Does “free information” make the university irrelevant?

I was sitting on my university loop bus, which is where I get to “test the temperature” of this current crop of students. A group of three sat across from me, looking very much like they fit into the category of first generation college students. They were accessing a cellphone app that gave them various pieces of trivia, on which they were all avidly focused.

“Did you know that a moth has no stomach?” the student holding the cellphone exclaimed

“No!” the others answered.

After reading several of these facts, one of the students exclaimed, “Why can’t school be like this, teaching us stuff we can really use?”

As a professor at this university, I was crestfallen. How can I compete with a cellphone app?

Getting off the bus, I met one of my own students. “I think the University as a system of knowledge is in trouble.” I said, and related the story of the cellphone trivia app to him.

“And you think that’s a problem?” he asked.

I don’t know. I teach classical sociology, citing Weber’s ideas about the legitimacy of authority. If students see a cellphone app as a more legitimate information authority than The University, doesn’t this traditional educational institution have a problem? I might not be so sensitive if it were not for the fact that the state is now proposing to cut my wage by 8 percent, making my full professor salary somewhat less than the pay of a large city trash collector. I might also be less sensitive if 40 percent of my students, in their evaluation of my Web 2.0 based class, had not seen me as largely irrelevant to their learning. When I taught Introduction to Sociology two decades ago, Professor was very close to the top of the list in terms of honorable status. I see – of course my research comes from the web -- that this position of honor is slipping. Certainly, we need our trash moved away from our living spaces. And no amount of Web 2.0 apps will move our trash for us. However, given Web 2.0, do we truly need professors?

I am a big fan of Web 2.0. I teach a course on collaborative sustainable design that uses Web 2.0 tools to allow students to collaborate for intersubjective learning. And I greatly cherish the new kinds of knowledge they get from working with each other rather than getting their heads filled with my lectures. My large lecture courses are interactive, but that’s different from this small lab class, in which cohorts of equals work together to accomplish a goal. It’s great to watch students learning from each other, and Web 2.0 tools like Google Docs and various collaborative wiki tools (such as Wikispaces and PBworks) are very useful in that process (or very frustrating, as my students have told me in my last set of evaluations for this course).

The university costs money. Web 2.0 is “free.” Does that free information compete with me and my role in society, making me less essential, less useful, less paid? Should I hang it up and let the web teach my students?

Interestingly, in their evaluation of this course, many of my students believed that a TA could meet most of their needs, and that my role was largely irrelevant. However, a majority of students also believed that I provided useful input to their projects. Useful, I am, but not essential.

I should say, however, that students’ evaluations were equally mixed about the benefits of Web 2.0 tools. They are frustrating, they (and I) all agreed, never quite meeting the ideals we expected of them. But, of course, professors never quite meet the expectations of students as well. As a person, and therefore not a program, I am probably better at managing student expectations than Web 2.0 tools, but I’m not always sure. There’s something about Google Docs that creates an infrastructure of promise, of hope, that I, as an individual, will never live up to. How do I manage the expectations when I’m in competition with Google Docs, when I’m in fact dependent upon Google Docs to get things done myself? Does Google Docs become, in 1980s lingo, the “locus of authority”?

The University, as an institution, is going to have to face these issues head on. How do we make these tools work for us rather than compete with us? How do we appreciate how “group projects” become so much better with these tools, while not letting the tools become the center of the educational process?

My students, the focus of my anxiety, have also been the most assuring. In their evaluation of my class, when I expected them to write about the technologies, the “active learning” classroom I managed to cob together out of nothing, what they really wanted to talk about was what they learned about from learning to deal with each other. They learned how to do something, even if it was failing to do something, with other people in an active, engaged, and often painful, way. And they appreciated that more than any course design I could provide, although, I like to think that the course design had something to do with it. I’m hoping that, maybe five years down the road, they stop being annoyed at the ways in which I failed to provide the best organized of courses and realize that what they got done with each other had something to do with me, too.