Association of American Colleges and Universities, January 2001

The Social Life of Information

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000

Summary prepared by Ross Miller, AAC&U

from the cover: "The way forward is paradoxically to look not ahead, but to look around."

In an age of electronic innovation, we have easy access to huge amounts of information. Brown and Duguid stress the need to avoid a "tunnel vision" of over-reliance upon information in decision making and planning and to recognize the importance of "context, background, history, common knowledge, social resources" and other "stuff that lies around the edges." Such "fuzzy" social knowledge provides balance and perspective.

Predictions of rapidly increasing numbers of home-based office workers (telecommuters) have proven to be overly optimistic. Individuals who have experimented with working at home, frequently move back to an office setting after only a few months. The social elements of the office provide for incidental learning, support in solving problems, and other benefits that an information-centered point of view may overlook.

Info-centric thinking has generated some simplistic notions about the restructuring of organizations and systems. Brown and Duguid are not as concerned about what the future will actually be as they are by the tunnel vision and misguided confidence of the info-centrists. Access to information is only one of many factors important to success in human organizations. Plans to structure higher education simply as the delivery of information reflect an info-centric point of view and miss the "stuff that lies around the edges" of a campus. Creative on-line courses often have some community-building feature that stimulates personal interactions on-line.

Brown and Duguid note a growing awareness of the distinction between information and knowledge. They believe that knowledge resides in individuals and communities of practice, information can simply be searched for and located. Knowledge is lost to organizations when individuals leave.

Business is beset by difficulties in transferring best practices from one site to another because knowledge, not just information, must be moved. Being informed of best practices is insufficient. Thus, to transfer best practices, a knowledge resource (i.e. an individual or a community of practice) should be available to coach the novice community of practice as it develops.

For knowledge to travel, one must develop knowledge through practice and within groups of practitioners. The sharing of practice in collaborative communities facilitates knowledge growth and transfer. Simultaneous working, learning, and communicating is characteristic of a community of practice in which practitioners are continually reshaping and developing their knowledge. Brown and Dugid cite examples of knowledge communities ranging from copy machine repair technicians to nuclear physicists to illustrate the ubiquity of this model and its utility in the development of many kinds of knowledge. The community of practice is an ideal learning environment, transforming "know that" into "know how," changing "learning about" into "learning to be."

Brown and Duguid's discussion of the university of the future begins by citing current pressures on universities to change:

• changing demographics of students, later and longer attendance, multiple institution attendance, variety of credit sources, a "desire for worthwhile education on topics that matter to [students] in a system that responds to their needs" (p. 208)
• competition for paying students from distance learning providers, both not-for-profit and for-profit.
• new technologies that motivate institutions to examine their basic missions and reconsider how to educate students —not just how, but also how to do it more cheaply.

Yet even as universities consider changes, many important functions of the university must remain:

• warranting the knowledge they develop in students since most students are not in a position to judge the quality of what they receive (i.e. they are novices looking for more advanced learning);
• "misrepresenting" what they do by including many curricular experiments and co-curricular interactions which contribute to learning outcomes but are not specified in syllabi or catalogs;
• enculturation into several, if not many, communities that help students learn how to judge what is worthwhile and what is worthless;
• peer support;
• interactions that help to conquer "social distance;"
• locally-influenced curricula on some campuses such as computer science at Berkeley, film studies at UCLA, oenology at UC Davis.

(Brown and Duguid support "misrepresentation" explaining that "If every detail of a student's learning were held to public account, a lot of valuable experimentation and improvisation would probably disappear.")

Basic student needs will also remain:

• access to authentic communities of learning, interpretation, exploration, and knowledge creation;
• resources to help them work with both local and distant communities;
• robust credentials that represent their learning in the workplace.

If courses are sold one at a time, it is probable that much useful and creative "slack" in the higher education system will be micro-managed away—to the detriment of the learner and society. This would be a "paradoxical and unfortunate result" of the very information technology that is supposed to improve access to information.

Some of the new models for higher education that have been suggested, while seeming to do away with campuses, actually depend upon campuses for their continued viability. Credits that are earned on-line still have to be accepted somewhere and applied to a degree granted by some institution.

Universities will become "degree granting bodies" (DGBs). "To provide adequate credentials through adequate learning (with adequate amounts of misrepresentation) is the responsibility of the degree-granting function of universities." This function will evolve in an independent direction through the emergence of DGBs.

Students would sign up for particular DGBs according to the degree plans offered and the reputation of those degree programs, i.e., how the public viewed the quality of the program's graduates. DGBs could be large or small, local or international, comprehensive or specialized to a single field. Essentially, they would be administrative bodies that provide access to higher education and work to build and maintain trust in their degrees. Brown and Duguid believe that degrees based on overly-narrow experiences would fall in value when compared to degrees based on more extensive training, experiences, and application.

Faculty would provide sanctioned teaching for DGBs. Teachers could contract with one or more DGB and teach on one or more campus, on-line, or in any other way appropriate to their area. Students who study with particular scholars gain credit toward a degree from the student's DGB.

Research would continue as an important mission so that students would have access to practitioners in their chosen area of work. It would remain important to have active researchers available to teach. Students would continue as laborers in university research, gaining important experience while providing a needed labor pool (e.g. for laboratories). Competition from the for-profit sector is likely to push universities toward pursuing research that the private sector is unable or unwilling to pursue; this role has been the university's traditional area of strength.

Faculty would locate the facilities needed for their work. Whether a classroom, a laboratory, a computer room, or a library, facilities would be located for the convenience of students and faculty alike. Faculty and students at a particular facility (especially a high-quality facility) might come from several DGBs. Communities would form on these facility-campuses and the sharing and "stealing" of information (part of the social life of information) would occur. DGBs might require that students spend a certain amount of their degree time in such a setting in order to provide for interactions with professors, students, and others. Such an arrangement would assure the incidental learning which currently forms a vital part of the college experience.