Our sense of timing

When we're inner directed, we enjoy a superb sense of timing. We get a feeling about our timing being off or right on. We know on the inside when something we could do would end up being too soon or too late to make the intended difference. We get inner promptings when something is taking too long or flying by too quickly. Our inner sense of timing can tell us when to start, persist, back off or stop everything we do. Our inner direction gives us feeling of profound contentment and satisfaction when our timing works out beautifully.

When we're outer directed, our timing is almost always off. Our tunnel-visioned outlook cannot calculate the right time to do anything. Without our inner direction, we take very little of the vast complexity into consideration. We don't know "when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em". We miss the boat or jump the gun without an inner sense of timing. When we're outer directed, we assume there is no inner direction and no possibility of a superb sense of timing.

We acquire an inner sense of timing by going within for guidance. We humbling admit we don't know the right timing for what we want to do. We become aware of the mind-boggling array of issues that factor into superb timing. We let go of being right, being in control or being superior to others. We face our sincere question of timing with innocence and receptivity. It's as if we're facing a mystery that will reveal clues to us if we patiently await signs of the right timing to deploy in this particular situation.

Less than ten percent of the enrollment in any scheduled instruction will experience perfect timing. The vast majority will find it comes at a bad time personally. The tempo will seem too fast or slow. The duration will either take too long or not take enough time. The scheduled offering cannot get it right for everyone because the diversity of right timing requires unscheduled or on-demand instruction. As learners become inner-directed, they will learn what they want when it works for them at several levels. They will repeatedly experience superb timing in the learning opportunities they encounter. They will join my delightful experience of life-long learning outside the system that delivers content on schedule.

In proximity to processing

I'm currently reading two books by Richard Louv about the restorative effects of spending time immersed in natural settings. I'm getting the impression that nature can heal minds and bodies by its presence as eternal processing. Unlike mechanistic procedures which come to an end, natural processes appear endless, regenerative and nurturing. Rather than confine and control us, growing things liberate us from too much linearity and structure.

This use of natural processing bodes well for the replacement of costly colleges with collegiality. It suggests that higher ed for college dropouts can restore their emotional freedom in lieu of perpetuating their emotional baggage from negative academic experiences. It shows a way for higher learning to be good for our brains. It accommodates a shift away from print literacy to more immersive, oral and visual modes of comprehension.

It seems to me there is not much to say about this with printed sentences. There is, however, much to show about this with a multimedia vocabulary.

Identity and activity issues

When our identity issues get handled adequately, we can make efforts which are congruent with who we think we are. We feel like respectable human beings who are doing what is needed at the moment. When our identity issues are unresolved or decided against us, we cannot make the required effort or find anything to do that resolves our identity issues. We feel like a machine, puppet or pawn in a system of persecution.

If we internalize the toxic messages of an education system designed for dropping out, our identity will take a major hit. We'll operate under the impression that we are:

1. unworthy of respect from admirable adults
2. incapable of facing challenges or getting sufficiently organized
3. unrecognizable as unique somebody with valuable contributions to make
4. unfavorably compared to others who are not as defective as we have become

This narrative of a flawed human being drives us to alter our miserable moods with excessive frenzy, consumption and/or socializing. We persist in being too busy to rethink our identity which seems like a curse, not one of several options. We generalize the toxic messages from the education system that told us we don't belong in the world of success, satisfaction and impressive results.

Our identity issues get resolved largely by getting mentored and serving as a mentor to others. We discover who we might be that differs from those putdowns we've internalized. We foresee the possibility of self respect, self expression and self fulfillment. We open the door to becoming less self absorbed, selfish and needy. We step into the light of making differences in the world that needs our help in seeing what we see, doing what we can do and achieving what we can accomplish. We become a respectable human being that gets admirable things done.

Designed for dropping out

Both high schools and institutions of higher ed are obviously very effective at getting large numbers of their students to dropout. From my perspective, dropping out must be their intended solution. If those institutions were designed for matriculation and graduation, they would be structured very differently. Institutions for higher learning must be deliberately designed for dropping out and have been proven very effective at achieving that purpose. They send loud and clear messages to their potential dropouts like the following:

• If you've got self motivation and a passion for individualized learning, you're a misfit here. We rely on grades and grade point averages to incentivize learning. Our extrinsic rewards are known to have a toxic effect on your intrinsic motivation and your sense of a personal mission.
• If you want to be creative or imagine learning to involve your creativity, you don't belong here. The only outlet for creativity in large classes with machine-graded exams is cheating. Some instructors teaching small classes may allow you to express yourself, formulate your own solutions or think for yourself. However those instructors are not recognized by their peers or given favorable evaluations for teaching like that. You'll find those instructors will drop out of here just as you're inclined to do.
• If you learn best socially, you will learn next to nothing here. We give grades for individualized performance. The purpose of most group projects is to divide up the workload, not to collaborate or gain from others' perspectives. What you'll learn socially here is the finer points of binge drinking and other expressions of frustration, neediness and insecurities. 
• If you benefit from getting understood by mentors, perceived as potentially  talented, recognized for your unique attributes, you're in trouble here. We need you to conform to academic rigors, comply with arduous requirements and suppress your idiosyncratic urges to do well here. Only the arts curricula allow you to be flamboyant and defiant of job market requirements.
• If you admire particular faculty members for their maturity, expertise or exemplary interpersonal conduct, you belong elsewhere. We hire and promote faculty members who work well in silos, thrive on turf battles and compete with their colleagues for power within academic departments, divisions or the faculty senate. Those you admire are losers in our bureaucratic system of academic employment.
• If you want your experiences to seem meaningful, significant and valuable to you personally, you've come to the wrong place. We deliver a barrage of meaningless experiences to ensure that students remain dependent on the administrative authority figures, compliant with policy requirements and consistently submissive when getting misled, mistreated or misunderstood by their advisors. 
• If you want to learn from instructors who take responsibility for their mistakes, listen to other viewpoints and change their minds easily, you'd best dropout and look elsewhere. We encourage our faculty to exhibit patterns of fortress mentalities, blame shifting and hiding behind their job descriptions. We expect our instructors to desperately avoid responsibility, listening or cognitive flexibility when interacting with students or their parents. 

In other words, anyone who drops out has a clue and those who stick it out are dedicated to remaining clueless.

College for a healthy economy

As I've explored before, attending college is bad for our brains. So what?

• Isn't high school bad for our brains too? Yes!
• Won't the employment for college graduates be as bad for their brains as college courses and college prep was for them? Yes!
• Isn't college as bad for the brains of faculty and administrators as for the students? Yes!
• Isn't it good to get adapted to environments that are bad for our brains in order to benefit from steady employment and high incomes? That depends!

As I've pondered this "bad for our brains" issue further, it seems it's inevitable for a toxic portion of our economy that machines high volumes of consistent outcomes. The pressure to deliver reliable results on a committed schedule creates employment that is bad for our brains. Anyone who plans on a career machining these results needs to get adapted to all that debilitating adversity in college.

There are other facets of our economy that can be good for our brains. I expect these sectors to grow in the near future while those which crank out consistent products, services and programming fade from their preeminent position. These healthy facets of the economy:

• provide individualized attention to each beneficiary
• employ self structuring talent to fill continually changing roles
• solve problems as they arise in the context of that beneficiary
• rely on the intrinsic motivation and good judgement of each caregiver
• work with the beneficiaries in collaborative, peer2peer arrangements
• produce new innovations that happily vary from previous ones
• involve continual growth, learning and personal development for each participant

Preparation for contributing to this economy requires college experiences that are good for brains. They need as much preliminary adaptation to prepare for future healthy employment as those getting inured to debilitating adversity. This sector will redefine what is meant by the term "healthy economy" from capital flows, trade balances and employment levels to economic activities that are equally good for our brains as for our financial measures.

Becoming well rounded

There's an entire industry of conventional content delivery that imagines we are not even slightly well rounded. This industry includes textbook and every other kind of print and educational media publisher. Preachy professors and pedantic academics of every stripe count among the members of this industry. Content delivery includes anyone else in a position to tell us what we need to know and how to think about it.

I imagine everyone is already well rounded even if we're not all "well educated". We all have wide and varied experiences with different food, music, locations, people and more. We've got tons of experience with caring for other people, pets, plants and other living things. We've been on the receiving end of lots of attention from others and engaged in changing how we get treated. We've started many and completed some projects, creative endeavors and social pursuits. We received boatloads of feedback from people, results of our efforts and our own self-assessments. We've all tried many things that did not work out as we expected, hoped or intended. We've all learned from our failures, setbacks and surprising successes. We've taken the time to upgrade our explanations of how the world works and our predictions for what happens as a result of our actions. We've learned to keep secrets, earn others' respect, maintain trust levels, use honesty and much more of the complexity of relating to other people. We've all got more facets than anyone can count.

In a world that works for us, we would bring all these well-rounded experiences to bear when we are learning something new. We would not be learning something to become well rounded. We would presume we already are and use that as the basis to assimilate new information and experiences. We would naturally compare what we've just received to what we already know and recall the new stuff by its tie ins to our well roundedness.

Convention content deliverers cannot adopt this outlook of mine. Each member is too focused on his/her particular expertise and the material to be covered. None of our well-roundedness counts in their world. It's does not deal with the subject matter. It's not in the form of respected expertise. It appears unrelated to the content they deliver. In the world of well-roundedness, conventional content deliverers seem to be flat as pancakes and as shallow as puddles.

I know from my own experiences that preparing content to deliver is hard work. My mind goes into task mode tin order to maintain intense focus and shut out distractions. On this basis, I presume that conventional content deliverers are consumed by binary thinking. They rule out the possibility of everyone already being well rounded in terms of the clear contrast between work and play, experts and amateurs, or knowledge and ignorance.

Thus it is very unlikely that anyone could become well-rounded by consuming the content delivered by experts. Getting seen as "not already well rounded" cannot help this endeavor. Getting treated as uninformed and lacking expertise creates labels, profiling and stereotypes that work against well-roundedness. Getting the content deliverers' own "flat and shallow" condition projected onto us consumers of their content can only undermine well roundedness.

With that preface said, my advice for becoming well-rounded is to realize everyone already is exactly that. When we accept that and let that serve us, we will become even more well rounded, resourceful and responsive. Imagine that!

When do we help others?

In order to realize a much lower cost to higher ed which producing much higher quality educations, those formerly known as students will need to be very helpful to each other on countless occasions. These slides look at twenty different occasions for us to be help to others.

When do we help others

View more presentations from Tom Haskins.

Locating where you're at

When reinventing higher ed to provide higher quality at a lower cost, each participant will be interested in where others are at right now. Here's a look at that.

Locatingyou

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Self-reinforcing cycles

There are two kinds of self-reinforcing cycles. The more common in human endeavors are self-destructive while those in nature are robust, resilient and sustainable. The future of higher ed depends on the migration out of human patterns to biomimicry of those natural self-reinforcing cycles. We cannot develop sustainable strategy drivers when we lack awareness of what Peter Senge called The Fifth Discipline and Gregory Bateson called our Mind in Nature. We've got to learn to take our models based on causal arrows and close the loop to include the feedback, side effects and hidden consequences of taking action.

When we tell people what to say, do or think, they will either comply or defy our domineering advice. We do the telling as if it does not come back to haunt us or have lasting effects on others. Our model includes a causal arrow of making others do what they're told to do. The others will become dependent or counter-dependent on getting told by us, contrary to our predictive model. They will discount or dismiss their inherent abilities to say what's on their minds, do what situations call for and think for themselves. They will wait to be told rather than take initiative and responsibility. Then when the cat is away, the mice will play games of retaliation. The domineering one will find the others have become "high maintenance" and in need of being told everything. There seems to be no escape to this self-reinforicng cycle. There are no sustainable dynamics amidst this considerable destruction of all the participants' flexibility and effective contributions to the whole.

When we ask people what are they trying to accomplish, what options are they considering and what considerations are on their minds, they will respond to our queries.  Our model includes enduring effects on others. They will become more reflective, self aware and resourceful. They will use their timeouts to challenge their assumptions, process their previous attempts and rethink their strategies. They will take ownership and look after the common interests with their big picture. This system is becoming more resilient and sustainable as power is shared, processes work with the participants and collaborations become productive.

When we "make like a tree and leave" human endeavors, we function within a forest of reciprocities. Our model contains countless loops. We respond to what's needed, requested, missing and changed. We enjoy others doing the same for us. We find each is contributing in their unique ways to their locality in the whole system. Everyone's innovations are synchronous with the local and systemic dynamics. The effects of all these reciprocities creates a highly resilient and sustainable self-reinforcing system.

Strategy drivers in higher ed

This morning I've been making connections in my mind between all the facets of reinventing higher ed and the strategy drivers of existing institutions. In the patterns I've recognized, there are two widely adopted strategy drivers that cannot:

• be good for our brains
• make degree programs much more affordable by providing higher quality educations at a lower cost
• redefine school work for students and redesign jobs for faculty members and administrators
• disrupt their current business models or established incentives for academic excellence

There are two other strategy drivers which support meeting all four of these challenges creatively and resourcefully. Thus the choice of strategy drivers becomes crucial to any model of reformation, renewal or replacement of the bastions of higher ed. Here's a brief look at those four strategy drivers:

1. Quantitative strategy drivers dwell on the metrics as measures of success, bases for prioritizing and frameworks for addressing problems. These drive the spending on expansion, reallocating resources to accommodate larger enrollment and redirecting efforts away from solving isolated problems. These drivers put faith in objective, historical data which steer the enterprise by looking ahead through the rear view mirror. 
2. Qualitative strategy drivers fixate on dimensions of competitive superiority, extrinsic valuation and attributes that command premium prices. These drive the spending on prestigious acquisitions, reputation-building enhancements and investments to upstage rival institutions. These drivers put faith in subjective rankings, comparisons and accolades which steer the enterprise by looking at itself in the mirror to preen and posture itself more impressively. 
3. Intrinsic value strategy drivers dwell on how the customer is always right, beauty is located in the eye of the beholder and trust emerges from transparency. These drive the spending on listening to customers, discovering their unmet needs and bringing solutions to their contexts where the problems occur. These drivers put faith in feedback from customers' experience of the delivery system, desires for changes and insights into what's missing which steer the enterprise to become more responsive. 
4. Resilient strategy drivers dwell on the ways self-reinforcing cycles becomes self-sustaining and spinoff benefits for all the participants. These drive the spending on modeling the complexity, capturing the recursive dynamics and reversing vicious cycles into virtuous loops. These drive the spending in on initiating compassion, working with collaborators and responding to inherent requests which steer the enterprise to create ecologies where everyone wins without exploitation. 

Both the intrinsic value and resilient strategy drivers function far more resourcefully and creatively than the other two. The bring out the best in the people involved which spills over into the lives of others impacted indirectly. The cumulative effects of these beneficial dynamics yields the wonderful effects on brains, affordability, job design and the reinvention of higher ed.

More ways colleges are bad for our brains

Last year, my most read post was How colleges are bad for our brains. I included seven facets which have since grown to a dozen. Here the five new ones with the original seven republished below.

8. When we're we're faced with injustices, we take the higher moral ground to restore fairness from our own viewpoint. Nowadays it seems unjust to be forced to pay so much attention to lecturers, to ignore our handhelds streaming with our friends latest news and to single task some meaningless assignment. Our brains get busy figuring out how to restore fairness by ignoring the professor, sneaking looks at handhelds and multitasking while dealing with stupid tasks.
9. When we're overloaded with too much information, our minds go blank. We handle the excessive inputs by shutting down the processing what what we're hearing, seeing or getting asked for in response. We fail to pay attention and appear to space out at a time when it's crucial to absorb everything. We then lose confidence in our minds' abilities to function under academic pressures and assume we fail at other classroom challenges.
10. When we're faced with extremely consistent, familiar and predictable situations, our minds flip onto auto-pilot. We take a load off our massive glucose burner (neocortex) that thinks about anything inconsistent, unfamiliar and unpredictable. We rely on our pattern recognition abilities to know when there will be no surprises and when it's safe to tune out our surroundings. We then appear to be space cadets sitting in college classrooms wasting our time, money and energy being there.
11. When we're overtaxing our memories, our minds conserve storage space by discarding useless information. We forget what seemed pointless, irrelevant or useless at the time we encountered it. However, we easily remember what we did that worked for us, got the intended results or proved to be accurate. We also remember what proved to be waste of time and avoid that in the future. From college courses , we remember what we did and what we got, not what was said or assigned.
12. When we're expected to overt-think or overanalyze a challenge, we lose touch with our pent-up feelings. We assume we can be Spock-like and identify with pure rationality. When our pent-up feelings erupt, our minds quickly invent rationalizations, justifications and coverups to maintain our pretense of rationality. Our inner turmoil escalates under this regime of repression and usually becomes mental or physical problems which are impossible to ignore. We deny we've got those problems until they ruin our lives and force us to dropout of college.

1. When we're exposed to excessive expertise, we learn to act helpless and then become morbidly dependent on authority figures. This works for submitting to the alpha dog in our pack, but not for knowledge work, creativity, and many other roles that call for our personal resourcefulness.
2. When we're put under prolonged pressure, we suffer crippling anxiety. We lose physical coordination, mental agility, immune responses and restful sleep. We remain in a state of agitation which we cannot shake off, sleep off or mood alter away. This is our fight/flight response gone awry because the dangerous predators seem to be constantly present.
3. When we get framed as deviant, defective or deficient, we unconsciously buy into the diagnosis and play the part. The way we get seen, labeled, talked to and evaluated becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. While this worked to maintain safety in numbers and avoid getting kicked out of our tribe, it's not helpful when cultivating our best performance and unique abilities.
4. When we're subjected to excessive control and guilt trips, we over-compensate in order to restore our emotional balance. We may lash out at others or take out our frustrations on ourselves. Displacing these anxieties gives us urges to overindulge in drinking, shopping, gambling and many other escapes.  While this keeps us from totally losing our minds, it sabotages our relationships, reputations and self respect in the process.
5. When we're exposed to bad examples, we imitate them regardless of their effectiveness. We may easily become hypocrites, incompetent technicians or bullies if those examples get paraded in front us. This learning by osmosis enables us, as infants, to add twenty new words to our vocabulary every day and to mimic our parents behaviors which meets with their approval. It does not safeguard us against internalizing gibberish or dysfunctional exemplars. 
6. When losses, setbacks and other misfortunes do not make sense to us, we get devastated and drown in despair.. We are prone to long bouts of depression when we're faced with a barrage of meaninglessness incidents. This works to prevent us from digging a deeper hole for ourselves or from foolishly chasing after rainbows.  However, it does not generate the meaning that's missing or define new directions for us to pursue.
7. When we're rewarded handsomely for our efforts, we lose our self motivation, creativity and long term perspective. We become addicted to the extrinsic rewards, greedy for more and desperate to maximize our earnings. This works to motivate our stockpiling food for a long winter, but not for taking others' interests to heart. 

Working in hierarchical ways

Working in hierarchies in a hierarchical way is bad for our brains, our physical health and our relationships. Yet it appears we are hard wired to keep score, assess rank and react to changes in others' status, as a 2008 study by the National Institutes of Health discovered (link from Harold Jarche). If this fixation with hierarchical ways of working was all we had going for us, there wold be no hope for collaborative enterprises or the reinvention of higher ed.

I've got lots of experience with working in hierarchies in non-hierarchcial ways. I've found ways to take initiatives and spawn innovations regardless of the stagnant outlooks above me. I've thrived on being self motivated and intrinsically rewarded while colleagues and managers seemed addicted to external motivators. I've been inclined to question authority and function with autonomy while others were dependent on the command and control of higher-ups. While my non-hierarchcial way of working got me into trouble and excluded me from promotions on occasion, more often it provided me with additional opportunities, accomplishments and personal satisfaction.

As I've psyched out those who get completely caught up in working in hierarchical  ways, I've identified four patterns which can eventually become a passing phase of further personal development:

• Unmet dependency needs: When our own parents have seemed unreliable, unavailable or unsupportive to us, we become starved for positive parental figures. We remain dependent on those who seem bigger than us, more powerful and overbearing. We hope to get much-needed approval, recognition and validation from these authority figures. Hierarchies provide big daddies or big mommies at the top of the pyramid which satisfies these cravings.
• Living in the past: Unresolved issues make our past history seem very important to us. We experience our lives as stuck stories where the same things repeatedly happen to us. While dwelling in our past, we treasure reminders of poignant memories, traditions and rituals. We take comfort in legacy procedures, unchanging policies and unquestioned routines which hierarchies enforce.  
• Symbolic gratification: We are poor judges of what will deeply satisfy us when acting out unresolved power issues. We need lots of stuff to prove to others and convince ourselves that we're powerful, confident and worthy of respect. We overcompensate for insecurities, victim stories and repeated incidents of powerlessness with very showy packages. We accumulate big things as indisputable proof. Hierarchies meet this need with big benefits, big paychecks for the higher ups and big responsibilities over others. 
• Over-thinking conflicted issues: While we dealing with lots of irrational urges, we keep a lid on them with excessive rationality. We try to justify our actions and rationalize our decisions to keep from flipping our lid. We idealize our rationality and over-think any issue with emotional components.  Hierarchies march these inclinations with excessive meetings, policy manuals and procedural compliance.

For either collaborative enterprises or lower cost/higher quality higher ed to function effectively, the participants need to be able to:

1. self-structure their activities, take initiative and make adjustments to our conduct based on outcomes and other kinds of feedback
2. take satisfaction in their processes and outcomes without getting formally evaluated, rated or scored
3. get creative when faced with symptoms of deeper problems, complex system dynamics or dilemmas that defy problem solving
4. collaborate with others who are valued for their diversity, consulted for their unique outlooks and treated as equals

While working in hierarchical ways, we cannot meet any of these four prerequisites:

1. we cannot structure our own activities but we can comply with orders, wait to be told what to do and hide behind our job descriptions
2. we cannot feel intrinsically rewarded but we can get motivated by how we rank, fit in and compete with others
3. we cannot get creative but we can give lip service to the need for action and make a show of handling the problem with lots of busywork
4. we cannot collaborate with others but we can envy their successes, demonize their differences and dismiss commonalities with them

When working in hierarchical ways can be framed as a passing phase in personal development, wounds from each individual's troubled past would need to be healed. Sore points would lose their sensitivity. Sacred cows would get slaughtered. Hot buttons would get dismantled. Thorny issues would get resolved. By renewing his/her mind, each could then be free to work in non-hierarchical ways. The hard wiring to work in hierarchical ways could fall into disuse.

For more see my next post: Healing the wounded workforce

Leaving legacy premises behind us

When we work against our brains, we will keep learning to a minimum. We will be too stressed, distracted or exhausted to absorb new ideas, insights or protocols. Most classroom instructors favor the methods that work against our brains. I suspect they are embracing one or more of the following legacy premises:

1. genuine learning is hard work and calls for strenuous effort
2. brains will adapt to any consistent condition and it's better to adapt to adversity than easy street
3. if students struggle with the material, they will never feel confident enough to challenge the under-prepared or disqualified instructor
4. when students find learning to be difficult, they will depend on the instructor for more expertise, evaluations and remediation
5. when learning is made too easy, the students will act defiant and become a behavior problem in the classroom
6. when learning is made difficult, students learn to respect authority and to prepare for employment in hierarchies
7. when learning is easy to come by, it's equally easy to forget -- unlike learning that was hard-won and memorably challenging

When we work with our brains, we learn more right now and continue learning throughout life. We will be invigorated, focused and motivated to absorb new ideas, insights and protocols. When classroom instructors favor methods that work with our brains, they may be relying on some of this second set of premises:

1. learning occurs naturally when we're calm enough to be curious, creative and confident
2. brains that adapt to inquiry, theorizing  and experimentation are better prepared than those fitted to compliance and conformity
3. when students feel confident enough to challenge authorities, they will feel they can challenge their own partial understandings and false assumptions too  
4. when students succeed at teaching themselves what they need to grasp, they will value how instructors teach themselves more each day
5. when learning is set up to fall into place, students learn to trust uncertain processes of losing their confusion, misunderstandings and over-confidence 
6. when learning is made difficult, students will become more resourceful if given access to peers and mentors who can assist personal progress
7. when learning is put to immediate use, it becomes easily retained and recalled in subsequent situations that call for that practiced use

Embracing this second set of premises might occur when instructors learned from how they have been working against our brains. They might start challenging their assumptions, legacy practices and current level of effectiveness. On the other hand, they might persist with keeping their own learning to a minimum, do the same for their students and stick with the first set of premises indefinitely.

Illiterates as the new normal?

More than half of entering freshmen need remedial reading and math coursework to cope with the academic rigors of higher ed. The standards for academic performance are not changing. The students are changing. Institutions always know they are right and who is wrong. The standards cannot be questioned or changed. The only option is to fix the entering freshman who are obviously falling below standards and changing for the worse. According to the keepers of academic standards, there's no way these substandard students are the wave of innovation which will become the next normal.

1. When the first steam railways began operating, it was apparent they were making very poor use of the canals that carried tons of barge traffic.
2. When the first telephones got connected, they were practically useless compared to the elaborate network of telegraph transmission offices and delivery boys.
3. When the first television stations began broadcasting, the selection of programs was paltry compared to the vast panorama of radio broadcasts
4. When online games were offered on AOL and Compuserv in the 1980's, there was no way they could compete with card games, board games, party games or ball games.

1. As entering freshman are far more media savvy than print literate, they are making very poor use of reading requirements and textbooks which has always delivered tons of information.
2. As the first college students got connected to each other, the problems they solved were insignificant compared to professional experts hired to fix things.
3. As the initial lectures and support materials were made accessible online, the selection was paltry compared to the panorama of online films, videos and games.
4. As the online learning was first organized by LMS's like Blackboard and Moodle, there was no way they could compete with online shopping, socializing, gaming and content generation.

Do you see a pattern here like I must be? Am I drawing valid parallels between shifts in technology and remedial coursework for entering college students?

Colleges for illiterates

Went I went through my undergraduate degree program, information was scarce and authorities commanded respect. Nowadays, information is abundant and respect gets earned by lots of other qualities besides authority. (transparency, authenticity, consistency, reciprocity, etc.)

When I learned to read, I was absorbing much longer paragraphs than fit in a tweet or text message. Lately, the length to be absorbed is like this paragraph.

When going to college made more sense than it does now, it was widely presumed that we needed expertise to solve problems. Nowadays, it more obvious that experts are making a mess of problems which are extremely complex, interconnected and non-linear.

When I worked on group projects in college, I was applying what I had learned in books. Lately it makes more sense to read people and shared situations to get practice at solving complex problems together.

When colleges enforced reading requirements, there was no way to graduate if one's reading comprehension was under-developed. Nowadays, reading is getting replaced by socializing, authoring and collaborating in ways that make a bigger difference than reading every could.

When colleges get reinvented for the 21st century, they will be designed for illiterates to graduate with honors. They will be honored by their peers who know first hand of the differences they made, the problems they solve and the respect they earned in the process.

Tracking institutionalized interests

For dashboards to function effectively at upgrading higher ed, they must track others' interests. Unlike PLE's that organize one's personal explorations, dashboards are designed to be there for other learners, educators and employers. They will get where people are coming from to assist them getting to a better place. They will orchestrate getting the exact learning needed from the right person at the right time and place. By tracking others' interests complexly, the right diagnosis will be made when something goes wrong.

Lots of students, educators and employers express deep interests in remaining institutionalized. They show no interest in being liberated, empowered or engaged in collaborative dynamics. Institutions solve problems for them. They function better under imposed structure and conformity pressures. Dashboards that exclude these interests will only serve a small minority of agendas, intentions and expectations. The exceptional educational value of well designed dashboards will have little impact. So today I'll explore the design challenge of monitoring many others' interests in remaining institutionalized.

Most of us that have happily found well-marked exits from institutions don't appreciate what they do for insiders. We only see the adverse effects and adverse selection of people for positions. As I explored last year in Amazing institutions and Are institutions really problematic?, institutions bring order to tribal dynamics. They provide protection from irrationality, subjectivity and disorder for those who otherwise feel very vulnerable and likely to be harmed again. They provide convincing justifications, requirements and enforcements to questionable endeavors. They make it easy to look busy, productive and proficient when self-structured efforts would appear idle, aimless or incompetent.

Institutions are also breeding grounds for second-class citizens who are never satisfied. These whiners complain about everything that happens or does not occur. They are easily addicted to distractions and habitually entangled by others' chronic childishness. They have no way to show respect, solve problems, take responsibility, function reliably or think through their own options. They come across as "very high maintenance". They rely on institutions to provide legitimizing cover and much-needed structure even though they cannot take advantage of all that to become first class citizens. They are in no shape to shape up or to change their tune.

These second class citizens get consistently misdiagnosed inside institutions.  The first class citizens do not learn the lessons taught by these underdogs. Their first-class scoreboards remain disconnected from these second-class interests. All this creates a phenomenal opportunity to reinvent higher ed to better serve those who are not self structuring, DIY punks, hackers and gamers. Those with well-designed dashboards will be tracking these institutionalized interests and cognizant of how to respond effectively to implicit requests, questions and confusion.

Where do institutions come from?

Like those in favor of an Invisible University or a 21st century revival of an Invisible College, I'm looking forward to higher ed becoming free of institutions. I see the moniker "Invisible University" as a transition term like "iron horse" and "horseless carriage". Once the replacement technologies become widely used, I expect we'll drop the word "university" from our label for the higher quality and lower cost post-secondary educations getting realized. The term "university" has already been tainted by diploma mills and corporate training functions which use the label to glamorize their offerings. I suspect it will be dropped easily when the time comes.

In order to realistically anticipate how institutions could get substituted, I believe it's essential to answer the question: Where do institutions come from? If we don't understand why they exist and how they persist, we are susceptible to wishful thinking and grandiose claims of superiority. Institutions are famously durable amidst societal upheavals. They have contradicted predictions of their demise throughout history. It's only when their reasons for persisting gets undermined that they collapse.

1. Institutions exist for the sake of private paperwork. Their structures support the documenting, distributing, reviewing, credentialing and filing of voluminous amounts of written and printed paper for select eyes only.
2. Institutions depend on the exercise of authority. They arrange the command and control of large numbers of personnel who lack authority themselves and depend on authorities to decide direction, prioritize actions and evaluate outcomes.
3. Institutions serve their own survival, perpetuation and fortification. They defend themselves against aggression on the outside and traitors within in order to maintain their existence or to impede changes.
4. Institutions serve an abstract public according to a legislated mandate. They cannot serve exceptional cases, individuals or special interests without violating that mandate.

There are countless college majors in academic subjects and degree programs for becoming licensed professionals that fit these institutional parameters "hand in glove". These pursuits get studied by going through printed material in sequence. I anticipate that institutions of higher ed will persist to serve this portion of the educational spectrum as it has in the past.

There are many other studies that are taking on the opposite characteristics. These pursuits can easily defect from institutions while getting better served through collaborative dynamics in distributed networks. The characteristics of these kinds of studies include:

1. Open source expertise that has been digitized so it can be easily replicated, annotated, tagged, stored, searched and mashed up into new documents.
2. Communities of creative authors using tools on the web while gaining credibility through their personal transparency, value creation and reciprocation
3. Collaborations intended to disintegrate after intense exchanges and discoveries of new possibilities, collaborators and projects
4. Community activism and outreach programs that: give individuals personal attention, accommodate their unique situations and respond to their particular requests. 

The pursuit of these studies will appear to undermine the reasons for institutional existence. Credentials on paper will be replaced by credibility in social contexts. Learning from books will be obsolesced by learning from peers, multi-mediated conversations, and collaborative productions. Authorities will get regarded as potentially toxic while interactions with fellow authors will yield more educational value. Serving the interests of other learners will yield far more competency and comprehension than complying with course requirements. Getting feedback from those served will prove more significant that getting grades, extra credit and bonus points from instructors. More educational value will be realized at a far lower cost. Institutions of higher ed will become elitist and nostalgic fashion statements.

Alarms on the side

Scoreboards get us into trouble by their errors of omission. They don't provide warning lights to help us steer clear of situations that are best avoided. A well-equipped dashboard has alarms on the side to forewarn us of trouble ahead or onboard.

Lots of our technologies give us warnings in addition to the metrics. Automobiles show us when we're low on oil or when the engine is overheating. Radar detectors signal when we're approaching a speed trap on a highway. Digital indoor/outdoor thermometers sound the alarm when the temperature is going below freezing. Geiger counters alert us to toxic levels of radiation. Computer game alerts indicate when our supplies are too low, our spending has gone over the limit or we're about to get penalized.

Each of these alarms is hard wired to an objective data stream. Sensors monitor fluctuations in physical conditions. Logic circuits filter out exceptional data. However, when we're on the lookout for the quality of the education we're getting, there's no hard data. The situation requires being on the alert, rather than receiving automated alerts. I expect we will make more effective judgment calls by setting ourselves up to watch for particular kinds of trouble. The dashboard alarms will involve taking time out to assess our situations with particular issues in mind.

As I've continued to develop my design concept for dashboards in higher ed, I'm seeing several alarms on the side of anyone's dashboard. There are particular kinds of troubles to lookout for when getting educated by experts within institutions. These same troubles can easily reoccur outside of institutions where learning happens within chains of value and reciprocation. Here are four alarms that support enduring learning, self motivation and the cultivation of useful insights:

1. Expertise monitor: We need to be on the lookout for expertise that works against our best interests, as I explored here. When this alarm sounds, we can stop expecting to benefit from the problematic expertise and start locating expertise aligned with our interests.
2. Freeze warning: When we try to relate to someone with no interest in our own interests, they seem cold to us. They're coming from a Bad or Better place below the line. They come across as controlling, manipulative, deceitful or tormented. When we detect a frosty approach to understanding us, we can create a healthy boundary that "just says no" to this abuse. 
3. Booby prize detector: When we're baited by extrinsic rewards like points, badges, grades, rankings or stats, our pursuits become senseless. We get caught up in a stupid game to play. We chase after the booby prizes instead of seeking what we find meaningful, valuable and fulfilling to our unique frames of reference. We need to be on the lookout for our judgment becoming impaired, our priorities getting warped and our satisfaction declining. 
4. Crap detector: When we get caught up in bogus offers, scams and ripoffs, we typically delude ourselves about the value. We talk ourselves into staying with it and avoiding the label of a a quitter. This alarm will call attention to the hypocrisy, false claims and other misrepresentations of value. We can move to solid ground where we have the sense to respect ourselves and to act with integrity. 

Practicing these kinds of vigilance will avoid most of the ways that college can be bad for our brains. When we alert to problems with expertise, cold outlooks, booby prizes and crap, our anxiety will be lowered. We benefit from a better self concept, more self respect and increased confidence. We'll become more self motivated and satisfied with our own accomplishments for our own reasons. Our learning will endure much longer than it does when we comply with requirements, cram for the exam and judge our efforts by the grade we get.

Finding places for dashboards

Dashboards in higher ed will make it possible for most learning to occur among peers. The labor cost will plummet as the work gets done by those currently considered to be unqualified. There will be almost no "covering the material" or "studying a textbook". The learning will be driven by individual interests arising from each person's recent experiences, explorations and contributions to others' learning. For a system like this to work, each learner needs a dashboard to keep track of their own and others' interests. Dashboards cannot become a universal solution. They don't function for the immediate interests in what I've been calling bad and better places. The design and use of dashboards needs to find where they function effectively. Here's how I've gone looking and found two places.

In any bad place, there are chains of pain. The executive yells at the manager who chews out the direct report who goes home to criticize his/her spouse who screams at their child who whips the dog that attacks the cat that devours a bird. There's no need for a dashboard in chains of pain. All participants are too upset to show an interest in other interests or to see their situation comprehensively. Everyone simply acts out how they were made to feel through their linkage in the chain of pain so the next in line feels the same way. Misery loves company.

In a better place, there are chains of command. The exercise of authority occurs through hierarchical levels. There are roles to fill and penalties for stepping out of line. Higher-ups dictate what those below are allowed to do and how they get evaluated for complying with those dictates. In higher ed, the college president tells the provosts who tell the deans who advise the department chairs who inform the faculty who pass it on to the students.  There's a need for scoreboards in chains of command to measure and compare outcomes. Chains of command keep outbursts to a minimum while fueling every kind of  lip service, sabotage, retaliation and defiance that wont' get caught. Everyone is paying their dues and getting even when they can.

In a good place, there are chains of value. The experience of benefiting from a purchase, interaction or other experience gets passed on down the line. The goodness found by one gets shared so others can take advantage of the opportunity, join in the satisfaction or experience the difference for themselves. Each adds their own subjective value before sharing those advantages with his/her social network.  The beneficiary of a valuable educational experience will tell her/his friends about the experience, the explanations for it and the likely follow-through to get more out of it. There's a big need for dashboards in chains of value. Each needs to monitor how others could value something they might share and what interests of theirs might be served. The tie-ins to one's own interests require continual attention to maintain the intrinsic motivation to serve others' interests and respond effectively to their requests. Everyone is making a difference in others' lives.

In a great place, there are chains of reciprocation. The experience of giving comes back around. It makes tons of sense to share surpluses, care for unmet needs, serve others' interests and contribute to common good. The generosity of spirit gets repaid in countless ways. There's the sheer enjoyment of the process. There are the results that become evident. There's the feedback others communicate. There are opportunities created to make a bigger difference or to collaborate at enhancing the difference made. Dashboards can track all these ways of getting repaid as well as what's going on with others. Everyone is immersed in co-creating satisfying experiences.

Dashboards for upgrading higher ed

I expect college dropouts will be the first to adopt connected dashboards to get a higher quality education at a lower price. They will be followed enrolled college students who will aggregate their interests in better college education like consumer advocacy movements have improved lots of what we buy. For the reasons I explored yesterday, I doubt that a majority college administrators or faculty members will adopt connected dashboards. There will be exceptions, just as there are with academics making use of handheld and social networking tools currently.

The two posts I've written about dashboards remain the most read for several weeks now. (Disconnected dashboards create mayhem, From scoreboards to dashboards). I've just begun to follow a growing buzz about gamification which aligns superbly with the use of dashboards I have in mind. I'm also getting renewed interest in what I wrote 3 years ago about Personal Learning Environments - PLE's and PLE 2.0. All that tells me to share much more of my design thinking about dashboards that can serve those seeking better/cheaper college educations.  I've just created a new tag: dashboards to help readers revisit this series of blog posts in the future.

I foresee dashboards getting used by seekers of college educations to:

1. become more self aware of where they're at in their development and states of mind
2. be more understanding of where others are at and thus more capable of getting on others' wavelengths
3. be more transparent and easily trusted by those in need of one's assistance
4. become more supported, validated and respected by peers while supporting, validating and respecting them
5. be more challenged and playful, without becoming overstressed, while pursuing personal objectives
6. become more successful at getting the right person for the job of whatever is going to be learned next
7. be responded to more quickly at any hour, day or location which will get the timing right for optimal learning

When dashboards come into widespread usage, the current model of lectures delivered by experts in classrooms will get questioned, invalidated and compared unfavorably to these peer dynamics. Prior to widespread deployment, the early adopters will make it evident how they are learning more in better ways at lower costs.