enhance the intellectual life of the University and advance its mission.
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At Sacred Heart University I have been leading the first phase of a strategic directions initiative to articulate the highest-level aspirations of the organization, and to mark ways that the Library can leverage its expertise and strengths to enhance the intellectual life of the University and advance its mission.

As part of listening, thinking, and planning together, we have read discussed some truly thought-provoking articles and reports. Two of these in particular are from MIT: Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms, and The Once and Future Library. These are very different documents: the first is a report of MIT’s Online Education Policy Initiative. The second is a report from the MIT News Office, and summarizes remarks by several MIT senior librarians made at (or responding to) a panel discussion concerning the future of the library.

Despite their differences in format and subject matter, the two documents converge on several questions and concerns about the changing role of the library is the quickly-evolving ecosystem of higher education.

  • Preserving the cultural record —both the “wild frontier” of digital preservation and the massive challenge of “analogue” preservation— complements the online education report’s call for fostering thinking communities that identify and develop the change agents and role models for implementing reforms. Without access to the materials, scholarly traditions of higher education, or the “thinking communities” that the report advocates, will be unable to realize the good intentions of the reformers. The past cannot constrain the future, but without it neither reforms can be adequately grounded both in prosaic institutional realities and perennial threshold questions that undergird scholarly disciplines.
  • The future of the collections (at MIT and elsewhere) will be entwined with increasing disciplinary collaborations across fields of research in higher education. Until the past few years it was common inside libraries to think about the “collections” that supported distinct fields of study: British literature, community nursing, entrepreneurship, or cellular biology, to name only a few. As the library’s role of assembling scholarly materials diminishes, however (insofar as so much is available digitally, with or without pay walls), the library’s role of publishing and codifying scholarly materials has grown. This suggests the simple question: What is the library for?  While the report may have intended “fields of research in higher education” to be those it named, from neuropsychology to meta-analysis and assessment, the importance of disciplinary collaborations and interdisciplinary conversation embraces widely disparate fields, and the library has a central publishing and fostering role as a digital and analogue commons. The threshold concepts that critically examine the interests, biases, and assumptions present in the information ecosystem suggest a unified field of varying forces that more hold the scholarly disciplines together than tear them apart --the threshold concepts that are fact "what the library is for" (both as purpose and as advocacy).
  • The Once and Future Library begins by noting how ancient libraries (such as Alexandria) held a lecture hall, refectory, and porch where scholars could talk, collaborate, read, and eat. Now the modern library —such as even Sacred Heart University Library— has versions of these facilities inside, and is far from merely a “reading room” or “book warehouse.” The Policy Initiative recognizes the numerous contributions of fields such as motivation and rewards in learning, health and nutrition, and learning spaces, and “the necessary mix of cognitive, social, and interpersonal skills needed for life and work.” (p. 18)  The library is both a literal and physical learning space.

These convergences (preservation, collaborations, and a holistic vision of learning) strongly imply a spectrum of abilities, practices, and habits of mind, that expands and deepens through engagement with the information ecosystem.  This is close to the definition of the Framework for Information Literacy published by the Association of College and Research Libraries in 2015.  Although higher education as an introduction to “life-long" learning has become a cliché, “life-long” still has great meaning to those on the receiving end of fundamental, continuing, and painful social change.  The disposition towards learning inherent in information literacy offers a pathway through the world as we are finding it.

The confluence of a kind of lazy, informal postmodernism and casual digital culture has led many to wonder whether the constitutive commitments to truth, goodness, and beauty that have characterized Western higher education for millennia have simply ceased to be relevant. Both documents from MIT suggest strongly otherwise —and coming from one of the fonts (MIT) of all things digital, constructivist, and cognitivist, this is surprising and reinvigorating at once.

The dynamic, digital scaffold proposed by the Policy Initiative could be able (or will be able to) extend the necessary mix of cognitive, social, and interpersonal skills that are thresholds to genuine engagement without limitations by the modes of pedagogy, either on-ground or online.

The Policy Initiative proposes a “learning engineer” at the center of that dynamic digital scaffold. At MIT “engineer” is a “good” word signifying “us, what we stand for,” while for those outside MIT "learning engineer" may connote “narrow, technical, and highly specialized” instead. I understand “learning engineer” to be local MIT-speak for “instructional designers,” and the “design thinking” at the heart of educational enterprise. The Policy Initiative’s strong recommendation that such individuals need far greater support and integration with subject-based academics is heartening.  Ironically, it also strongly suggests what instructional librarians have been trying to do for a long time with little fanfare, external comprehension, or support. “Design thinking” is now at the heart of librarianship, and can only strengthen on-ground, hybrid, and digital pedagogies.  In a sense a library is a perpetual "beta" of the Initiative's "dynamic digital scaffold."

At Sacred Heart University Library, our strategic directions initiative has already moved ahead with recalling and creating “the once and future library.” We are searching for an instructional design librarian, intentionally a hybrid kind of work, and we are engaging the university community in planning further library building, collections, and service renovations (re-newing, indeed!). What is most important about this initiative is not the resulting document, but the process itself of listening, thinking, and planning together.

Many people have concluded already that they don't. If you have concluded that they are irrelevant and old-fashioned, you probably will not be open to this discussion. I encourage you, nevertheless, to have an open mind.
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. . . Many people have concluded already that they don't. If you have concluded that they are irrelevant and old-fashioned, you probably will not be open to this discussion.  I encourage you, nevertheless, to have an open mind.

I’m a librarian and a book person (who’d have thought?) and therefore probably against the grain of American culture right now.  Books have been enormously influential in my life; they gave me an outlet, vision, and ambition when I was very young, and (some of them) have continued to challenge, delight, and astound me ever since.  Some books I count as old friends, and its a diverse lot: Lucretius, Søren Kierkegaard, Frederick Buechner, Karl Barth, Flannery O’Connor, Robertson Davies, Nora Ephron, Peter Brown, P.D. James — probably my educational and professional background shows there,  and some (like Brian Greene) I don’t understand very well.  I continue to read both printed books and digital texts; my current project is John Eliot Norton’s Bach: Music In The Castle Of Heaven.

To sum up a counter position: A “book person” is an anachronism: the world is digital, information moves at blazing speed, and care, nuance, and precision are luxuries of the past.  Readers have become users; teachers have become suppliers, and students have become customers.  The competition for attention drowns out the sustained attention any book requires, and the mark of the contemporary is multi-tasking, even though humans have been shown to do that very badly.  Instead of nuance, we have media scolds and bludgeons; instead of discussion we have talking points and position papers; instead of reading we have scanning or surfing.  Is it any wonder that we wind up with in a bitterly contentious, polarized society marked by increasing, sharp differences between the very rich, the poor, those caught in the diminishing middle, —where everything is on the market, and humans are either the customers or the product?  Disruption is the word of the moment, nevermind whether it is a well-establish and solidly argued social good or simple mediocrity —that it’s disrupted is enough to draw the line between the tired old and the shiny new.  Aaron Bady’s sharp questioning of Clay Shirky reveal how possible futures become taken for inevitable outcomes, and the slippery proposition that those outside any institution, profession, or work are bound to understand it better than its practitioners.  “Open is open” seems to end all discussion, period.  It is alleged, if you are part of “closed” (read “old) system, you couldn’t possibly understand.

Printed books are an “old” format bound for disruption, right?  Turns out: not so fast.  People continue to want them, and sales remain strong, despite Amazon’s assault on bookstores.  (And I do mean assault.)  The “friction” (or difficulty) of obtaining a print book —you have to go somewhere to get one: library, bookstore, or online— is also a friction for the publisher (lately restyled as the “intellectual property owner” —but that’s another blog entry).  Once published and sold, a print book can’t be disappeared in an Orwellian or Statist (Fascist) manner.  Case in point: last summer the merger of Penguin and Random House led to the disappearing of 1,400 Random House digital books from the SHU library catalog —the terms of the deal seems to have indicated that the new management (mostly from Penguin) would not continue the contracts with digital book aggregators (in our case, eBrary Academic Complete).  Suddenly links didn’t work, and a few weeks later records displaying them were deleted from our library system.  Had we purchase those 1,400 books as printed, the library would still have them available.  At least a few of them are bound to have been of enduring value and related to SHU’s curriculum (it was Random House, an “old” and “quality” publisher).  Now we have to pay more —either acquire print copies, or find where they are available digitally.

This doesn’t get at why books really matter, of course.  I’m thinking of academic books: scholarly books, and high-quality books for the wider market (such as Robert Caro’s everlasting biography of Lyndon B. Johnson).  What matters is not their format, but their content, their intellectual, nuanced exploration and exposition of a subject.  Format is not incidental, but neither is it crucial.

Books are critical to education and the life of a culture because of the sustained attention required to write and to read them.  Books are critical because they encode or contain thinking that can become part of a public discourse —can be challenged, confirmed, critiqued, welcomed, despised, all the possible outcomes of seriously considering a proposition or an argument.  A book sticks around in a stable form so that the author cannot suddenly alter  its contents to suit latter convenience, prove herself or himself right, or respond to critics.

Books are destructible, and tyrants have long sought to destroy them.  Book burnings became a badge of totalitarianism in the 20th century.  But otherwise all the copies of a book are hard to destroy.  A widely distributed supply and market system made it highly likely that somewhere, somehow, a copy might survive.  This has mattered in the face of tyrant, and it matter most during the period when so many texts went underground during the great disruptions of the early Middle Ages.  This list of ancient authors who survived to be read later on the basis of a single copy is a long list, and includes works by Aristotle, Lucretius, and Tacitus.

The idea that books as a technology of learning are obsolete takes a very short view.  To be sure: some books are obsolete: who bothers to look up past market prices for securities in a printed volume?  A much longer view sees the value in the conversations among and between generations.  Partisans of the “originalist” view of the U.S. Constitution need to know what those original views are; partisans or a more evolutionist view need a sense of difference over time, of intervening realities and developments.  At the far end of this this longer horizon is the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand’s striking question: what are we doing that could make any difference 10,000 years from now?  (See The Long Now Foundation)

A neo-liberal university in which the customer (students + parents) is king may be able to “satisfice” their information needs by simply pulling random hits from a casual Google search.  That sells students and learning short, perhaps disastrously short.  Learning is more than simply a private good to be parceled out to those who can pay.  I believe in books, because books give witness to thinking that might propell such a university away from a view which spells long term disaster for learning, for universities, and for free society.

 

 

A book isn't an artifact, but a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity.
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My prevous post took a brief look at the religious ideas that permeate not only Jaron Lanier's Who Owns The Future? (whether he explicitly acknowledges those ideas or not). This post considers what he contributes about books, and the future of books.

(Lanier, author of Who Owns The Future? appears on the SHU campus on Wednesday, October 9, 7:00 p.m. Schine Auditorium)

Books have become a cultural flash point that inspire "maniacal scheming" (see pages 352-360) --an unwitting testament to books' enduring iconic, cultural power.  What bothers Lanier is that current development of networks --the Siren Servers that seek total computational awareness and control--might lead to losing "the pattern of what a book is in the stream of human life and thought." (353)  After sketching some possible future scenarios about the fate of books, authors, and readers, Lanier offers a definition (one of the very best I have ever read):

A book isn't an artifact, but a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity. The economic model of our networks has to be optimized to preserve that synthesis, or it will not serve [hu]mankind.(358)

Lanier here touches upon the emotional salience and cultural power that books evoke.  The uneasiness Lanier shares with many is not just about texts (tomes, bindings), but about human lives.  "Human life is its own purpose," he continues.  "Thinking about people in terms of the components on a network is--in intellectual and spiritual terms--a slow suicide for the researchers and a slow homicide against everyone else."(360)  The ingestion of millions of e-texts into Artificial Intelligence divorces what humans write about from who they are, and what makes their lives meaningful to them.  "Whether we will destroy culture in order to save/digitize it is still unknown."(353) (Lanier references that metaphor to the Vietnam war.)

What makes a liberal education liberal--freeing--is the strong association (synthesis) of particular texts with particular people, moments, events, movements, points of view.  The real intellectual problem with Wikipedia isn't its alleged accuracy or inaccuracy. Rather, it "proposes that knowledge can be divorced from point of view." Note that Lanier writes knowledge --not data, not information, not the "flashes of thought" that might be "inserted meaningfully into a shared semantic structure" (ibid.)  Knowledge is what humans make for other humans.  Strictly speaking, computers can store, locate, index, and transform data, but can't know in the same sense.

These are my own thoughts, sourced in Lanier's text, which I found to enormously helpful in articulating the fundamentally different business model of a library from a database, even a sort of meta-database (a database of databases --a discovery service, in other words).  What libraries are about is the discovery of knowledge in human communities and continuities, in a symmetrical transaction that celebrates unanswered questions (intellectual risk) and acknowledges the presence of other sources of knowledge --whether living persons, libraries, databases, search engines, or other human syntheses of any and every kind.  

This transaction (process, pedagogy) thrusts libraries into an educational process squarely at odds with Siren Servers that are naracisstic (as though they alone collect data), risk-externalizing (questions and uncertainties never belong to the Server, always to the user), and depend upon extreme information assymetry --users can't know what the Server already knows about them, and how it seeks to modify their behavior.

Understanding the cultural term "book" a "a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity" respects authors, readers, and the economic and intellectual chain of power and responsibility that connects them.  This also illuminates why some (many?) people care so passionately about books --what they care about is human continuity, personhood, what makes a human life worth living.  What better question could a liberal arts education pursue?  What could be more "relevant" to the challenges of living in a "flat," networked world?

Jaron Lanier's book Who Owns The Future? is (in the words of one of my beloved college professor's), "quite a read."
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Jaron Lanier's book Who Owns The Future? is (in the words of one of my beloved college professor's), "quite a read." (Lanier visits SHU on October 9, 2013.)  It's a wild, occasionally bumpy ride through simultaneous developments of technology, economy, and social thinking occasioned by the massive computing power ("big data") of arrays of servers.  When such an array achieves dominance in such a manner that it can aspire to omniscience, Lanier calls it a "siren server" --a software-mediated social vision that believes it's the only game in town, marked by radical information assymetry and outsources risk as much as possible.

There are so many elements of this book that I will pick out several for consideration, but one at a time. This piece concerns the religious elements of the social vision that advanced software engineers (called by synecdoche "Silicon Valley") seek to monetize and compell social acceptance.

Lanier does take this on in his fifth interlude, "The Wise Old Man in the Clouds," with the double meaning intact. Silicon Valley (or at least, many there) anticipate The Singularity, when software comes to write itself and computers outstrip human interaction, when the memories, emotions, and thoughts of an individual can be uploaded into "the cloud" and when the body died, the person lives on --when illness, death, scarcity (want), and human limitations of every kind are overcome (p. 325-331), when robots can provide satisfying sex.  (Really! --see pages 359-360)

As a technologist Lanier (who is both a technologist and a philosopher) wants to skitter away from religious questions.  Speaking for technologists, "We serve people best when we keep our religous ideas out of our work." (p. 194) --and yet this book is shot through with religious sensibility and ideas, including non-traditional human development ideas famous in the Bay area.  The questions of limits and Ultimate Concern, of human closed-in awareness and the unexpected in-breaking of The Other, keep returning again and again.  No one has yet successfully addressed these questions as regards technologists.  (And by "successfully," I don't mean that I would agree with that writer, but that such a writer both acknowledges these questions and moves discourse forward.)

Lanier's makes frequent reference to visionaries (H.G. Wells, Alan Turning, Ted Nelson), philosophers (Aristotle, Hobbes, Malthus, Marx) and science fiction writers or characters (Philip K. Dick, Dr. Strangelove, Star Trek the TV series, especially the original series).  All of these raised questions broadly classes as theological or religious --although apparently in the Silicon Valley "religious" means such Concern as narrowly defined by California-flavored evangelicalism, western Mormon sensibilities (whether orthodox LDS or not), and the spectre of fundamentalisms of every stripe.  ("Spiritual" is a very different word, suggesting all the happy feelings of Eastern philosophies mixed in with self-affirming slogans.) No wonder Lanier wants to restrict technologists to keep religious ideas out of their work.  

But does "religion" have to be defined that way?  (The fact that violence-prone religious fundamentalists share a small bit of thinking in common with "religion" makes other religious people guilty of crimes against humanity to the same but narrowly limited extent that chemists are guilty because they share a small amount of thinking with DKFarben, makers of the poisons used by the Nazis.)  The Silicon Valley amounts to being the paradigm of, among other things, "spiritual but not religious."  But that's a feint, simply deflecting attention.

On the one hand, "what does it mean to be human" (which Lanier re-phrases as, "whether people are 'special'", p. 196) is not a technological question and can't be answered in those terms and limitations.  On the other hand, those terms and limitations beg that question.  The adjustment of software and information to reality is imperfect --reality consistently outstrips human ability to encode it.  (For all the hype that information lies at the heart of the universe --such as DNA encoding for example-- it takes humans to translate that reality into symbols or code.)  The religious and philosophical questions raised by massive "cloud" computing are inescapable, and only a resolute will to face them for what they are will sing a song over against the Sirens strong enough to modify their behavior.

Finally, someone else takes on Clay Shirky.
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Finally, someone else takes on Clay Shirky.  (See my own posts below.)

I especially appreciate how Bady's remarks about how Shirky stacks the rhetorical deck in his own favor, so that anyone inside higher education is incapable of questioning higher education.  Oh, but I'm a librarian, so I'm not capable of questioning so famous a writer. I must be part of the problem, and I'm solely hell-bent on self-preservation, apparently.

One might add, by Shirky's logic, that anyone inside capitalism is incapable of questioning capitalism --this is the classic "false consciousness" rhetoric: your consciousness is false, so you are unable to see that your consciousness is false.  This is another variety of the rhetorical move made in previous decades by Michel Foucault, for whom power was everything --and if you question Foucault, you obviously do so because you resist Foucault's power with your own.  Huh?

An academic library enacts a community of practice so that learners move beyond "standard answers" to understand the real questions, sensibilities, and aesthetics of their disciplines, and why they matter.
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Clayton Christiansen's impressive work on disruptive innovation (see previous post) arises from his examination of innovative developments in concrete products such as transistors, computer chips, and automobiles.  His analysis has both an intellectual plausibility and an on-ground sense of touch.  

One of the main points (to paraphrase crudely) is that the new innovation frequently is not (in fact) as good as the old, expensive, hard-to-get product, but for the innovation's users it's good enough.  

Example: the incursion of foreign automobiles into the USA market in the 1970s, in particular German and Japanese cars.  They had a reputation as not being as reliable as your grandfather's Oldsmobile or Buick (and maybe they weren't).  I owned a 1967 Volkswagon bug, and it wasn't totally reliable.  I later owned two successive Ford Pintos, the cars that exploded on rear-end impact (faulty gas tank).  They were terrible, and I've never been persuaded to own another Ford.  So while German and Japanese cars were regarded as less reliable (imagine that!), in fact the Big Three automakers were producing glitzy junk. No wonder younger drivers abandoned them in droves.

In that case, not only was the "new" product "good enough," the former product had deteriorated.  Earlier, the first transistor radios were only "good enough" (tinny sound), but they were a huge, portable improvement on the old tubes.  These products are really clear, and consumer-oriented, although Christiansen's analysis also holds ground very well in the case of computer chips, which are secondarily consumer-oriented.

So what do academic libraries produce?  --much less clear than radios and automobiles.

The old language about "the academic library supports the students and faculty" is insufficient. (See Scott Bennett's article.) The support role has been supplemented (if not replaced) by Google and other traffikers in information.  That is the true innovative disruption in the academic library --Google (Amazon, etc.) is not "as good as" but is "good enough," and the exchange is not primarily financial (dollars for support) as much as time and effort.  For many using Google (etc.) is good enough: not so much work, easy to use, and ubiquitous.  Just think about the question, "why is it so much easier to buy a book than to borrow a book?"

If the old support, service-oriented language is insufficient, what's left for academic libraries?

Real (or deep) learning happens in communities.  In a community, they internalize the implicit practices of a discipline that matter most.  That's why they are called disciplines, not just subject matter --learning puts the schaft (schaffen=create) in the Wissenschaft (wissen=to know) in German, the source of the model of the modern Ph.D. research university.

But the research university "DNA" is just what Christiansen claims innovative organizations such as BYU Idaho disruptive.  There are several levels to his claim. Consider that this organization is called BYU (Brigham Young University) Idaho for a reason --it's basically oriented to the "mother ship" BYU in Provo, Utah.  All of BYU receives a huge tuition subsidy for all LDS students who are "temple worthy" (an LDS status indicating good standing: in 2011-2012 $4,560 vs $9,120 for non-LDS).  Who teaches at BYU-Idaho?  It doesn't produce it's own faculty, but depends on other organizations (such as BYU Provo).  While traditional faculty may face disruptive innovation in time, some alternative method of demonstrating certified expertise then will have to be found --or consider that impact on medical or engineering educations.

Whether or not every college has the "DNA" of "Harvard" (roughly equals the Ph.D.-granting Carnegie Class One research university) --deep learning still occurs in communities of practice.  John Seely Brown (.pdf) writes:

Indeed, knowing only the explicit, mouthing the formulas, is exactly what gives an outsider away.  Insiders know more.  By coming to inhabit the relevant community, they get to know not just the "standard" answers, but the real questions, sensibilities, and aesthetics, and why they matter.

Notice Brown's verb inhabit. I'm sure that such a community can be inhabited via distance education modalities, but it takes a lot of work.

Libraries and librarians come to understand how people learn as self-directed, internalizing learners --the library is a learning enterprise without the structure of the direct learning environment (classroom or course management space).  Students are intentional learners, not just users whose use of resources the librarians facilitate.

The disruptive innovation presented by all kinds of information technology, and finally by Google, Amazon, iTunesU, MOOCs, and their kindred --this disruption forces the clarification of what an academic library produces: an environment where students take responsibility for their own learning.  Librarians enact the institutional mission of the university in the context of that environment.  

An academic library enacts a community of practice so that learners move beyond "standard answers" to understand the real questions, sensibilities, and aesthetics of their disciplines, and why they matter.   Libraries are one of the places where disciplinary outsiders can become knowledgable, practicing insiders.  The library enacts the schaft in the Wissenschaft.

 

Disruptive innovation in academic libraries can only be understood in the context of disruptive technology and the complex variables of what academic libraries actually produce.
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"Disruptive innovation" has become such a buzz-word that it seems to have spawned a minor industry.  Disruptive innovation is "explained" in a video featuring Clayton Christiansen, the guru and (for practical purposes) the inventor of the phrase.  Let it be noted that Christiansen himself sticks to a careful, specific definition.  (The commentary spawned by this phrase, however, has taken it way beyond Christiansen's probable intentions.)  According to that video:

Disruptive innovation is not a breakthrough innovation that makes good products a lot better. . . . It transforms a product that historically was so expensive and complicated that only a few people with a lot of money and a lot of skill had access to it.  Disruptive innovation makes it so much more affordable and accessible that a much larger population have access to it.

Christiansen goes on in his writings (such as The Innovative University --which I reviewed here) to add that such new, affordable products may be (in fact) inferior to the previous, expensive products --but that doesn't matter: the new products are good enough.  Common examples that Christiansen and others cite are transistors (in particular, transistor radios for consumers), automobiles, and computer chips.

One would foolhardy --and probably wrong-- to doubt the basic wisdom of Christiansen's insights.  But how has this really played out in academic libraries?  I've read a lot about this, but in the end I use what I have read to understand my own experience.

So what is "the product" that academic libraries produce, much less that universities produce?  This is where Christiansen's concepts get stickier.

So far as disruptive technology goes, my entire career in librarianship has enacted the disruptions.

Digression: In 1981 I began work as a cataloguer's assistant in the Historical Studies Library at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton --the original think tank for Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, Robert J. Oppenheimer, George A. Kennan, Erwin Panofsky, to name only a few of the true luminaries.  A great deal of everyday life the later 20th and 21st centuries is founded on the work of IAS scholars.  While I was there I encounter --and listened to-- George Kennan, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Hawking, Irving Lavin, Albert O. Hirschman, and Clifford Geertz.  For a humble cataloguer's assistant, recent M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, it was a very heady experience.  (And this after three years in Princeton, where I remember encountering John Nash, Rudolf Carnap, John Fleming, and Carl Schorske).

Anyway, what about being a cataloguer's assistant?  I actually typed cards for the catalog.  That kind of work disappeared by about 1985 (--but not before I stopped doing it in 1982).  My first professional job as a cataloger 1986-1993 disappeared after I resigned it, as did work as an Cataloging Associate at Princeton University, and Editor of a Union List of Serials for academic libraries in Rhode Island, 1996-1998.  Jobs I have held since --Head of Technical Services in what is now a constitutent library of Columbia University, and Systems and Electronic Resources Librarian at Muhlenberg College, still exist in some fashion, but actual work --what those people do everyday-- has changed dramatically.

In short, I used to do a lot of things that computers do now, mediated and supervised by human beings. Information technology in one sense disrupted that work but not completely --professional-level care for database quality and consistency (=avoiding garbage-in) is what makes the very daily world of the Internet go.  It's built on the work of many, many people long before "computers" stopped being people and started being things.  (That obscure reference explained.)

Work in libraries 1980-present has been a story of disruption, but also continuity.  Grant that the technology is disruptive, what about disruptive innovation?  What does an academic library produce?  That is less clear --and for that reason, some people argue, academic libraries shouldn't be funded.  "Show your productivity in numbers, or be gone," in effect.

Four activities --reading, writing, critical thinking, and calculating-- are crucial to liberal education. A person who can't do them can't really be called educated. Social learning is an important supplement to, but not a replacement of, individual learning.
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This post refers back to the post (below) of May 14, 2010, and the post of August 25.

In those posts, I mentioned Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) and his article Individual Knowledge and the Internet.  Sanger analyzes three common strands of current thought about education and the Internet.  "First is the idea that the instant availability of knowledge online makes memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary."  The second strand claims that "individual learning is outmoded, and that "social learning" is the cornerstone of "Learning 2.0"  (The third two strand will be examined more fully in a later post.)

Why do I return to an article published a year ago?  I believe that Sanger is on to something: a superficial, misleading articulation among certain educationists that learning has become fundamentally different with the advent of social web tools.  On the contrary, Sanger see such tools as fancy tools, but only as tool towards a very similar end: the content and method of liberal learning which remains to be done, no matter what the technological environment.  I agree with him.  I think that Sanger's argument is worth continuing, if only because, as the bloom seems to be coming off some Web tools, this is a teachable moment to ask, what does it mean to be truly educated?

But back to Sanger's critique of a second strand of thinking about learning adn the Internet: that individual patterns of learning are outmoded, and the new pattern of learning (thoroughly invested in and enabled by Web social tools) is collaborate, social group learning.  Just as some educationists' first claim that the Web has made memorization unnecessary (by in part caricaturing all remembered content as mere rote, unreflective memorization), so this strand caricatures individual learning as --well, individualistic-- as lonely, uncreative, and private to the point of solipsism.

Now group learning and social learning using social web interaction --wikis, online conversations, online fora of all sorts, can certainly be valuable.  They can also have problems, and carry costs and benefits which a wise teacher can choose to use as time, attention, and the situation suggest.  This is to say that these tools are exactly that: tools; that other tools (reading a book, an article, summarizing a paper, writing a poem, translating a passage, or other traditional activities) might also be useful, or not, as the situation suggests.

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, however, go much further (in the article cited above).  The go on to claim that "collaborative learning" is "the core model of pedagogy," and that of course digital platforms alone enable this.  Asking what is meant by social learning, they claim:

Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.

In other words, social learning shifts focus from content to process, which "stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning."  This view (according to Brown and Adler) views knowledge as a kind of "substance" and that pedagogy --the art of teaching-- concerns how to transfer this substance from those who know to those who do not yet know, i.e. from teachers to students.  This "transfer" contrasts with the "constructed" knowledge students arrive at collaboratively.  How "substance" differs from "construction" is left unsaid.  As Sanger points out:

One could just as easily, and with just as much justification, assert that what is constructed in social learning is a "substance" that is socially shared. One can simply say instead that Cartesian learning involves the teacher causing the student to believe something that is true, by communicating the true thought.

In any case, Brown's and Adler's understanding of "Cartesian" (by extension, of Descartes) is laughably superficial.  "Substance" is not a prominent term for Descartes, who though that each person's mind is a substance, not knowledge itself.  Brown and Adler have simply adopted an idea from widely repeated (and vague) academic discourse that knowledge is a social construction (certainly a problematic idea --just ask a physicist).  Knowledge as a kind of "substance" is much more Aristotelian or even Thomist, but those thinkers are too intimidating to serve well as a kind of fashionable foil for social constructivists.  Thankfully Brown and Adler did not drag Kant into this.

The distinction boils down to learning with or without the presence and support of peers.  Certainly some people need peers in order to maximize their abilities to learn; others need solitude.  Isn't this obvious?   The view that social learning is therefore superior is easy to claim, but very difficult to verify in any meaningful manner, because "social learning" simply lacks the definitional heft to test rigorously.  The several tools which Brown and Adler present as examples of social learning are interesting, but cannot bear the entire weight of presenting an alternative to a straw-man "Cartesian." 

Ultimately, you have to do your own reading, no matter how the Decameron or the Divine Comedy come to you (to think of two classic texts with extensive online tools).  You may post your thoughts in essays on a blog or wiki (as I am doing), but the act of writing is still solitary, and needs practice for mastery.  (I certainly don't claim the latter!)  Discussion in any forum, whether face-to-face or online, is a great thing --but I agree with Sanger that a true scholar needs the ability to think independently.  A scholar is not automatically a member of a herd.  You might get a lot of help from peers to learn maths, science, management, economics, or a host of subjects --but if you don't master the material yourself, then you haven't learned it.  If you can't do the problems yourself, you haven't mastered them.  Your peers will not be omnipresent, whether in an examination, or on the job.

I agree with Sanger that those four activities --reading, writing, critical thinking, and calculating-- are crucial to liberal education.  A person who can't do them can't really be called educated.  Social learning is an important supplement to, but not a replacement of, individual learning.

Why does this matter to me as a librarian?  I am involved with planning a library renovation --I am making sure that there will be both group and individual spaces for study.  Part of liberal learning includes memorization, reading, writing, independent judgement, calculating --exactly the kind of independently responsible learning so much in demand by knowledge workers today and in the future.  What goes on in a library is individual learning, supplemented by group learning.  Individual knowledge is still necessary in the internet age, and "social learning" without individual knowledge is insufficient to the tasks of reading, writing, critical judgement, and calculating.  At the end of the day, you have to wipe your own nose, say your own prayers, reading your own texts, and work your own problems.

Google's primary responsibility is to make money for its shareholders. Libraries exist to get books to readers.
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Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library, writes in The New York Review of Books:

Like all commercial enterprises, Google's primary responsibility is to make money for its shareholders.  Libraries exist to get books to readers --books and other forms of knowledge and entertainment, provided for free.

Darnton's laser prose cuts to the heart of the mission of an academic library: to connect resources to users, period.  No shareholders, no restrictions based on an individual's ability to pay, no corporate interests to satisfy.  The academic library may be the last great commercial-free information commons, and it is endangered because it is often so misunderstood.

Academic libraries have, of course, service plans, budgets, stakeholders, access policies --and sit amidst institutions which charge tuition, often a lot of money.  But after the price of tuition, after admission to the University, after matriculation and registration --the whole of the library information commons is available to every user, individually for free.  Hardly free for the institution.

Darnton's three jeremiads survey the vicious cycle of esclation in the prices of materials followed by decline in library acquisition of those same materials; the unsustainability of commercial journal prices (written and edited by university researchers for the most part!); and the challenges of Google Books, the Google settlement with copyright holders (still not resolved), and the Digital Public Library of America.  The information commons --that bounded financial and institutional space which balances the interests of writers, readers, publishers, colleges and universities, and data bundlers (such as Ebsco)-- is up for renegotiation.  Every major avenue of library acquisitions (monographs, journals, databases, consortia) is undergoing transformation as I write, even for a modest academic library such as Sacred Heart University's.

Fr. Victor Austin of St. Thomas Church (Episcopal) in New York City once told a story --a man stopped him towards the rear of the church after a evening service led by the church's renowed Choir of Men and Boys.  "Is it free?" the man asked Fr. Austin.  Confused at first, Austin replied that you don't need a ticket to attend the service.  "But is it really free?" the man persisted --perhaps used to religious communities where one needs to be a paying member to attend high holy services.  St. Thomas' Church  --with a professional choir, much less the Zeffirellian church itself, the ornate style of worship, the public location on Fifth Avenue-- is a spectacularly expensive operation to maintain, possible only through generous gifts both past (read: endowment) and present.  "Is it really free?"  Fr. Austin responded, "No, it is infinitely expensive to provide this service.  But for you, it is free."

That is exactly the position of an academic library, a non-commercial, non-shareholder-driven information common space.  It is very, very expensive to maintain this service, this space.  Librarians can shower you with statistics.  University librarians read more spread-sheets than books on some days.  University administrators and trustees have every right to insist on a lively return on their investment, but measured in cultural, academic, intellectual terms --not expressed as net profit.  It is hugely expensive to run a library.  Academic libraries were once famously called "the bottomless pit, the library as viewed from the administration building" because of their insatiable budgetary demands (Munn, 1968).

But for the library user, it's free.  It must be.  Creative human life, the life of the mind is free.  It is not a return to the shareholders.