An interesting question caught my eye recently: what’s the half-life of knowledge, for facts we think we know?  Samuel Arbesman provides an answer in his recent Harvard Business Review article called, “;Be Forewarned: Your Knowledge is Decaying.”

Based on his new book, “;The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything we know has an Expiration Date,” the article first cites knowledge that entire generations accepted as truths that turn out to be false. For example, Pluto is not actually a planet.  He then touches on data that changes slowly over time, requiring us to constantly stay informed.  For example, he shared that, “;A friend of mine, for example, was speaking recently with an older hedge fund manager who began his story with the following: ‘Since we all know that there are 4 billion people on the planet…’” Actually, now there are over 7 billion people on Earth.  There are more examples, from babies to hand-washing practices, in the TEDx video below.

Arbesman also explains that changes to knowledge do have patterns.  He says, “;Overall, there is a shape to how knowledge grows.”   For example, by looking at the changes in data, he describes how the increases in the number of elements in the periodic table “;obeys regularities,” and how, “;even the number of universities over time obeys regularities -; from the medieval period to the modern day.”

Number of Universities Founded in Europe

Source: TEDx video

The Half-Life of Facts: Sam Arbesman at TEDxKC

It seems the only thing we can predict is that knowledge will keep changing. Clearly, using outdated information to support decisions has the potential to create all sorts of problems. Not only does this reminder about ‘knowledge decay’ encourage the personal pursuit of lifelong learning, but there are implications for every industry, including higher education.

Things are shifting relatively slowly in the higher education world, and as Arbesman points out, “;We should be concerned most about facts that change slowly, the facts that change over the course of years or decades or an entire lifetime.”  

How do you keep up with it all?

It seems we may have another big, unpredictable storm close to home -; MOOCs.   They have been getting a lot of press this year, and here's another recent article from the New York Times – "The Year of the MOOC."

Last week Inside Higher Ed announced a partnership between Coursera and Antioch University to license Coursera courses for Antioch degree programs. 

In short, here’s the business model:  Universities such as Duke and the University of Pennsylvania work with Coursera to produce massively open online courses (“MOOCs”) that are offered for free (at least until this point) through Coursera.  Some schools, like Antioch, may decide to license these courses and will pay Coursera a fee to do so.  Coursera will share the gross revenue and net profit from these licensed courses with the universities that produced the content.  The faculty that produced the course will also receive some revenue.  Schools like Antioch will offer these licensed MOOCs to their students, thus giving them access to a wider array of courses and instructors, including “;rock star” faculty from well-known universities.  Because the cost of licensing the content through Coursera will likely be smaller than the cost of hiring these well-known faculty to teach at the licensee school, universities like Antioch that work through Coursera can pass the savings on to students, thus lowering the cost of a degree. 

From the Antioch University website: “;Each Coursera course will be facilitated by an AULA faculty member who will also be enrolled in the course, thereby enabling both frequent interaction between students and instructor and augmentation of the course through supplemental exercises and projects focused on expanding the learning experience.”

Like a storm, the higher education landscape is in a swirl and small pivots may produce large, important changes.  We wonder whether this might be an early pivot . . . and potentially change who is in the path of the storm and who is considered safe -; for now, until the next pivot.  We’ve written about the dismantling of higher education,  potential business models for edX and content creators and distributors, how at least one student perceived his experience in the first MITx MOOC, and the multitude of factors impacting the higher education market right now, but this is something big -; the market just pivoted. 

Rather than try to predict the exact path -; and force -; of this new development in higher ed, we have a few questions that we all might consider as this unfolds:

1.     Will licensing of MOOCs created by highly-respected schools “;crowd out” faculty from the licensee schools?

2.     How might licensee schools feel about their new role as “;facilitators”?

3.     Will licensing MOOCs increase access?  Might organizations licensing the content decide to focus on fee-paying schools and create two tiers of content -; paid and free?

4.     If all schools have access to all of the same MOOCs, how will schools differentiate themselves in the marketplace to attract students?

5.     If different universities license the same course materials, but have different grading standards, how will we compare outcomes across universities?

6.     Might the difference between schools come from the quality of facilitation/support offered by licensee school faculty, rather than the MOOC faculty, since that will become widely available, and perhaps commoditized?

7.     If more schools use the license model, could we eventually end up with a handful of “;top” schools producing the content and a small number of large schools offering the degrees? 

8.     Will Coursera-type companies become the publishers in the new higher education market?

9.     Who decides what content/teachers are “;best”?  Will it become true that courses from Coursera partners will be viewed as “;superior” to courses from other schools because they are frequently licensed?

10.   Will license deals like this drive a wedge into the higher education market, essentially enhancing the star power of the best-known universities and leaving the schools with less-developed brands weaker?

So, higher education meteorologists, what does your weather satellite read? 

After I posted my last piece on Who Is Doing DH, I got into an interesting conversation with my colleague/co-conspirator/Twitter-buddy/provocateur-extraordinaire Trent M. Kays about the problems with a “;big-tent” view of digital humanities. Below is that exchange.

[View the story “Is Big-Tent DH a Good Thing?” on Storify]

Trent is working on a post right now expanding on his view, but certainly his view that other academics and scholars (particularly, but not exclusively, in Rhetoric and Composition) have long been doing work that is now being considered digital humanities but have long been unrecognized by their colleagues in English departments and the humanities more generally is accurate and problematic. Roger Whitson acknowledges the blind spot in a recent post, after attending the Computers and Writing conference, as well as being schooled himself on Twitter.

But Roger also gets at, I think, is one of the reasons I contend that DH needs to be open and respectfully appropriate what has been done before (and for a long time):

“But most of these moves [within DH] have done little to change an institutional culture that largely sees preservation, criticism — and probably most importantly reading andwriting as their most fundamental practices. I, too, was swayed when Derrideans made claims that there were no real separations between theory and praxis or between constantive and performative utterances. And yet, what did those arguments actually accomplish except to keep us doing exactly the same thing?”

There needs to be a change in how we do things in the humanities. One of the things that attracted me to DH (other than what I’ve already stated here and here and here) was that there was room to do something different, instead of trying to carve out a small piece of the whatever-has-been-done-before-but-slightly-different. And certainly using technology, even mindfully and critically, can just recreate old patterns in bigger and faster ways. The more popular DH becomes, the more we risk research and work that isn’t innovative, just repetitive (although one could argue if one academic successfully uses a tool to do x to a certain text of body of texts, why it is then “;wrong” to use that same tool and process to do x to a different body of text? Less innovative, perhaps, but if the conclusions are equally insightful and revealing, then why knock it?).

This brings up an important issue that seems to be lurking, and that is the idea of “;innovation” that drives so much of the rhetoric in higher education today. Everything has to be NEW NEW NEW and groundbreaking and innovative; it’s one of the reasons the humanities haven’t faired as well as certain STEM fields (and why other STEM fields haven’t done so well, either). It’s also why DH is attractive -; it will CHANGE the humanities. But if we allow the innovation rhetoric to take over, then we will find ourselves in the cut-throat business (literally) of only seeking what’s new over what is interesting, useful, and insightful.

This is why I think the big tent, or as I call it, the DH collective, is so important. We need people who can do all kinds of different things (innovate, built, create, critique, tweak, and disseminate, among other things). I think anyone who is interested in DH should be welcome into the collective and then be permitted to find their space and their community (or form their own) within the collective. Excluding people because they don’t do x or y recreates the pattern of academia as it stand right now. We might never change what it means to be a humanist, but we can change how higher education operates. That, to me, is the biggest promise DH holds. 

The $ 249 chromebook is the best idea I’ve heard all week.  It seems like the chromebook is finally moving from “;proof of concept” to “;something actual people would actually buy.”  Finally, decent size and specs at a community college price.  This could fulfill the promise that netbooks made, but crapped out on, back in 2009.

Otherwise, we’ll be stuck in annual games of budgetary chicken, with diminishing returns.  The for-profits are already suffering; if we don’t change, we’ll be next.  And asking the legislature to keep Coursera out of town is not a serious answer.