MIT Milestone Celebration The Future of OCW and Education

GUEST SPEAKER: And what we'll be doing is getting started with our panel discussion. We have structured this discussion to leave a lot of time for questions and answers and discussion from the floor. So this afternoon, we've heard about ways in which OpenCourseWare and similar resources are being transformational in how people get access to information and how they use it. Now I want to turn our attention more to the future and the changes we're likely to see in the years to come. My pleasure to introduce this panel-- the moderator for the panel is professor Hal Abelson. He's a class of 1922 professor of computer science and engineering in the MIT department of electrical engineering and computer science. He's joined in the panel by three distinguished individuals-- Dr. Charles Vest, who, of course, all of us here know extraordinarily well, is currently the president of the National Academy of Engineering and of course the president emeritus of MIT. John Seely Brown is the chief innovation officer of 12 Entrepreneuring and the former chief scientist of Xerox Corporation. And then Sam Pitroda is the chairman of the India Knowledge Commission as well as the chairman and CEO of WorldTel Limited. Hal will introduce the panel's topic. And the questions our panelists will be addressing, he'll briefly describe that. Each of the panelists will make a brief statement about those questions. And then Hal will control the flow of questions and answers from the floor. Please, Hal. HAL ABELSON: So I wanted to start by saying how I feel. What I want to say is to yell, we did it! [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] And that comes-- and that comes with a certain amount of pride. You heard Susan mention a little while ago that we have MIT students using OpenCourseWare in teaching MIT courses at places around the world, including China. One of those cities is Dalian. So the students are going to Dalian and learning that it's not enough to change light bulbs. And a lot of people have a lot of friends here in Dalian. But the main emotion I feel right now is one of tremendous humility. And it's a sense of how tiny a step we have made and how tiny a part of this transformation is MIT OpenCourseWare. Tom talked about the change from globalization 1.0 to this other amazing emerging thing that's happening. And I think what MIT OpenCourseWare has led us to do is to see that we're in something like education 1.0. We couldn't even see that before. And now the question is, what comes next? What are the opportunities that come? What are the things that, having gotten to this point, we can't predict, but we can maybe try to imagine? And we have a tremendous panel of three people to help us imagine it. Sam Pitroda is chairman and CEO of WorldTel Limited. He was science advisor to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and was responsible then for India's foreign and domestic telecommunications policies. He's been a force for innovation since the 1960s when he invented what's considered the first electronic diary, one of the first examples of handheld computing. He's particularly known for having introduced microprocessors and telephone switches. Sam is widely considered to be responsible for India's communications revolution. And this began with a crusade in the 1980s where he worked for Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on a 1 rupee a year salary where he put together a team of professionals, a digital switching system, set up rural exchanges, set up the factories that made the fiber optic cables, introduced automatic dialing, international dialing. In 1980, India had about a million telephones altogether. And by 2000, 3/4 of India's half million villagers had phone service. Sam is currently chairman of India's National Knowledge Commission, which is a high level advisory committee to the prime minister, whose objective is to transform India into a knowledge society. He is passionate about the hunger for education in India and the fact that education is the key to economic transformation and that the key to that is the expansion of universities and colleges. And he's often quoted as saying, "why does India have 7 IITs when we could have 70?" John Seely Brown is the inspirational seer for the age of people and information. He's been chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation, a position he held for 20 years, director of Xerox Palo Alto research center when that was the leading computer science research center in the world. He was the first computing research manager to really focus on the profound relations between information technology and social issues and to bring sociologists and architects into the computing research community. He's written widely on research management and on innovation and on the human context in which information technology is embedded. John's leadership in technology goes back to the '60s when he created what is still one of the world's best examples of artificial intelligence-based computing tutoring. And he maintained that during his years at Xerox when he was co-founder of the Xerox Institute for Research and Learning. And it persists to the present day with his thoughts and writing on how the net is changing, the fundamental relations between people and knowledge and between learning and society. I've been asked to do many silly things when I've been at MIT, but ranking up there as the silliest is the idea that I would be introducing Chuck Vest to an MIT audience. So let me just say that people talked a lot about the genesis of OpenCourseWare. And I won't repeat that. But I do want to say it was Chuck and his administration who took this nutty idea that was presented by a bunch of faculty and glued that to a sense of a institutional vision and a sense of the civic responsibility of a university in the modern age. But I've got to say that as honored as we are to have our guests, the real honor is you, both the people who have made it, but also many of the leaders of the open educational resources community who are here. So we don't want this to be a one-way discussion of hearing great thoughts. This is really meant to be a discussion and a hope that maybe we can all together start imagining something this afternoon that will take us from this education 1.0 finally seen in a global context to something that could be much, much greater. So, Chuck, let me ask you to start. CHUCK VEST: Thank you, Hal. Views I'm going to express are solely my own and neither those of MIT nor the NAE. I'd like to begin sneaking up on the future by looking back very briefly at the beginning and looking at the present and giving you my idea of what some of the big forces are out there. First of all, the question in 1999 when all of this started was were residential universities dying dinosaurs, and would information technology and so-called distance learning render residential universities obsolete? And by the way, was there a great opportunity for universities to make a whole lot of money by teaching other people at a distance mediated by information technology? And the answer that MIT's faculty gave to that was of course OCW. So at the time, MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative was absolutely counter to the trends of the day. It was revolutionary. And, Tom, I don't know we used the word "harm," but we certainly knew it was risky-- revolutionary and risky. And it was entirely consistent with MIT's culture and tradition. If it weren't for that, we wouldn't be sitting here today. And also to me, the fact that OCW was actually realized and funded at least up to this point demonstrates the power of a good idea. If you have a really good idea in today's world, and in this great nation, you can still find a way to do it. And above all, I always viewed-- and I think my colleagues did-- OCW as an adventure. We really didn't know where it was going to lead when we started out. And you'll hear lots more about where it has led today. So some personal beliefs and observations about all of this-- I'm a great believer-- in fact, I'm in love with the residential university because I still believe that nothing can actually replace the magic that occurs when you've got a bunch of bright, motivated, diverse young men and women around 18, 19, 20 years of age coming together, living, learning in a very intense environment. Teaching and learning, no matter how they occur are really deeply human activities. And I think as we try to understand the potential for technology in all this, we must remember teaching and learning are deeply human activities. But there is also no question then and certainly no question now that computers and communications-- that is, information technology-- are clearly a hugely transformative force. And history tells us that technological process always outpaces social progress. So the kind of conclusion that I drew from this, and I think that, in fact, that is what OCW represents is that what began to emerge at least for a period was a way in which relatively stable and indeed conservative institutions like universities can develop enormous synergies through the use of ever-expanding technological tools. So you can at once be conservative and then in very new ways evolving and innovating very rapidly. So add to all this the fact that MIT's OCW combines the educational quality and pedagogical approach and ways of organizing knowledge of a great university with the democratizing and empowering forces of the internet and the worldwide web in this increasingly interconnected world that we just have heard so much about. But of course, there is much more than just MIT's educational content going up on the web everywhere for everybody for free. There is a whole movement which actually preceded it, starting with building vast digital archives of scholarly materials, starting with things like JSTOR and Artstor and on and on. There is open digital publication that has developed, things like the Public Library of Science. There's open academic software platforms and pedagogy like Sakai and all kinds of other open content initiatives around the country and around the world. And I want to particularly mention quickly something that we really haven't talked much about today, which is the promise of web lab, which again was started here by MIT faculty, particularly our colleague Jesus del Alamo, which already, although in an embryonic way-- it's real-- is allowing young people in, say, sub-Saharan Africa to sit around in front of a laptop and in fact control real experiments for educational purposes using equipment that may be in industry, may be at MIT, may be at Stanford, what have you. So there's a whole lot more out there. And also, if we step back, there's a huge number of driving forces that are kind of pushing and shoving and shaping all of this or at least creating the opportunities. One is the connectivity, that worldwide connectivity that Tom has eloquently explained to us. And second is in fact globalization itself, this new world in which we must compete and cooperate simultaneously in all kinds of different ways across traditional boundaries. And third-- and all of you who travel like I'm fortunate to be able to do-- the rest of the world, whether we know it or not in this country-- the rest of the world is really tuning in to the increasing importance of education. They really are understanding that if the young people aren't educated, they're not going to be able to play in this evolving world. So what all of this leads to is what I like to call the meta university. The meta university, something I may return to in a minute, is really a new digital substrate or infrastructure of all this content, all these platforms, all this connectivity that teachers, learners, and institutions worldwide can build their own education for their own purposes shape to their own context upon. So on to the future. First, let's start with the pragmatics. How the future plays out not just for MIT OCW, but for the entire open course and open content movement is going to depend on how well and how creatively we meet at least four barriers or obstacles. And they really are obvious. One is intellectual property. Can we really pick up and run with Creative Commons and so forth and have the commitment to work with what we have to work to enable us to have this openness in an age of ownership of property? Second is quality control. The web, by definition, is the Wild West of information. And if people are going to be serious learners, somehow things like the impramatur of great universities like this are going to be very important. Third is, of course, how do you meet the costs? I sometimes give talks about things like OCW, and I have a slide that say, what's the business model? And then I say, next slide, please. And we go on to the next topic. Because we are providing a free good, somebody ultimately has to see the value and pay for it in this open sharing way. Well, we do that by partnering. Are there new funding models? Susan and the whole team here are thinking very hard about these issues going forward. And of course, finally is bandwidth. We're all used to having lots of connectivity and bandwidth. But despite the flattening of the world, there's still plenty of places who don't have it in the extent that it is needed. And so new delivery mechanisms like the creative use of iPods and so forth and so on has to be a big player going forward. So what's the conclusion I draw from all this? First of all, in addition to having a great idea that came from this extraordinary faculty committee, most of the members of which you met just a few moments ago, MIT OCW had first mover advantage. And first mover advantage coupled with an institutional quality level and literally iconic recognition factor around the world-- combining those two things allowed us, I believe, to move forward. And also-- and keep this in mind as we try to think through the future and decide what weighting function to put on all the things John's going to tell us. We had what was fundamentally a very simple, accessible product. And wrestling with that tension about what's innovative, new, and different and what is really easy to put in people's hands and use is, I think, a lot of what we have to think forward in the whole movement going forward. OCW here and elsewhere is going to have to thrive based on, I think, at least four things. One, excellent standards of quality and as I say, the sort of quality control and recognition factors. Scale and comprehensiveness were what was particularly unique about OpenCourseWare. There was nothing new about the idea of putting some material on the web. It was the scale and institutional comprehensiveness that gave it its uniqueness and still gives it uniqueness today. It will thrive depending on our ability and will to continue to define the cutting edge and, in fact, to innovate fast and well, which is what, of course, has to go on everywhere in this globalized world. And finally, I would put out that it will thrive depending on how we address the widening uses, because we've talked about this as this wonderful global free good, which is something I passionately believe in, but it's having enormous impact inside MIT. Students and faculty members using it as kind of a time clutch to shift forward and to see how fundamentals are going to be applied in later courses or to look from a course backward to refresh and so forth. What can we do in the daunting task facing this nation and others in secondary education and lifelong learning, something that has just got to be a reality in any advanced society today. And I believe that MIT OCW must by definition thrive on globalization. We must embrace openness and the creation of electronic-based learning communities. We must continue to define the cutting edge while remaining widely globally accessible in what we do. And above all, we will thrive if and only if we continue as you have done so marvelously really standing tall for the basic principle of sharing and empowerment. I was going to read you two paragraphs from a book I wrote on the meta university, but I'm going to skip that so we can go on and hear from Sam what is really happening beyond the boundaries of Cambridge. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] SAM PITRODA: Thank you. CHUCK VEST: Thank you. SAM PITRODA: I'd like to comment on OCW from the viewpoint of India. India is a country in a hurry, growing at the rate of 9%, 1.1 billion people, 550 million below age of 25, expanding everywhere and demanding low-cost solutions. Just to give you an idea, when I entered telecom in the '80s, we had about 2 million telephones for the entire country of 750 million people then. Today we have or we are adding 7 to 8 million cell phones every month. The cost structure is such that while the world is looking at $11 ARPU, average revenue per user, India can survive and flourish with $5 ARPU. So today our main need is speed, scale, and low-cost models. In this process of development, we recognize we have serious skill shortages. We don't have enough engineers, scientists, teachers, including truck drivers. Today India needs 500,000 trained truck drivers. There are a lot of crazy people driving around without license. As a result of this, prime minister of India decided to set up a National Knowledge Commission a couple of years ago. We have seven members in the commission. We meet once every two months for three days, and we look at five areas of knowledge-- access to knowledge-- to us, that means literacy, languages, translations, libraries, networks, portals, reservations, affirmative action programs. Then we look at knowledge concepts-- primary education, secondary education, distance learning, OpenCourseWare, higher education, vocational education, so and so forth. We also look at creation of knowledge-- science and technology, patents, copyright, trademark, entrepreneurship, innovations. Application of knowledge for agriculture, health, and small and medium-scale industries. And finally, e-governance. In education, we are focused on three key challenges-- expansion-- we don't have enough schools, enough teachers, enough professors at all levels. Second, excellence. Leaving aside top tier of maybe 5% of universities, IITs, IIMs, and some other universities, quality of education at university level is very poor. And third, equity. We have to make sure the poorest of the poor can have the opportunity to go to the best schools. As a result of all these discussions in the last two years, government of India has decided to quadruple investments in education in the next five years. According to 11th plan, Indian government would be spending $65 billion in education. We are building 30 new major national universities, 4,000 colleges, providing additional meals to 60 million children, mid-day meal program. We want to grow from 320 universities to 1,500 in next five years. How do we do all of these things? We are beginning to ask questions that we have never asked before-- questions like do you really need classroom to learn? Today, when you think of education, you think of duster, blackboard, chalk, teacher, textbook, exam, grades, so and so forth. So that's one fundamental question we are asking. Second, what is the role of the teacher? Traditionally, a teacher has been busy creating content and delivering content. Can I take that away from teacher and have content created somewhere else and delivered through electronic media? So future teacher would be more of a mentor. Third, what would the university of 2050 look like? Do you think they would have a campus like this? Today, when we are building university, automatically we are going off and acquiring 500 acre land, creating huge amount of buildings. And people like me are saying, look, this is not feasible. We just don't have enough resources in spite of $65 billion to, one, train teachers and, two, create infrastructure. And that's where I believe OCW kind of an experiment gives some hope. We don't know how it soon will unfold. We had a group on OCW in India. We had one of your MIT representatives on the group [INAUDIBLE]. We spend about six, nine months studying the whole subject, and we have submitted recommendations to the prime minister. Our normal process is we have a working group set up on a subject, and we deal with about 50 different subjects like, say, national knowledge network. We would have about 30 people working on national knowledge network, spend nine months, come back with a white paper, which we will debate at the National Knowledge Commission. And the output would be a three-page letter from me to the prime minister saying, we suggest following things for the government. We are planning to build a knowledge network to connect 5,000 locations with 1-gigabit broadband connectivity to connect all of our universities, major libraries, R&D institutions, agricultural research, and health research. OCW becomes an important part of our effort. We are still learning. We're not very clear as to where we are headed. But I see a lot of hope, and I hope we can work with MIT to learn more about this experiment some more and get some help. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] JOHN SEELY BROWN: I want to do something slightly different, but building on everything we've heard today and, Tom, also pulling off some of the things you were saying. I'm really struck-- you know, I spent some time in India and helped write a report called "Minds on Fire." Interesting question, how do we get minds on fire? Is not our real challenge the challenge of imagination, inspiration, and intuition? I think those triads are a very powerful notion. I thought it was strange to come to MIT to talk about inspiration, imagination, and so on, because every time I come here, I walk across campus, and I run into students. And I got to tell you, the students on this campus have more fire in the belly, minds on fire than any place I know of in the world. I'm not gonna comment about the faculty. I'm talking about the students. [LAUGHTER] OK? I don't meet the faculty very often. But the students you meet in the bars and things like this. And it's really interesting. And you step back a moment. You might even say back to the future. And you go back to the origins of most of our physical sciences. And you recognize that science grew out of tinkering. We were tinkerers. And we were tinkerers. And we were bloggers. Those bloggers happened to be formed-- called letters, the Royal Society of Letters. But that's how science got off the ground to a very large extent. I think, Tom, if you go back to your platform, we're now beginning to enter a new world, a new flat kind of world with a new kind of platform, a platform fundamentally empowering tinkerers, all kinds of tinkerers. Some might call them mashups. Some might call them remix. Some might call them actually engaging in tinkering in the old style, tinkering that built our automotive industry, I might point out, in the 1900s and so on and so forth, tinkering and building real stuff as well. I'm really struck. Let's take some examples. Think about open source. We may actually be inculturating maybe a million students not into the theory of computer science, but the practices of certain communities of computer science. Communities are practice, different open source communities. The Linux community is different than the Apache community is different than Red Hat. Each of these communities have their own kind of distinctiveness, sensibilities, and so on. But you have a passion to join those. And in joining those, you pick up their practices, their ways of looking at the world. Let's go on. That's so obvious, but it is pretty pervasive around the world. Let's talk about astronomy. Think about for the moment the Faulkes telescope. Two beautiful telescopes-- one I know well in Maui, actually paid for by the English government, actually by a man named Faulkes. And this is a completely robotically driven telescope. Students all over England, Australia, and now opened up through OCW a limited amount can actually program up interesting experiments to run on this telescope. There's only one catch. The catch is you've got to make it open source. That's to say that you have to put whatever you take up on the net, and you have to give your interpretations to that. And other people from the community, including professionals, are there to comment on what you do with that. A new kind of learning community between-- I'm going to come back to it-- amateurs and professionals is starting to emerge here just naturally in the white space, so to speak. What do we have here in Boston? Something called the MicroObservatory-- the MicroObservatory up the street has either two or three telescopes, robotic telescopes, fairly simple telescopes. Interestingly, every night this week before I got on the airplane last night, I have grabbed time on those telescopes and made certain measurements that get delivered to me in the morning to go over. And then I can put it through my own digital signal processing algorithms, because they give it to me in the right kind of format to actually be able to do even more processing on that. Now let's think about the world of insects. By the way, today's kids aren't necessarily turned on by digital chips like we were. They are turned on by how bugs work, how the animal world works. Now let's think about Bugscope. Bugscope is a fairly serious electron-scanning microscope, again, robotically controlled and put on the net. Kids from all over can submit samples. They get prepared. And actually, high school students from around the world can use that as a remote instrument to explore things. Kids get turned on by this kind of tinkering. They can actually, as I did by mistake two nights ago, drastically over-expose things on one of your telescopes here. You learn by failure. You learn by tinkering again. Now think about going back to the topic that Tom ended with, the whole issue of global climate change and what are we doing both to the water and to the climate. Think what global labs does in terms of empowering the world's kids to go out and take measurements around the world of water, for example, and then compile that data together, run analysis off it, and so on and so forth. And of course, what you have here where I first got this idea is iLab, or-- is it now called Web Lab? OK. HAL ABELSON: It's always called that. JOHN SEELY BROWN: OK, I only knew it as iLab. In terms of a very interesting set of heat exchangers that I can actually run remote experiments this way. So I just want to call your attention that although OCW in the first phase looked a lot at content, maybe the next stage is to also look at activities. And what are the activities you do around this content having to do with tools, having to do with instruments? Because we can virtually put any instrument we want today on the web. And most schools can't afford the $3 million or $4 million dollars for the fancy electron-scanning microscope, but the nation can afford that. It can be put on the TeraGrid if nothing else. And so I think we have an ability to bring back tinkering, the tinkering that actually is the basis of our intuition, because it is one thing to be inspired, but if you're inspired without intuition, then that's only so good. But most of us get our intuition from playing around with stuff. And that stuff can be done remotely. And by the way, it can also be done in terms of things like tech shop, in terms of computer-controlled machining tools, building real things, again, like Neil Gershenfeld has led here in the Media Lab. So I really think that we're beginning to build another kind of platform, Tom-- a platform that brings all of the kind of content we're talking and activities we're talking, but now tools-- many, many tools-- into kind of an informal learning context where tinkering can come back, because I really think content plus tinkering with real tools really does lay the foundation for a way to kind of get gut understanding for things and reignite passion, not just on MIT students, which you have no problem with here, but for the rest of this country, which we do have a problem with. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] HAL ABELSON: Well, we'd like to hear from some of you. There are microphones around? There's supposed to be microphones going around? So we'd like to hear some of your visions and some of what you think. And if you don't volunteer, we will call on you. I'm a professor. [LAUGHTER] Up there. AUDIENCE: I'd like to ask you to look again at this notion of tinkering, because I remember talking to colleagues of mine in engineering saying that what's wrong is that the devices that are now available, you can't tinker with anymore. So how can you tinker with an iPad? Those are the engineers who grew up taking watches apart. So tinkering I think is not the right word, or at least you have to rethink what you mean by tinkering, because you're tinkering with things that are really quite abstract now. And that seems to me to be in a kind of a collision course with what you said, sir, about you need 500,000 truck drivers. Those are really two different worlds-- the world of the truck driver and the guy who's going to tinker in your sense. And what worries me is how you're going to mash those worlds together. Are you, for example, going to think, well, the way to do it might be to take up the technology of driverless cars that we're doing here so that you can free up those 500,000 truck drivers to tinker the way you, sir, want to do it? So those are just some of the thoughts that I had. SAM PITRODA: The idea is not to buy 500,000 trucks to train truck drivers. But the idea is to get some technology to help in the training of 500,000 truck drivers. Otherwise, you will never do it. I think technology is the hope to meet the kind of scale we are talking about. AUDIENCE: What I was concerned is aren't the 500,000 truck drivers sort of excluded from the tinkering world? SAM PITRODA: Maybe. That's OK. I don't think everybody will be capable of tinkering. I don't expect everybody to be tinkering. But if some people tinker enough to come up with something interesting for truck driver, that's more interesting. That's how I look at it. JOHN SEELY BROWN: Yeah. I have kind of mixed kind of-- I understand exactly where you're coming from. And in fact, what really struck me is that most of us grew up as tinkerers till about 1980. And then tinkering disappeared. And in my fancy terminology, I said everything became cognitively impenetrable-- means I couldn't [? grock ?] it. And what hit me is in about 1995, I suddenly discovered tinkering was coming back. And it was coming back, by the way, in media. And kids were doing incredible remixes, mashups, and so on and so forth. And starting from that platform, you know, that kind of tinkering really did take off. And just look at YouTube. And a lot of that actually comes from all kinds of tinkering with content and with media, the modes of expression, and so on. So that I saw as the beginning platform. And then I started realizing that more and more of these tools are now being made robotically capable that actually if you join the community, the community actually as a set of peer learners actually has a pretty interesting scaffolding structure. And so I was kind of looking at the notion of a long tail in terms of these very niche communities that you may want to be passionately kind of joining. So I mean, I think the story, I agree, has gotten more complicated. And I was very happy to see a movement called Make. It's more in the West coast than the East coast, although I think it's propagating over here too, where now you're finding in essence community libraries that are now setting themselves up on a particular thing called TechShop in Menlo Park where basically you can you get, as a student now or myself as an ancient, can get access to almost any kind of mechanical device to kind of do machine-controlled, computer-controlled lathing and building stuff with the physical stuff. And so I actually think that we're finding new ways to fill that gap. But no, we're not going to be opening chips and watching how they work. I agree with you. But I think that somehow tinkering is going to be happening at a higher level. Now, your real point is are we just talking about the abstract? Tinkering with ideas, of course, is what you do in a good share of science. But I think if you look at the remix game in media, you're really thinking about emotion. You're thinking about communication. You're thinking about other things that underlie how do you communicate and capture people's attention. And I think that's going to be a new kind of tinkering that I think it's going to be critical at all stages of the kinds of economy we're talking about. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] JOHN SEELY BROWN: Oh. New batteries. AUDIENCE: Fred, can you pass the mic over? I was wanting to draw the attention back to teaching and learning and propose to the panel question. It seems to me that most of us in the room have grown up in a world in which the information and knowledge that we consumed or learned or acted with was structured, say, by the Dewey decimal system or by traditional classroom-based disciplinary categories. And as I see the new generation coming up with Google searches and so forth, and as I look at my son, who is a senior in university, doing papers and being able to put things together in the way that I would never have been able even to imagine when I was a student, I'm just wondering if the whole new technologies isn't rewiring the brains of our children in such ways that we can't even imagine or catch up with as we think about the future of teaching and learning. I'm wondering if the actual structure and access to human knowledge isn't being so restructured that we now have different-- I hate to use the word paradigms to imagine as we think about the future of learning and education. I'm wondering if the panel, any of the panel, have thought about that or considered it as we think about the future. SAM PITRODA: A lot about this in India. We don't have the answers, but we have lots of questions. One question is, why does it take four years to get a BS in something? Who came up with that idea? Is that idea valid today? I don't know. Why does it take so many courses to get a masters? Can we change that? I do agree that all of the paradigms of the past needs to be questioned-- role of teacher, role of classroom, content. The kind of material we teach, is it relevant today? I know the kind of stuff we teach in India today in many cases is absolutely irrelevant. I don't care about the history of British Raj in India anymore. So I don't need to learn about George V. It's not relevant to me. But we still teach. So I do agree that this is the time to question. CHUCK VEST: I think the answer to your question is yes. But what we do about it, I have no idea. SAM PITRODA: I think once we begin to question-- CHUCK VEST: I only want to disagree with you on one thing. Somebody has to be learning about and thinking about George V. SAM PITRODA: Sure. CHUCK VEST: We have to learn-- SAM PITRODA: But don't teach me as an engineering student perhaps. [LAUGHTER] OK? And it's OK. It's your privilege. If you want to learn, learn. But don't force me into it. CHUCK VEST: I think the one point I do want to make to this is really embedded in something that John Seely Brown said. And that's that one of the really exciting things that's happening today, whether it's tinkering based or not, are the increase of learning communities where you have older people who may have some wisdom, but not a clue what's actually going on. And you have young people who do think in absolutely different ways. And I think this continual mixing beyond the formal base learning is really exciting. And I don't know where it's going to lead, but I think it's going to lead in a good direction. SAM PITRODA: But unfortunately, people who are planning education are all in 60s. CHUCK VEST: I agree. JOHN SEELY BROWN: Yeah, but you know, Chuck, your observation is what really sets the stage for a culture of learning. I mean, because now that really-- if you can get these types of communities to sell form and interact productively, which I think are happening, that is probably the single best way to crack the original problem of lifelong learning, you know, that OCW started out with. But two brief comments-- you know, one thing that's really happening-- and you guys know it here tremendously well-- is the role of visualization. I mean, many kids today are much more-- are really-- in fact, most of us in this room are probably much more visual than we want to kind of really understand. Our ability to do incredible visualizations of very complex systems really provide you kind of a gut intuition again of something that is very hard to capture just by looking at partial differential equations. And I think the second thing is we've got to pay a little bit attention to reading practices, because the reading practices are going to be changing. Let me just look at Wikipedia, which was talked about earlier. The catch is when you ask the quality of the stuff on Wikipedia and compared to Britannica, that's not necessarily a well-formed question, because the reading practices of a skilled person in Britannica are completely different than the reading practices of a skilled person in Wikipedia, because if you know how to read Wikipedia, you know how to go to the Edit page. You know how to see what are the edits, what are the rollbacks. So you know how to find out what's being contested. So now you have a window into what is the contested knowledge part of that definition, which gives you a tremendous insight, which you almost never see, because we have opened up that completely. So now you see what is still under negotiation or being contested. So it is a new practice. HAL ABELSON: So I think the issue that you brought up really is-- it's kind of the answer to the question I asked is what can we imagine coming after education 1.0? So those of us who think about the worldwide web and how it's put together in a technical, architectural way, the web is designed in a very particular way so that every piece of it can link to every other piece of it. That sounds a little trivial now, but to say that in 1992 would have been a revelation. And what's happening now is we have the ability to take knowledge and organize it so that every piece of it can link to every other piece of it on a very fine-grained scale. That brings up the possibility of the kinds of things that you've been talking about, about sort of niche, personalized learning experiences based on putting things together. But at the same time, it raises this issue about what's quality. What's an education if it's sort of random putting in-- we don't know how to judge that, how to assess that. And I think that's one of the real challenges that as we look ahead from what this revolution is bringing that we're going to have to face. There. AUDIENCE: I'd like to propose a-- I'd like to pose a proposition to the group and let you react to it. We live in a world because of all of the changes that have already been noted by the various speakers, including Tom, in which knowledge has been democratized. And access to it has been greatly increased. And we've greatly reduced the cost of gaining access to knowledge, to learning, and to the tools of knowledge and learning. Colleges and universities convey knowledge. They teach. That's one function that we perform. But the other thing which we do is we certify. We send signals to the world that in fact people have acquired it. And the proposition that I'd like you to react to is that in a world in which knowledge is becoming more diffuse and access to it is becoming much easier that ironically the value of the signals that are being provided by institutions like this one are ever more valuable. And so we have more and more people in fact trying to gain access to the signal that is represented by having studied at an institution like this when in fact, the knowledge is that much more available and diffuse. That's a proposition. JOHN SEELY BROWN: Mr. President? [LAUGHTER] CHUCK VEST: Larry, I'm not sure I grasp totally what you wanted to say. If we go back, I agree that what's very exciting today, what we've all said in many different ways is with the amount of information, which, by the way, may or may not be knowledge, but at least the amount of information that is out there, the game is putting it together in the most interesting, creative, and in some cases useful ways and that our traditional roles in universities of certifying that yes, this young woman knows the fundamentals of the following profession and so forth, the meaning of that may be in question. But I am not sure it is if you think of it as only one stage along a life of learning and working. But then the fact that we amplify signals as you put it I think is very important. One of the things I tried to say a little earlier today that what I thought was really important about OCW was that it put out there the thoughts of our faculty about how knowledge should be organized and what our fundamental pedagogy was. And I think that's probably more important than the details of the content. But I'm not sure exactly how to answer your question about what the meaning and what it says to us about the amplification of these signals really is other than that we should be very careful. AUDIENCE: OK. Should I wait for a microphone? So this is more of a comment actually. So we all understand that content needs to be engaging if you put it somewhere. And the two examples that recently came from MIT are actually Howtoons, which is a comic book written about how to make stuff and then Drew Endy, synthetic biology. So do you see OCW actually playing a much more important role in this type of a content creation or actually at least promoting it further? HAL ABELSON: I mean, I certainly see that it could. I mean, one of the things that's to my mind a little bit absent from OCW are more materials that are written by MIT students. Both of the things you mentioned are examples of that. But I also think there's this constant tug of war between a lot of things that are made by a lot of people and saying this is the MIT curriculum put up as something for the world to examine and the world to build on. And for me, this is a real issue going forward in how we resolve it. But I guess the other thing I want to say is this is too much about MIT and OCW. I'd like to hear-- I warned you I'd call on you. I'd like to hear Dick Rowe actually talk a little bit about this notion of empowerment and how you think about that. So maybe if you give your question and then ask Dick to speak. AUDIENCE: My question is actually going to be connected with OCW again. But having put a subject on OCW, I suspect that there's a lot of faculty around the world that would be willing to augment much like Wikipedia. And the question is, is there a model that people have come up with for somehow-- and in-between model where you maintain excellence and at the same time draw on this huge energy from the community to develop materials? Anyway-- JOHN SEELY BROWN: You know, I think-- and Mike can talk about this at the-- Mike Smith. But I mean, one of the kind of next stages of a lot of this open education resource movement has to do with how do you close the loop in various ways. I mean, take a piece of material-- you know, a course, re-mash it-- remix it and then mash it up in different cultures all over the world. What an incredible learning opportunity that is. What are the mind bugs students of different cultures have when they read your texts and so on? So how do you actually feed all that stuff back, you know, is a very interesting question. And how do you start to let other people be able to add material to it, which is like what connections does. How do you then try to figure out, well, hold it, now I've lost the warrants? And so this is kind of Pandora's box. But I think we're going to find some very clever types of recommendation systems, warranting systems, lenses that you can put over this material to see which of this material has been vetted by whom and so on and so forth. So I think this is a new kind of a platform that I think we're just at the very beginning to be able to understand how to really play this out. CHUCK VEST: Just very quickly on this, this is why I use this term meta university, because I think it is a platform with some infrastructure. And at least for the foreseeable future, I think the loop's not going to be closed. It's going to run open loop. That's what we're observing right now. And so when we first got started in this, my assumption was that it would ultimately morph into something more like Linux or Wikipedia where the community was really building a thing. But I'm not sure there's going to be a thing. I think there's going to be a big multiplicity of things built on this platform. JOHN SEELY BROWN: But I wasn't implying it'd be one thing. CHUCK VEST: No, no. I know. JOHN SEELY BROWN: OK, right. I mean, loops can be closed on niches. Yeah. HAL ABELSON: Dick? DICK ROWE: Yeah. Dick Rowe. I'm with Open Learning Exchange, which is kind of a child, if you will, of OCW. We're starting with the assumption that to really meet the goal of universal basic education, you have to start with young kids. You have to start basically the elementary and then following with the secondary level. And we're starting also with the assumption that for this to happen, it has to be done at the local country level. It can't be a central place which is then distributed. But in fact, the actual course development has to be done within the context of each country. So we have identified 100 countries around the world where we're helping to open what we're calling Open Learning Exchange centers that have the responsibility for defining what is needed to meet the goal by 2015 of universal basic education for their country and to have the resources to be able to develop that content in an open source manner. To my left here is Matthew [? Carlos, ?] who is the librarian for the Billion Kids Library. We have an open source, free Billion Kids Library that we're developing where all of the content developed in each of these countries, customized and localized for that country, in fact is shared on a global basis through this Billion Kids Library. A key element of that, which is the quality control issue, the certification, is that every item in that library will have a field for comment and rating. And the comments, you have to be a member of the network to comment and rate. But then we know a bit about who these are. So that fourth grade math teacher in Brazil can say, give me the fourth grade math courses that have been rated by teachers and students at least a four or a five star rating. That way, they can begin to select by the users themselves what is quality and not. And it's all an open source. It really spins off of OCW if that's the idea. So we think of ourselves as the child of OCW, focusing primarily on elementary education, but also addressing and hopefully with MIT addressing some of the secondaries as well. But our focus is really on elementary. HAL ABELSON: Great. OK, question. And then, Mary, can I ask you to speak next? But first, question up there. AUDIENCE: So my question or more comment to address the issue of scalability that was talked about earlier and also the problem that we seem to see about if you open it to everyone and everyone can address or everyone can add to it, then you lose the warrants that you were talking about. But why not do what a lot of companies do, which is outsource different parts of the business, so to speak? So for example, with-- so MIT, we're really good at engineering and with some other fields. And so we do that really well. And those sections in OpenCourseWare are done really well. But then there's other fields. So for example, truck driving-- we don't do that at MIT. So we could have people who do do that, who their profession is training truck drivers. And then if MIT or some other organization kind of certifies that, and then it becomes part of the website. So it's kind of a mechanism of outsourcing and then bringing back into the fold. And then that way, you get your warrants, because the people who are doing or who are adding the content of that specific area are then professionals in their field. They know what they're doing. And so then that's where you get your warrants. SAM PITRODA: I think it's already happening to some extent. You know, like, medical education is being done by somebody. Stanford is doing something. You know, people in Japan are doing something. You know, South Koreans are doing something. Indian IITs are doing something. So it's already going on. But it's a little early. HAL ABELSON: But I do want to-- I feel a little bit nervous about a model like that, because this isn't about MIT and 20 other places dividing up knowledge and providing certification. That's not the way this platform is going to grow. As Chuck and John just said, this is not-- it's not at the place where it is appropriate or even possible to think about closing it off. This is not-- You know, MIT's statement in OpenCourseWare is here's what we do. You don't have to like what we do. You don't have to think it's any good. But it's what we do. And there have to be lots of other places that say, here's what we do. You mentioned medical education. Let me ask Mary to say something about TUSK. MARY LEE: Hi. I'm Mary Lee from Tufts University. We have been working on the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase for about 12 years now. And it's a system that is built with open source software that's a powerful infrastructure for health sciences education. What it allows institutions to do is build their own content, but also share it. The system is used by several schools in the US, several countries in Africa, and actually more recently in India. And it allows faculty actually to collaborate not only across disciplines, but also across countries. So faculty, as they're-- we also are part of the OpenCourseWare consortium. We have courses from our medical school, dental school, veterinary school, nutrition school, as well as our Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. And these courses certainly are shared. But we also do curriculum co-development with these countries. So our faculty in medicine and public health and these other disciplines actually work with faculty in these other countries to create content that is locally relevant. So it's a combination of sharing core content that really allows them to leverage faculty that some of these countries do not have. So for instance, in the consortium in East Africa, there is one pathologist who flies across three countries to teach pathology to medical students. Well, with sharing content, you can actually have other faculty at these institutions help to teach that pathology in addition to that one pathologist who's the expert who's flying around. So I think we're going to see pretty rapid development in these countries which really have major faculty shortages, but able to leverage faculty from here, from other countries, who are willing to share their content and co-develop the content, which then can be customized to the local needs. And the other thing that the system allows is because it's a very powerful database structure, every learning object that's in the system is tagged with metadata so that all of the content can be reused and repurposed. And so histology, which is taught across the dental curriculum, the veterinary curriculum, the medical curriculum, actually those learning objects can be used and reused across all those disciplines. So it allows incredible leveraging of the content not only within an institution, but across all of these institutions that are participating. JOHN SEELY BROWN: If I may just say-- one thing we have to pay a lot of attention to is multiple meanings to content. Your content in terms of the learning objects is both content and activities. And a lot of the repositioning of it to different cultures, different contexts has to do with actually changing the activities. And I we kind of overlook how rich we could get if people contributed new kinds of activities to the content, so to speak, in terms of-- because very often, for example, it is the problem sets that really determine how good a course is. And finding better and better problems sets is something that can be done in a very kind of micro way. AUDIENCE: Could I just ask the members of the panel if you would concur that the configuration of control, the ability-- and I think the question about verifying learning that was asked by this gentleman over here earlier goes to the heart of it or one element of the heart of it, that we have a very set, established-- in the United States and most other countries-- concept, hierarchy of power, control, and authority in which standards are determined by experts who almost always have been men in rooms with the door closed writing the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, I'm caricaturing it of course. Against which now you have legions of people in a flat world reinterpreting and re-modifying and restating and, dare we say, socializing standards and reality and modifying it in a way that is literally uncontrollable by any terms that we have understood historically. And so to me, one of the riddles we face as we go forward-- because I think it's like trying to stop water from going down a mountain. You aren't going to stop the tendency. What we have to figure out is how to understand it. That then led me to think about an itinerant professor in the 15th century going to a village and talking to people. How different is that from a learning group formed on the net that begins to talk with each other about something they share in common? The former led to something we know as universities over time. And what we're trying to imagine now is what the latter will lead to in some future iteration. But under it is the societal control, it seems to me, and determination and definition of quality and standards. And I'm curious as to whether people-- I'm not-- I'm worried about it. I'm not worried in a negative sense about it, but in a how do we understand it, how do we get on this horse and ride it and understand it. Do you see those kinds of things up for grabs in this migration we've started where we don't know where the ultimate destination is? CHUCK VEST: At the moment, I think we have the modern-day equivalent of the itinerant professor who comes by and leaves his notes, here's what I know, and then leaves the conversation. And the group continues. I think that's really what we are talking about here. And I recognize now maybe why I missed Larry's point, because I was answering it in the context of that person leaving the notes can certify the quality of the information, knowledge, and structure that he or she has left. But we are not, at least at this point, in the business of certifying what the people have gained from that and whether they are now qualified in some way. And what is interesting among the many things that's fascinating about the evolution of both MIT's OCW and the larger notion and the larger movement is what I tried to say about the origins was really about what does a university do in this world. And the real excitement that is emerging is what individuals do with it. And I don't think we know how we do that second level of certification or whether we should. JOHN SEELY BROWN: You know, again, there are different types of signals that we're going to be encountering. And one of those signals is going to be more the portfolios. I mean, so somebody comes to you and presents a portfolio. Just like, seriously, I don't look if somebody-- they come from MIT. I look at what lab do they come from. Who do they study under? It's a much more micro thing we already use in terms of those signals. And I think looking at a portfolio-- now, the question is, at some point that finesses the problem. Who has the authority to be able to evaluate the portfolio? But you know, what is so wonderful-- and we tend to overgeneralize this in open source. You know, truth is determined by does this code run. So you actually have an arbitrator sitting behind the scenes there, which simplify the mechanisms to make open source really flourish. When we move to these other domains, we don't have that kind of intrinsic arbitrator, so we come back to much more serious types of questions. AUDIENCE: My comment perhaps addresses-- HAL ABELSON: Last question. AUDIENCE: Sorry. OK. My comment addresses perhaps this question that has been discussed in the last few minutes. If we are all moving to individual learners and that this platform is providing that opportunity, then is there no room for the meta learner? Because it seems to me that if you cannot certify what is being learned and if the market is not clearing the tinkering products, because if you are tinkering with products, the market can clear those, who is going to be clearing the market of learning? Is there no room for a meta learner? And I think that's perhaps a question that I'm posing to the panel to see what your thoughts are on that. HAL ABELSON: So I don't think anyone knows. But I'm very optimistic. So if we relate this to what Peter just asked about where's the authoritative place, and who is going to be doing this-- you know, this is exactly-- if we go back four years-- the discussion that the news media was having around blogs. Right? All these people are going to put stuff on the internet, and there's all this junk and all this crap. You know, and that's not over yet. But the result has been there is still the notion of quality. But it's based on an incredibly richer version of discourse. And what I would hope is that we'll see the same kind of thing happen as you open up these sort of micro ways to get together for education. Now, this isn't going to happen for several years. But the other thing that it tells you from the world of blogs is that it could happen pretty fast once it gets going. So I'm pretty optimistic. JOHN SEELY BROWN: And take multiple forms. HAL ABELSON: And take multiple forms. Right. GUEST SPEAKER: I'd like to thank all. [APPLAUSE]