Speaker 1:	Tonight we're going to think together and to hear about how technology will affect fundamental and transformational change in higher education and most certainly in the liberal arts. Leading us in tonight's conversation is a distinguished educator, author, and innovator, Cathy Davidson, who teaches at Duke University where she co-directs the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge and holds not one but two distinguished chairs, the Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. Cathy served as Duke's first vice provost for interdisciplinary studies, and in that role she helped to create over 70 programs, including the Program in Information Science + Information Studies and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience as well as the University Scholars Program.
	She is co-founder of the Global Learning Network HASTAC, humanities, arts, technology, and science alliance and collaboratory, which administers the annual $2 million HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions. Her more than 20 books include 36 Views of Mount Fuji, Revolution and the Word, and The Future of Thinking. Her latest book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, was named a top 10 science book of the year by Publishers Weekly and has been the occasion for over 80 invited lectures in the US and internationally. I guess we're the 81st. A frequent speaker and consultant on institutional change at universities, corporations, and non-profits around the world, she writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications in the US and abroad.
	In July 2012, she was named the first educator on the six-person board of directors of the Mozilla Foundation. She was recently appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Humanities and received the 2012 Educator of the Year award for visionary contribution to science and technology and education. Cathy Davidson's main contributions have been in the area of history and theory of technology, including history of the book, history of industrialism and post-industrialism, and history of new technologies and society. Her interest in issues of race, gender, and sexuality cross all her work, from 18th century literature to envisioning the future of digital media and learning institutions in a digital age.
	I got to hear Cathy several years ago, several summers ago, when she spoke at the Aspen Institute. Really, the way I think about the transformations in education, given the digital revolution, have forever shifted given Cathy's presentation at that institute. Please join me in welcoming Cathy Davidson to Swarthmore and helping us understand some of these fundamental changes afoot. 
Cathy Davidson:	That was lovely. Thank you. Thank you. Forget all of that. None of that was true. No, that [inaudible 00:03:46] I want to talk for the next little while about the kind of educational system we have, how we got this educational system, and what we might think about together if we're thinking about educational systems as a future. I'll be focusing mostly on higher education, but I'm also going to be talking some broad strokes about education more generally. Part of my inspiration for talking about learning in a world changing as fast as our world is changing is this very humble, little building. 
	I visited this building about four years ago, and it was kind of decrepit. It was underneath the overpass, on a very, very busy overpass in a side alley in San Francisco. I rang the doorbell. No one answered. There was no one to meet me there. I rang the doorbell again, and no one answered. Finally, someone peered out and welcomed me in, and it was one of those typical under-the-overpass buildings with linoleum floors, maybe 20 desks, maybe 100 desktop computers, maybe 20 people, no one paying particular attention to me, nothing very fancy. It was the headquarters of Wikipedia, the sixth most visited website on the World Wide Web. What corporate headquarters of the sixth most visited website on the World Wide Web would look like that?
	I was there for a very specific reason. I was meeting Jimmy Wales. I had met him once before at a technology and learning conference. We'd had dinner together with some mutual friends, but I was there that day to ask him one question. My question was, "Did you know, Jimmy ..." He and his partner created Wikipedia in 2001. They came up with the Hawaiian word wiki for the strange, new kind of tool that would allow people to contribute together and contribute knowledge together. I really wanted to know if, in 2001, he had any idea that at that time, in a decade, he'd be helping to create an encyclopedia that's the biggest encyclopedia the world has ever known. 
	This is from November of last year. 23 million articles, 285 languages, 100,000 active contributors, 365 million readers monthly worldwide, 2.7 billion monthly page views in the US alone. If you go back to any of the literature in 2001, there's not even a concept, not even a concept, that that many people would contribute knowledge for free to other people who would be reading at that length for free, not because they had to, not because it was assigned, but just because they wanted to share knowledge, pass on knowledge, and learn knowledge on anything from the 1972 Philips VCR to pancreatic cancer to the rules of World of Warcraft, anything in one crazy, wild, contributive encyclopedia that didn't have a hierarchy, and it basically said if you think it's knowledge and you can find a source for it and reference it, it's knowledge. 
	I asked him, "Did you know in 2001?" He said, "You know, in 2001, we were guessing maybe 500, maybe 1,000 people would use our wiki." They had no idea, no idea, that something like this was going to happen. I think that's very important for all of us to remember, because we're in an era where nobody knows what's going to happen. My colleague and mentor, John Seely Brown, compares it to the Cambrian explosion in evolutionary history where suddenly one-celled organisms became multi-celled organisms, and then there was suddenly reproduction, differentiation so fast that it marked a new epoch in the change in organisms. I think we're at that moment in our own history of technology. No one knows what's going to happen next. 
	Another time, we were running the Digital Media and Learning Competition for MacArthur, and one of our judges was a man named Evan Williams. He was in a taxi having just come back from South By Southwest where he was showing this new thing that he and his friends had created called Twitter, and he had a little beeper on his ... I think it might have even been a BlackBerry in 2006, that was telling him every time somebody else signed up for Twitter. In the course of a cab ride from O'Hare airport to downtown Chicago, the thing stopped being little beeps and was just a constant noise as he saw Twitter before his eyes go from maybe 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000, and then it crashed. Who knew? 
	I remember in the car at that time, Twitter was ... We were joking about whether Twitter should have an E in it like Flickr ... or without an E in it like Flickr. I remember saying, "Twitter's kind of a goofy name. No one's going to be interested in Twitter. Who is going to want to make tweets? Get rid of that," so don't ever listen to me if I tell you what to do with your technology. 
	The historian Robert Darnton says that to put our perspective into the context of human history, that from the beginning to the present, there have really only been four epochs. We can say five or six, but he says four. Four times in human history where the ways we communicate with one another, the way we exchange knowledge is so different, so qualitatively different that there's no going back. When Darnton talks about this, the four eras he compares this to are, one, ancient Mesopotamia, 4,000 BCE, with the invention of writing, where for the first time in human history if I'm telling you something, you can write it down. If next year when I'm trying to sell you a camel, you've got a record of what I told you I would pay for that camel. 
	The second one ... Well, actually let's go back to the first one. This is much slower than our information age. By the time we get to ancient Greece in 400 BCE, the era of Socrates, the Greek alphabet is being finalized and stabilized, and Socrates is walking around wrangling against the information age, saying that writing is a very diminishing form of communication, that dialogue is alive. It changes. It's interactive. Writing takes the brilliance of the mind and the spontaneity of dialogue and freezes it in something as paltry, as diminishing to the human memory as writing. Again, fortunately he had a student named Plato who wrote this down, so we know in The Phaedrus that Socrates didn't like writing. 
	Second one, movable type. Before Wikipedia ... and I can tell this story at greater length if you're interested. Before Wikipedia, we would have said Gutenberg invented movable type. Now, if you go to Wikipedia ... and this is true. You know that movable type was created in China, 10th century China, perfected in Korea over about three centuries, and finally makes it to the West in the form of movable type. Not everybody liked that information age. It takes the primacy and the power, the authority of the state, the clergy, government and suddenly makes it more prevalent, more accessible to the masses at large. Maybe not the masses, but certainly to a larger public. 
	The third era is actually the era that used to be my scholarly field, which is the era of mass printing, paper, machine-made ink and steam-powered presses, about a little after the American Revolution, where for the first time in human history middle-class and working-class people could afford to buy books. They could own books, not just a primer, not just a prayer book or a bible, but actually books like, my favorite, one of the most popular novels of Philadelphia in around 1,800 called Monima: Or, The Beggar Girl. Monima has many adventures, but she's a beggar girl. The main character in that book is a working-class beggar girl. She moves from being destitute to having a little bit more affluence, but still a very, very, very non-elite character. That's what people were reading. 
	What did the Founding Fathers say about that? They said it was terrible. It would dilute attention. It would cause and lead to distraction, that these people, working-class and middle-class people, reading all these crazy novels about adventures and seduction and anarchy would destroy the new American democracy. Interestingly, the last information age was just as obsessed with pedophilia online in the form of novels as our own information age and with as little statistical correlation as ours. I think that's a fascinating recurrence, that if you read these novels, as a young girl, you would be susceptible to pedophiles. It's just kind of a quirky, interesting, connection. 
	What I'm going to argue today is almost all of our forms of education that we recognize as education were invented for that last information age, that many of the things we think of as the apparatus and the institutions, especially of higher education but not exclusively of higher education, were precisely to counteract the mob mentality that many of the elite were concerned with that would happen if people could read and have access to books of any kind, that the rules, the regulations, the metrics, and the science of the education system we've inherited was designed for the last information age, to make people suitable and active and responsible citizens of the last information age. 
	Of course, we're living in an age, the four information age, which began ... and we actually know the day ... April 22, 1993. That's the day the scientists at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications decided that the internet shouldn't just be for an elite, shouldn't just be for scientists, shouldn't just be for governments and the military, but should be accessible to anybody who had an internet connection. The way I define the particular quality of our information age is for the first time in human history, anyone who has an idea, who has access to an internet connection, can communicate that idea to anybody else who has access to that same kind of internet connection. No publisher. No editor. I have an idea. I can communicate that idea instantaneously to anybody else who has access ... and access is its own issue ... to the internet. That's a formidable, formidable responsibility and an amazing opportunity. I don't think that we have yet changed our educational systems to make people responsible to the information era we live in now. We're still training people for the last information era, not for the one we live in now. 
	Darnton also worked on the last information age before he became ... He left his job at Princeton. He's now the head of the library at Harvard and is partly involved in this whole massive digital public library initiative at Harvard libraries. This is his illustration of the old 18th century or early 19th century publishing history where you have authors. You have publishers. You have printers, compositors, pressmen, warehousers, suppliers, shippers, booksellers, wholesalers, readers, but it's a circuit of authority, regulation, broadcast, and control. My question is where does traditional education fit into a mix where our world is more like this? I have an idea. I make a video. I can put it up on YouTube, and anyone can see it, anyone who has access to YouTube. I can tweet anything, and if I'm ... Who was it today that had to resign because they did some silly thing on Twitter? Someone was telling me at dinner today. 
Audience:	The head of security.
Cathy Davidson:	Yeah, head of national security has to resign his job, mayoral candidate of New York, because they were idiots on Twitter. What are we doing as educators to train kids, plus heads of the national security and mayoral candidates, to live in a world where you can do something instantaneously? We're not always at our best at what we do spontaneously. Spontaneous impulses can have incredible lifelong consequences. How are we training people for that era? That's the question. 
	We're going to do three exercises. You've got to work in this talk. That's why there's those cards at your desk, and you should have a pencil there too. Is that right? Everyone got a pencil and a card? I'm going to just ... If you need more pencils, they're there. Just literally a minute and a half, 90 seconds ... and this is only part one of the exercise. 90 seconds, I want you to write down what you think are the three most important things we could do now to help prepare students for their future. If you are a student, just write the three most important things you think you can do in your own education to be prepared for your future. Now, just 90 seconds, write really quickly, and there'll be some other exercises we'll do too, but three most important things you can do to prepare students for this life that they're living, for their future. 
	Okay. I'd now like you to turn to somebody ... if you didn't come in with them, that's even better, but it's fine if you came in with them. Read off the three things on each your card and take 90 seconds to, among you, talk it through. Choose the one of the six things on those cards, the one most important thing that you think we can do to prepare ourselves for the future. 
Audience:	[crosstalk 00:19:54]
Cathy Davidson:	Okay. That's 90 seconds. Excuse me, please. Could I have your attention, please? Excuse me. Excuse me. Okay. 90 seconds. Back to places, everybody. I could leave now and just say my talk is over, because what you just enacted is the history of 20th century education. I never told you in the first exercise to write silently and write alone. You could have heard a pen drop in here, when I said to write three things on the card. The first time I taught in Japan ... This was way back in the 1980s ... I taught English for non-English majors. My students had never had a class from a foreigner before. The first time I told them to do an assignment, they turned to each other and started talking. I was like, "Whoa. What are you doing? I'm giving you a quiz. Why are you talking to each other? You're cheating." 
	I was teaching at a very prestigious women's college, Kobe Jogakuin, and my students were aghast that I would say they were cheating. I said, "That's interesting, because in America, if I ask somebody to do something, they don't talk to each other. Tell me about that." My students said that from first grade on, they had learned to work in han. In a han, or the group, you're not penalized for what you don't know. You're given responsibility for contributing what you do know. These groups are created so the person who's good at math works with the person who's good with reading, works with the person who's good at art or geography. If somebody gives you a hard task, you know you can depend on your group to help fill in so you can deal with that task in a complicated way and in a complex way. That was the methodology. I didn't have to say, "Work in groups," or, "Don't work in groups." That was the methodology I found when I was there. 
	Interestingly, by the time I went back the second time to teach in Japan, no one did that anymore. There was definitely a Westernization and a cultural change, and when you go back ... I've read a lot of Japanese educational philosophy from the '50s and '60s. It's all about the group, and that changed very much in the view of more Westernization, but we have learned to do what Socrates said was terrible. If you're given a hard problem, the first thing in our schools is to write alone and by yourself, certainly not what you do in the workplace, certainly not what you do pretty much any place else in life. If you have a problem any place else, you find people who can help you. You share knowledge. You talk it through. 
	That's what I'm going to talk about. How did we learn ... Also, all the research shows if you're going to ... and I don't have to tell this to people at Swarthmore. It's why people come to a college like Swarthmore. Being able to discuss ideas rather than just hear them passively from somebody in a lecture is a far better way of learning, far better way of learning, than just simply reading it yourself and not digesting it. Any time you have to talk about something, you argue about something, you try to convince something of somebody, you try to teach somebody an idea, that's by far a better way for retention and applicability than simply reading it on your own. We've got lots and lots of research supporting that. 
	My question is how did we get to the idea that single, silent, individual attention was going to be the most important way to measure achievement in our educational system? I think it's this lady, or her equivalent Ichabod Crane, male equivalent so we can have gender equality here, who's responsible because part of what her job was was to educate farmers to be factory workers, shopkeepers to be corporate citizens. This is happening throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century, with the whole movement for compulsory public education, city and roads, route memorization. The thing that I found fascinating ... and I have not looked at all of the records from all of the states in the United States, but I've looked at a lot of them. Almost all of them are obsessed with timeliness, that the most important thing education can do is to teach you to do tasks on time, on task, delivering the results to a time.
	If you think about the world of a farmer, part of what ... Now, I'm from Chicago, so this is a little bit made up, but if any of you are farmers, then you can correct me and say, "This isn't right," later on. If I decide on my little mental to-do list if I'm, let's say, a rancher, is that I'm going to fix the fence that day, and I ride out to my field and I've got a horse that's all tied up in the barbed wire, I'm an idiot if I fix the fence before I take care of my bleeding horse. In other words, it's a world of constant choices and contingency where you're reordering your day according to, "Is it raining? Is it snowing? What do I have to do today depending on the contingency of the world?" which is a very, very different world than the world of the factory. 
	This is my language rather than the actual language that you'd find in 19th century school archives, but basically these are the kinds of concepts that you see over and over again as arguments for compulsory public education in the United States. Timeliness is very important. Almost every state regulates what time the day is going to begin and what time it ends and how long the periods are going to be and divides up knowledge according to those periods. Spelling's going to be from 8:00 until 9:00. It doesn't matter if your students are loving spelling, hating it, learning, not learning, it's 9:00. Put away the spelling books. Take out the math books. That kind of segmenting of knowledge into time and blocks is specified in state after state. 
	I find this also very, very interesting. So is the age that determines when you're going to go to school. It differs from state to state, but everyone's really definite about it. If you turn six before September 15th, if you turn six before November 1st, if you turn six ... but there's a definite era by which you must ... It's illegal if you're not in school. Now, that's changed a little bit in the last generation, but in the original archives, there's a demarcation that says, "You weren't in school, and now you are in school," which is pretty weird because if you've ever had a child or been a child, you know that there are times that not every six-year-old is ready for school, and some four-year-olds are more than ready for school, but that idea that you regulate the human body and the human mind is very much part of the apparatus of the institution of education in the 19th century that did not exist before that and that we now tend to think of as natural.
	Today, we had a conversation about people who think that the semester has to be a certain length, and if you make it one week less or one week more, you're changing the order of the planets around the hierarchy, where the teacher stands, who the teacher is, the importance of the teacher. Many of those classrooms used to have a little box thing, a little platform that you would stand on. To deliver, you had to be. In fact, if Ichabod Crane were to come into this room, he wouldn't know what this was. He wouldn't know what this was. He wouldn't know what cell phones were, but he would know exactly, if he was the teacher, where he would stand, and he would know exactly where he stood. That has not changed. That's very much an artifact of the 19th century idea. It's the floorman. It's the floorman as the teacher, productivity that you can measure. What is that in education? What is the productivity of an idea? Think back to Socrates. What would Socrates think was the productivity of an idea? Standardization. 
	All of the archives I've read from the 19th century, I think it's really important that kids learn the same thing and preferably the same thing in the same grade and even on the same days, same week, in some states. By the end of the 19th century, scientific metrics ... and I'll be telling you a little bit more about that ... become very important in the division of the world into the two cultures. That's a much later term, but the idea that science and technology are one culture, have nothing to do with ethics, philosophy, history, the arts. If that world ever existed ... and I'm not sure it did ... we certainly don't live in that world now where those things are quite as fixed and as divided as it would seem to me, and the idea not of learning but of teaching. Again, I think when I'm at a place like Swarthmore, you already know that, that teaching is learning. Learning is teaching, and those things have to be more integrated. That's not the argument for standardized education in the 19th century. 
	Two people who are very, very interesting ... and I'm not really going to be talking as much about attention today. I really wanted to talk about the idea of liberal arts. That's what I'll be talking about in the third part of this, the new liberal arts. William James is the first writer in English to talk about attention. He whines about it and he says, "How come no one else cares about attention? How come nobody else cares about what the French call distraction?" I was so shocked when I went back and read that, that he says, "What the French call distraction," because the idea of, "I have a single-minded idea that then gets interrupted from externals," he had to go to the French to get that term. There was no equivalent of that term in English. That's pretty interesting. 
	Somebody who was a great student of James ... Actually, he was on his way to study with James when he decided, "No, no, no." He was going to be the Mark Zuckerberg of the 19th century. Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was from a very, very wealthy old Philadelphia family, was on his way to Harvard, and then said, "No." He wanted to go in the factory instead. The factory is the future. Became the father of scientific labor management and wrote hugely influential books. Drucker, the contemporary business philosopher, says he's the most important philosopher since Thomas Jefferson in America for scientizing and calibrating productivity. 
	What he means by productivity and one of the things he's obsessed with ... This is a very odd quote. People always get very stuck on it. What he was obsessed with is how you could make the unit of time and wheeling the wheelbarrow exactly the same whether the worker was working at 8:00 in the morning, when they've had a full breakfast and a good night's sleep, or at 6:00 at night, when they'd been wheeling that wheelbarrow all day. He felt that, for the person who was able to keep the same time all day long, they should get merit raises, and the person who had variability because they just happened to be exhausted or hungry should be called demerits. He called the people who were able to work standardized metric soldiers, and the people who were not were malingerers. 
	I used to talk about metaphorically ... I thought metaphorically about how, by 1920 or so, we were taking scientific labor management and turning it into scientific learning management. Then I gave a talk at Dartmouth where somebody said, "Well, you know Frederick Winslow Taylor was the first business professor and the first business independent master's degree and granting ..." There's a lot of qualifications, because I know Wharton School of Business has a different claim. Dartmouth likes to say Tuck School of Business was the first free-standing business school. Taylor was the first distinguished professor at Tuck School of Business, and what he wanted to do was take labor management, his theory of scientific labor management, and translate it to learning. That's what he did at Tuck School of Business.
	This is just a crazy slide with a lot of things that are invented basically between 1875 and 1925, or 1865 and 1925, because land grant university is in the middle of the Civil War. The two I'm going to talk about are the two in red, grades and multiple choice tests, and any time I come up with ... Tenured should go in that list too, by the way. That's another one of the things that's invented during this time period. My favorite story about grades is the first college in America to go from written out grades to A, B, C, D grades is Mount Holyoke College. 
	The second institution that goes from written out descriptions to A, B, C, D grades is the American Meat Packers Association. What's cool if you go back to the archives of the American Meat Packers Association is they hated it. They hated grades. They felt like sirloin and chuck could not be reduced to A, B, C, D grades, and they never were. From the very beginning, the metadata, as we'd say now, of A, B, C, D grades is on every piece of meat. Any piece of meat, it's not only an A, B, C, D grade. It's a number and you can find the actual notes. 
	Meanwhile, A, B, C, D grading spread like wildfire throughout educational system. Somehow, we were convinced that you could take something as complex as a student's progress and reduce it to a grade. If you try to think about that in any other terms than conventional, it's a pretty weird idea of human learning, that you could take all the things somebody learns in the course of a semester and you could slap a grade on it at the end and that would really mean something, it's an odd convention that we've inherited in our own age. We tend not to think about conventions. If you inherit one, it was natural. It was always like that. It wasn't. It's a fairly recent intervention. 
	The second one I'm a little bit obsessed with is multiple choice tests. It was my editor that asked me to go back and find the inventor of the multiple choice test. The first standardized multiple choice test is invented by Frederick J. Kelly, who was a graduate student, a PhD student at what is now Emporia State University in Kansas. He invented the standardized test for a very specific reason. For the first time in history, America was requiring secondary education. Before that, secondary education was only if you were planning on going onto a university. Suddenly, it became compulsory for everybody. It was at the time of massive immigration into America, and the schools were just ... There were not enough teachers to deal with the number of students. World War I was beginning, and America was starting to turn towards the war effort rather than producing students and eventually, of course, it actually enters World War I.
	Kelly said, "We have a crisis now, so let's come up with a way that anyone can grade a paper. You don't have to be a teacher. All you have to do is you make a grid, and anybody can get the key and can grade the paper." [inaudible 00:36:48] is not so different than a multiple choice test you might take now. Draw a line around the word cow. No other answer is right. Even if a line is drawn under the word cow, the exercise is wrong and nothing counts, because you're drawing under instead of around. Stop at once when time is called. Again, time. Do not open the papers until told so that all may begin at the same time. Again, an obsession with everyone doing the same thing at the same time and on the procedure of the right answer. That's a pretty funky way to think about human intelligence. 
	To Kelly's great horror, it, along with the IQ test, becomes the way that is decided who is going to be an office and who is going to be cannon fodder in World War I. To his great horror, World War I ends and school after school start adapting this form of testing, which he thought was an emergency, as the standard form of testing, and in 1926 what would become the Scholastic Aptitude Test uses this method, which he thought was an entirely debased form of knowledge, as the key method for admitting students to college. 
	Kelly goes on to become the president of the University of Idaho, and he's so happy when he gets to be the president. He's been a dean and all these things before, because he thinks, as the president, he can show the world how bad this test is by instilling Deweyite, think, do, learn, teach, see one, do one, teach one kinds of methodologies. Within a year, he's fired. The faculty vote him out because they hired him to be president of the new science of education, and they were appalled when he then turned out to be this Montessori Deweyite who believed in interdisciplinarity and merging of ideas and doing things by experiment. They wanted this guy, the inventor of the multiple choice test. 
	If the keywords of the industrial age are timeliness, hierarchy, productivity, et cetera, et cetera, maybe the keywords of our age are almost diametrically opposite, or at least inverted versions of some of those words, just in time or any time thinking, the kind of thing that makes you decide, "Do I send that tweet or do I think better of it?" How do you have judgment in a world where judgment can be so fast but can have consequences on the rest of your life? Rather than hierarchy, how do you operate in a world where you can put something online and other people can change it? They can mod it. They can mash it up. They can fork it. They can remix it. How do you work in that world? How do you work in a world where businesses outsource half of your job to somebody else? 
	IBM invented the punch clock. 60% of IBM workers no longer punch a clock. IBM works on something called endeavor-based work where you work by the job. Even if you're a full-time ... not an outsourced, but a full-time, salaried employee, you work by the job and your partners change per job. It's a really different model than the punch-clock model. 
	Sustainability. What if you stop thinking in terms of how do you produce more and more and more, but how do you sustain it, whether that's the globe, the world, the planet, or your company or your product or your website? Anyone here who's a website developer knows sustainability is rather an issue for all the technologies we use. Customization and iteration. How can you personalize your own content, and what does that mean? If you don't have a publisher, if you don't have an editor, how do you make the content yours? What is yours? What is authorship in the world we live in now? Peer evaluation and feedback. My goodness, we've developed all these systems for judging kids, for grading students. We haven't developed very many forms for teaching you how to give good critical feedback, how to respond to it, how to put something else out there. We're much better at failure and success than at learning from mistakes, iteration, all of those things. 
	Collaboration by difference is a term that my organization, HASTAC, is interested in. What happens when you have people who have such radically different skills, but you need all those radically different skills to work successfully together? In the PhD Lab that I co-direct, we're having students build their own personal websites, because the MLA this year found out 75% of people who are going to be interviewing job candidates at the Modern Language Association this year say they Google before they look at someone's resume. "Oh, I'm going to be interviewing Cathy Davidson. Let me Google her and see what comes up." What we say is instead of having your stupid Facebook page come up or something else, you should have a curated version of yourself. What goes into curating your own website? Design, some technology, some awareness of legality, copyright issues, authorship issues. There are many, many factors that are involved in creating your own public online identity, and then learning rather than teaching.
	This, to me, is the scariest number in education right now. 4.1 is the average grade point average of a student entering the University of California at Irvine this year, 4.1 on a 4.0 scale. That means they've had perfect test scores, they've hard perfect grades, and they've taken enough AP tests that they're better than perfect. I think there's something ... and I bet that's not different from Swarthmore students. It's probably pretty similar. I think there's something so strange about being in a world where to get into your number three ranked state university in your state, you have to be better than perfect and all of the concatenations that flow from being better than perfect by a metric designed for another era. 
	I personally think that we have to think more about the 30-year pattern of defunding and especially the last 10 years of defunding public education. The repercussions for our whole society are so egregious, but for all of us, not just 18-year-olds in the state of California, a world where you have to be that perfect has to have repercussions. I bet if any of you ... I know at least some of you are parents in this room. The kind of extracurricular and curricular pressures on kids today, the division of their life into segments and duties is pretty remarkable in human history. America, by the way, tests earlier and more often than any other country in the world. I don't know if you were aware of that. We tend to think, again, that our own system is typical. It's not. 
	Part three. I'm going to, in the last part of this talk, talk about eight ways that I think we can think about shifting the paradigms from the kind of educational system that was designed for the last information age, an era of timeliness, hierarchy, productivity, scientific metrics, to a world where if I have an idea, I can communicate that idea instantaneously without an editor to anybody else who happens to have an internet connection. I think probably a lot of these are very much ingrained in the culture of a liberal arts college, because I actually think a liberal arts way of thinking, an integrated liberal arts way of thinking, is extremely important to the future of higher education and that the division of the world into silos is in fact a very, very artificial division that we need to rethink and we have to remerge those divisions again. 
	Galileo, Leonardo, Newton, even Einstein would have found it very, very weird that we would think science was so unimportant that we wouldn't be training scientists in the ethical human historical cultural social aspects of science too. It's a very, very odd idea that science somehow doesn't have anything to do with humanity. Number one, we think liberal arts is a start-up curriculum for resilient global citizens. Resilience is a term I'm borrowing from [Guitarry 00:45:56], and the idea that you shouldn't just be passive, sometimes that you can't be active but you do have to have the tools and the mechanisms to be able to respond to the world you live in. 
	The project pictured here is one that I'm involved with, I'm very honored to be involved with, in North Carolina. A professor at the University of North Carolina, Richard Marciano, a computer scientist, has started these projects of going into communities ... He's done them in California, and we're doing this one in Asheville, North Carolina, where he's teaching people how to digitize records that are available in their community, and those boxes are all records of redlining and redistricting of the town of Asheville, North Carolina that go back to the 1920s. He works with the community to teach some basic computer skills and programming skills and also digitization skills. A team of us have been working on a 3D historical map that allows you to see, in this case, Asheville, North Carolina and the dimensions of the old 1920s redlining districts and how those have persisted over time. 
	It turns out that all the redevelopment of this city, which is now a very beautiful tourist location, all the redevelopment that's been done, redevelopment and urbanization, has been done in areas that were redlined way back in the '20s. People who are good, noble citizens with good credit ratings are always racking their brains and can't understand why they can't get loans on mortgages. They've been redlined way back to the '20s, the 1920s, and one is the historically black community of Asheville, North Carolina. The mayor of Asheville happens to be from one of those places that was redlined. The house she grew up in no longer existed, and they had some state funding for the next level of development. One thing we're doing is a public exhibition of all of this information. We're also doing crowdsourced events where people come and tell their stories, and on this tool we've created called Big Board, you not only have GIS mapping, but there's what we're calling searching of heterogenous data. You can do searches of photographs, of written documents, of oral testimonies, and place all of those into a map of addresses that no longer exist. 
	My students at Duke are involved in that project, both in the teaching and in the creation of the tool, and in understanding historically what redlining is and understanding in economic and social terms what redlining is and ... That's one of the photographs, by the way ... working with a community leader and with the mayor on how to best get people involved in this project. To me, that's a really interesting way of reintegrating the liberal arts. It's design. It's data. It's the ethics of big data. It's a community-based project. It's history, and it's seeing that those things are not different fields, but that you can't really understand ... and it's making policy, making policy of the future ... that you can't do one without seeing it integrated into the others as well, but most of our institutions are not very good at teaching us what the connections are. Maybe in the Q&A we can talk about general education requirements at Swarthmore. 
	At Duke ... I'll just say this ... we have lots of general education requirements that are very well-intentioned. We never draw the dots between them. We never say, "This introductory course in classics is related to this introductory course in art history and this introductory course in calculus because ..." fill in the blanks. We leave that for students to do, and we also have an idea that if it's the foundational general studies, you get through that and then you get to your major, which is the important stuff. I don't think we live in that world anymore where you can keep knowledge that divided. 
	Second one, and this one's a passion of mine. Critical thinking was what we all talked about for a long time. We had to teach our students critical thinking, and I think it's extremely important for people to have critical thinking. I also think it can be very defeating if the reflex you learn is how to always be critical of what you read that's been made by somebody else, because learning to make something is an extremely humbling experience. Trying to take an idea and turn it into a thing, trying to actually implement something or draw something or design something and have it work is a really, really different thing, or writing a paper. That also is a form of making. Very different than reading somebody else's work or seeing somebody else's project and being able to critique it.
	I also tend to think that sometimes when we work so hard at teaching our students how to do critique, that they get paralyzed at the moment of them having to turn around and create something themselves, that if all you can see is the negative ... Maybe this is about Congress. I'm not sure, but if all you see is the negative in what somebody else is doing, it's very hard to then say, "But here's what I would like to do," and put forth something sustainable, creative, ethical yourself. They're very different reflexes. 
	The project pictured here is one by Anne Balsamo, who teaches a class on the history of sexuality and the history of gay, lesbian, transgendered history in America, but she's also working with her students to digitize the AIDS Quilt and go around and get stories from the AIDS Quilt so that there can be a living ... The AIDS Quilt is so huge that it's only been shown twice. It's this massive, massive object. This is actually a platform where you can ... It's a touch screen. You can touch it and hear the stories behind the quilt, so you're both learning the history and you're embodying it and figuring out the best ways to embody it in a way that represents the community. 
	Three, make sure what we value is what we count. I'm not against abolishing multiple choice testing. It's fine, and it's efficient, and it's easy, and until we have another system, it's not going to go away, but there's so many things we don't test in the kinds of testing that we do, so many skills. I'm convinced one of the reasons that we have the dropout rate we have, especially of boys right now, is partly because of a mismatch of many of the most interesting, exciting things that this generation is doing and the kind of testing we have that's still a very, very old form of testing that only tests one very, very specialized kind of knowledge and not other kinds of specialized and interesting and valuable kinds of knowledge, creative knowledge, collaborative knowledge, cooperative kinds of knowledge, synthesizing knowledge, again, critical thinking and critical making. 
	All right. This is a quote from Toffler that I think is very compelling. "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." The idea there is that when you're living in a world where things are changing so fast, you aren't just adapting to change, you actually have to systematically unlearn your habits. Get them out of the way in order to learn something new. That's not an easy thing to do, and I do terribly sadistic things to my poor students to practice unlearning. It's a little bit like Outward Bound, and I'm happy to talk about that. They love it, but that's what that's about. How to model unlearning is really, really important, and it also requires a little humiliation, if not humility maybe even actual humiliation by the teacher too, who's willing to admit they can't do something. 
	I've gotten into the habit of taking lots of notes so I can tell my students about all the terrible ... I mean, the statistics class, we talked about Carnegie Mellon. There's a brilliant online statistics program at Carnegie Mellon. I felt like I was a freshman again. I hadn't done statistics since I was an undergraduate, and to be relearning statistics on an online course, I learned HTML 5 in a Udacity course. I was terrible. I mean, I was studying hours in order to answer my Udacity quiz. That's a good thing. Most of us in the classroom are in the classroom because we were great students, and we forget what it's like not to be a great student. 
	It's very, very, very useful to sometimes have to learn something that you have no particular predilection for or skill again, in order to learn what it's like to face change. It's terrifying to have to change. Basically, learning is change. Learning is going from something you don't know to something you do, which is a good definition of what change is. Most of us say we're going to change, and we're pretty bad at it. We're good at the change we're good at. Unlearning is a great way of making yourself aware of your assumptions and trying to learn in situations that aren't comfortable. 
	Five, make diversity our operating system. That's one of the mottos of my organization, HASTAC. I think so much of the way that we cast diversity is so patronizing and that it's important to really rethink diversity not as an add-on, but an absolute necessity in a world as complex as the world we're living in, that in fact if we don't have people with different skills, different abilities, from different backgrounds, with different experiences that we are impoverished. 
	My great, dear, dear colleague, John Hope Franklin, who's name I'm honored to carry in one of the chairs I have at Duke, used to say he was a famous historian of African American history and a civil rights activist. He used to say his job was to learn as much as he could about African American history so Americans wouldn't any longer have such an inaccurate view of American history. In other words, what he was doing was not compensatory. He was trying to fill in the incredibly embarrassing lacks that we had in our understanding of history. It's like thinking Gutenberg invented the printing press when Gutenberg, by no means, invented the printing press. In other words, our insularity does not help us. Our uniformity of standardization does not help us in the world we're living in now. 
	Six, this is one I talk about a lot when I'm talking to businesses. Experience locally, share globally. It's so hard to do a big ... I hate the rhetoric of failure. "Oh, we have to teach kids to fail." If you live in a world where you grow up and have to be a 4.1 to get into your local state university, you don't want to fail. Failure can be really failure. It can be dire, but how you can learn to experiment in a controlled situation ... and I think a liberal arts college, any university, the whole American educational system is an amazing time of experimentation. If you can learn to experiment in a local situation, that contains any mistakes you make or any times you have to redo things over and over again, but if you succeed, share your knowledge because we all need to learn from the best examples that people are using. I think it's really important for anybody who's succeeded at something that's brave or daring or different to let that be known so that we can all learn from that together. 
	This is a very long slide. Make alliances with other paradigm changers. I don't think anyone should have to do it by themselves. This January, my organization, HASTAC, is just listing classes that want to play along, that are thinking about the future of education, so that our students can make networks across the different colleges and bank and share. We're going to set up some tools where they can share anything innovative that either they discover, their teachers discover, their friends discover that they can share with one another. We're going to create a whole alliance with this. 
	I'm teaching a Coursera Online MOOC on the same topic, which is completely optional, but we're expecting about 100,000 students in that class, and we're trying as much as possible to have students around the world also contribute ideas about innovation and experiments that have worked at their own universities around the world to reinforce the idea, one, that it doesn't take corporations to invent change. We can do that too. We do have ideas in education, and two, to enforce the idea for our students that innovation is a good thing. It doesn't have to be lonely. You don't have to be the biggest risk taker in the world, and there are other allies out there. 
	The eighth one is three ideas of institutional change. One is Clay Shirky, the new media theorist who says, "Institutions tend to preserve the problems they were created to solve." I think that's partly true. It's a little cynical, though. I'm not sure that institutions always have to preserve the problems they were created to solve, but there is more than a little bit of a nugget of truth in that. Tom Friedman says, "Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary." I like to think that's true. I'm not sure it always is. 
	Then my collaborator, David Theo Goldberg, and I started thinking about, "What if we thought about institutions not for what they prevent but what they afford?" In other words, at every institution, there are like-minded people, or even not like-minded people but who have ideas about institutional change. What if we thought of institutions as containers that allowed us to make change happen instead of as obstacles to change? How could that work? How could we change? What would be the potential if we rethought of our institutions not as obstacles but in fact as containers that helped us to change?
	I'm going to end with an anecdote, and then I'd love to have questions and answers. This is my favorite story of change because it has nothing to do with universities. Dennis Quaintance is a developer in the town of Greensboro, North Carolina, near where I live. It's a small southern city. He built some hotels and houses and various other things before. He had about 80 people he worked with to build. One day he and his wife were walking their twin babies down the canal in Greensboro and his wife said, "What if you tried, for your next hotel, to build one that helped the environment instead of hurt it? Or at least it didn't hurt it. What if it was an environmentally sustainable hotel?"
	Dennis had never even thought about that before. He doesn't have a college education. I don't know if he has a high school education. He went online and started reading about sustainable building, and he talked to the other people that worked for him and said, "What if each of you learned the best sustainable building practice in your field? What if we tried to build a sustainable hotel?" He talks about something his kids started calling ... They were older by this time. They were about eight by the time he actually got this idea off the ground. The kids were calling it the toilet of the month club because they started bringing home sustainable toilets and just trying them and seeing if they worked, because there was no model. 
	He was reading about things from an elevator from Norway that, as it's going down, it's creating enough energy that it is enough energy that it powers the same elevator going up, that refrigerants and power would go into the ground into some kind of a thermonuclear cavity that you could repurpose for heating in the hotel. The top of the hotel is painted this incredibly bright white vinyl that reflects the heat up, very simple, basic things. Ended up with a hotel that's pretty nice for Greensboro, North Carolina. That's the lobby. 
	They also said, "Let's tell people what we're doing," so everything they did they kept putting onto a website, and the people who give out the LEED awards ... LEED stands for ... Is there anybody here who can help me out? L-E-E-D. It's something like excellence in leadership in ... It's some horrible acronym. It's like HASTAC. 
Audience:	[crosstalk 01:03:30]
Cathy Davidson:	What is it?
Audience:	... environmental design.
Cathy Davidson:	Thank you. Leadership in environmental design, and there's another E. 
Audience:	Excellence. 
Cathy Davidson:	Excellence. Thank you. The LEED people contacted Dennis and said, "You know, we think you're on your way to making the world's first platinum LEED hotel." He's like, "That's impossible. That can't be the case." It was the case, the world's first platinum LEED hotel was by 80 people in Greensboro, North Carolina that decided they wanted to build a sustainable hotel and started learning and teaching them how to do it. I interviewed him when I wrote my book, Now You See It, and I said, "So, what lessons do we take from this?" He said, "Well, there's really two lessons. One, wow, how cool. 80 people in Greensboro, North Carolina taught themselves how to build the world's first platinum LEED hotel? That's pretty cool. But the second lesson is kind of depressing, because if we could do it, why isn't everybody else?" 
	That, to me, is the big lesson for institutions, and that's why I'm saying institutions should be mobilizing networks, and I really do believe it's places like Swarthmore that are small enough and dedicated enough that you can be the leaders in this. We have an educational system that was not created for the world we're living in now. I certainly don't know what an education system might do to let students lead the way to breakdown some of the standardization of knowledge, some of the silos and think about knowledge in a more integrated way. I think probably you, who are here, already know a lot about that. It's a matter of taking the lessons of people like Dennis Quaintance and just saying, "Why can't we do it? Why can't we change?" That's the third exercise on the cards. I hope when this is over you think about what you wrote and talked about with one another and make it happen. I think we can. I think we can. Thanks. That's all I have to say.