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The Higher Education Revolution? (Dougald Hine at TEDxLondon, 17 Sep 2011)

by Dougald Hine on Sep 24, 2011

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The slides and script from my talk at TEDx London "Education Revolution".

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The slides and script from my talk at TEDx London "Education Revolution".

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In our last term at university, a friend of mine had a conversation with her tutor. “Ten years ago,” he told her, “I would have insisted you stay on and do a doctorate. The way things are going now, just get your First and get the hell out of here.”
My life has been shaped by the company of a kind of “university in exile”, made up of people who would most likely have gone into academia a generation or two ago, but who saw what was happening to our higher education system and took their chances elsewhere.Throughout my twenties, I kept coming across other members of this invisible college. I learned more in their company than I had in my time at university, because we were led by our own curiosity and passion, and because the networked technologies available to us made it easy to find each other and to get access to the materials we needed.Today, I want to tell you about what we learned, the projects we ended up creating, and the gamble to which it has led me — that the promise at the heart of the university is about to be reborn in a DIY revolution, much of which will come from outside of existing institutions.
It isa gamble – because none of us know what is coming next. We’re living in deeply unpredictable times, as institutional, financial and ecological crises unfold before us, while networked technologies rewrite the social rules for how they play out.
Let’s start, though, with the promise at the heart of the university — that there should be places within society which are dedicated to the cultivation of knowledge, places available to all kinds of people for a time during their lives, and where those with a particular vocation may dedicate themselves to it in an ongoing way.
Now, this is rather old-fashioned language — but I use it deliberately, because one of the places where I think we go wrong as we talk about how technology changes society is that we underestimate how little people actually change, from century to century. Radical changes often come when we find a new way to make room for something old, something which has been pushed aside for a time, but which meets our deep needs.The university has become all things to all people — an economic engine, a gatekeeper to high-status jobs — and it’s original promise is in danger of being lost. Yet that promise may be finding new homes, elsewhere.
I graduated ten years ago and started a career as a BBC journalist — exactly the kind of high-status job university was supposed to be a springboard into — but I dropped out after a year. The gap between outward success and an internal sense of lostness was too strong to ignore.I started to come across others in a similar position, looking for a meaningful route through life and finding the careers service had nothing to offer us. Instead, we stumbled into projects like the University of Openness — a wiki where anyone could start their own research project.Or the Pick Me Up email magazine, written by its readers, which came out every Friday afternoon — with the aim of inspiring you to do something more interesting than check your inbox on a Friday afternoon. The first rule of Pick Me Up was you couldn’t be a journalist, reporting on someone else’s story; you had to get involved in making something happen, then tell the story from the inside. The second rule was, you couldn’t tell the story in a way that would make people feel, “I wish I could do that” – you had to tell the story in a way that made them feel, “I could do that.”
It could be big or small. Everything from the guys who installed a street piano outside their house, to five mad Danish girls from the KaosPilots – a kind of cross between an art school and a business school – who mobilised hundreds of young Bosnians to reclaim a bombed out concert hall in Sarajevo.Being part of Pick Me Up was an initiation into the craft of starting projects and making things happen. And among all the playfulness, the most serious projects we started were experiments in creating new kinds of learning space.There was the London School of Art and Business, inspired by the KaosPilots – and School of Everything, a website that makes it really easy to find someone near you who wants to learn something you want to teach.
By now, what had started as DIY experiments had grown into something that people were taking seriously.
School of Everything became an internet startup, with investors and tens of thousands of members. We won awards and got written about in the papers.We didn’t get it all right. There was a revolutionary passion at the heart of School of Everything, but we allowed ourselves to get off-track — to build something investable, rather than listen to our guts.
The part we got wrong was that we built a system for making transactions — an “eBay for learning” as Cory Doctorow described it — when we knew from our own experience that learning is not a commodity to be exchanged. It’s something that happens between people, over time, within relationships. But here’s what we got right. We knew that the real power of the internet was not about spending more of our lives in front of screens. When universities were busy building campuses in Second Life, we were out there talking about First Life — about the way the web makes it easier to find each other, to get together and make things happen in the flesh. And that wasn’t as obvious five years ago as it is now that we live in a world where everything from a birthday party to an insurrection gets organised over social media.
The next thing that happened was that a bunch of young artists and activists took over a huge mansion in Mayfair and opened something called the Temporary School of Thought, a three week long “free university” that became an extraordinary crossing point between worlds.
Admittedly, that wasn’t exactly how the newspapers described it!But when they invited me to give a talk there, I found myself reconnecting to the spirit of the projects I’d been involved with before I’d accidentally become a dot com entrepreneur.Around then, I began to step back from School of Everything, and I started a meet-up group inspired by the idea of making good use of empty space…
The first wave of the economic crisis was biting, and people were wondering what to do with all these empty shops and offices. We wanted to connect that to longer-term changes in the ways we were working and learning, to the new sociable collaboration spaces that were opening up, and to how we create sustainable local economies for the future.And because we were hosting that conversation — face to face, and online — we started to get approached by local authorities and property owners who wanted to understand this DIY approach to making space.
So out of the meetup came a company, Space Makers Agency, whose first project was to transform twenty empty shops in an indoor market in Brixton into a rolling festival of temporary creative and community projects, makers, artists and new independent local businesses. Two years on, we’ve left, but the market is still there and thriving – in fact, it’s at full capacity for the first time since 1979.From there Space Makers has gone on to work around London and around the UK — I just got back from Penrith last night, where our latest project is getting underway.
Now, it might seem like what we’re doing with Space Makers doesn’t have that much to do with the future of the university. But there’s a thread here – a DIY spirit and a culture of reflection on deep social questions – which runs through Pick Me Up, the Temporary School, the University of Openness and all those other projects. All of it grounded in the existence of this pool of itinerant thinkers and doers, who chose to take their chances outside of existing institutions. There’s something happening, and my bet is that we’re just at the beginning.
The person who crystallised this for me lately is another internet entrepreneur — someone who’s similarly inspired by the power of technology to bring people together in the real world — John Geraci, the co-founder of outside.in.He argues that, over the next decade, we’ll see the coworking spaces and incubators, hacker and maker spaces, fab labs and media labs and all the other kinds of new sociable productive collaborative spaces mature into a real alternative to the university as we know it.
Now, since I started Space Makers, I’ve found myself in some interesting conversations about particular spaces and how to bring them to life.One of the most interesting came in January this year, with the architect and social innovator Indy Johar. Indy and I had met a couple of years ago, when we were brought together by the thinktank Demos as the outsiders on a project called The Edgeless University. We’d listened to a lot of higher education insiders talking pretty complacently about the future of their institutions, and we’d found ourselves agreeing about how much disruption could be in store in the years ahead.So we’d made sure to keep in touch, and I knew that Indy had plans for a new kind of collaboration space in London.And now that was about to become a reality.
This is the vision of the Hub Westminster – 12,000 sqft of converted offices, a block away from Trafalgar Square, a massive new collaboration space for people and projects to create social change.The night Indy told me about it, I found myself saying, “I think the way to make this amazing is if all the people at the heart of it can use it to do the thing they most want to do next.”“What do you most want to do next?” he asked me.“I want to start a university!” I said. It’s one of those mad things that come out of my mouth before I stop to think, and I’ve spent most of this year being daunted by the scale of it. But I’ve also discovered that the reinvention of the university is starting from a hundred places at once - people all over the UK and all over the world are starting experiments to create new pockets and pathways for the cultivation of knowledge.
And so here’s my pledge — next month, as part of the launch of Hub Westminster, we’ll host a weekend of conversations and encounters, a festival of universities, past and future. And we’ll go on making the space available as a meeting point between these experiments.Because if Geraci is right – and I think there’s good reason to believe he is – then it seems to me there’s a need for deep cultural reflection into the fundamental questions about the university, about the social good it offers, and how that can be made available to people our institutions fail to reach. So join us next month as we go further into the process of reimagining and reinventing the university.

The Higher Education Revolution? (Dougald Hine at TEDxLondon, 17 Sep 2011) — Presentation Transcript

THE HIGHEREDUCATION REVOLUTION?
DOUGALD HINE
(THE UNIVERSITY PROJECT)
1. INTERESTING TIMES
2. THE PROMISE
3. PICKING MYSELF UP
4. FIRST LIFE
5. A TEMPORARY SCHOOL
6. LET’S RECYCLE WOOLWORTHS
7. RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES
“I think we will see a giant wave of ‘new learning’ spaces around the world…
“There’s a huge opening here for a new way of thinking, and it’s going to happen right before our eyes.”
JOHN GERACI
Co-founder, outside.in
8. THE UNIVERSITY PROJECT
UNIVERSITIES: PAST & FUTURE14-16 OCTOBER 2011HUB WESTMINSTERTHEUNIVERSITYPROJECT.ORG.UK

The Higher Education Revolution? (Dougald Hine at TEDxLondon, 17 Sep 2011)

by Dougald Hine on Sep 24, 2011

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The Higher Education Revolution? (Dougald Hine at TEDxLondon, 17 Sep 2011) — Presentation Transcript