Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Customisation or the freedom to wander.


I recently spent a Monday at the Royal Irish Academy listening to the new Minister for Education’s speech on third level and the implementation of the Hunt report. It was an interesting meeting-the Minister stayed for the first discussion session- and striking for the opportunity on the day to engage, particularly the invitation from the Minister for future engagement (which we should embrace), as well as the number and variety of contributors including those of student leaders, as well as quite a number of retired academic staff (in some cases retired Presidents). Of course retired staff may be best placed to dissent and so comment on how things might be without feeling the constraints of living within-though naturally that could also well cut both ways! The occasion marked however the beginning of a dialogue which it is important we have, and it was good that the commitment to continue to engage was evident and manifest on the part of those within the institutions (staff and students) as well as those including policy makers outside. The most damning contribution on the day, however, in my view came from the Students’ Union education officer who claimed that if you removed the University crest or logo from all the course descriptions in our Universities, you would then be unable to tell them apart, so similar are they in content. An indictment of our similarity of mission perhaps, or of the homogenisation of our institutions as we attempt to customise what programmes we offer to the generally held view of what is relevant or necessary?  Let us hope that in any event this conversation with the Minister continues and involves not just preaching to the converted but includes many more new voices-particularly those who are on the ground delivering in our institutions of higher education, who are best placed to offer challenges to our curriculum and celebrate the appropriate distinctiveness in our missions thereby justifying our autonomy.
I reflected on this as I read last Sunday Observer’s article on Google and the feature they now offer, since December 2009 (news to me I admit) whereby what one gets when one ‘googles’ something is not the same response as for everyone else, though the query might well be identical. This is because Google, based on information they already have (from previous searches etc.) will have filtered, pre defined or selected what that person might like or be interested in. This was the subject of a recent talk given by Ell Pariser at TED where he argues that the major internet players may therefore be isolating us in our preconceived world views, by adapting what we find to our known tastes and interests. It is a little like Amazon telling you what books you might like, and in that same sense marginally more worrying than the recommendation of a choice of wine you might like from your wine store, or a cheese suggestion from your local market stall. The idea that we are already predictable and known in our habits-that our selection of movies, food and politics is already charted leads to a longing-on my part at least- for the unexpected. I love to discover something unexpected or unknown about someone- when a colleague sells concert tickets for instance and you get an insight into their music choice (you know who you are!!)
 All of this musing brings me back to the RIA and resonates with something in the Hunt report which I think should find favour and be welcomed. This is the Hunt report’s recommendation of a movement away from too restrictive or prescriptive course offerings, and endorsement of the ability and facility for students to wander and wonder amongst the broader sweep of subjects, particularly important as part of the first year  in University. Not narrowly focussing simply on what is seen to be ‘of the moment’ or strategically important or economically lucrative is also important throughout the undergraduate experience it seems to me. Hence the importance of an arts degree and of the first year in particular offering –as it does in UCC-a breath and diversity in first year-four subjects-some familiar and some new, from which the student can choose to elect to take to degree level those which are to them the most interesting and challenging.
In a sense it is a plea to allow ourselves and our students not to become (yet) parodies of ourselves-and allow our own instincts and natures to be challenged. As we tailor our reading to what we already know we will like-so our media, for example, is pre-selected to contain certain articles on certain topics (not just from a certain perspective). This can more easily happen if we receive or filter our media on-line- and less likely to occur if we have to hold and pass over all of the pages of a newspaper, so that our eyes might then alight on something we might not otherwise have known or wondered about- in the sports pages perhaps! It is the same when we wander through all of an exhibition in an art gallery, or browse the shelves of a book store or library- allows for the unexpected discovery and avoids a narrowing of life. Just as many of us are familiar with the phenomenon of not understanding how a vote goes a certain way in an election or referendum-because no one we know thinks that way- all of us are guilty of surrounding ourselves with ‘people like us’. So a bit of diversity-a chance to choose-a facility for an unexpected encounter in first year with a subject or a lecturer hitherto unknown is all the sweeter because it is unexpected and should be treasured. Our learning and curricular structures should allow for that unexpected something to happen, should avoid the customised route and our personal mission should also be to make it harder for Google to read us- be a little contrarian in nature.  As we have noticed nationally recently, some of that goes a long way.

5 comments:

  1. You may enjoy: Johnson, S. (2010). Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation. London, England: Allen Lane, if you don't know it. For me Johnson's account is not a bad way to think about teaching in this 'interesting' period (one that is not going to go away but intensify in terms of the patterns you describe) for universities.

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