Is higher education broken? Not exactly.

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a university in collapse in the style of illustrations of the Fall of the House of UsherWhat does it mean for higher education to work?

The problem with claiming (as I sometimes do) that higher education is broken and needs to be transformed is that it begs the question of what it means for higher education to work, and that depends what you think it is for.

From the name you’d expect that higher education might be for …well… education, assuming that to be concerned with learning and teaching, but it outgrew that single purpose a very long time ago. Yes, learning & teaching still looms large, but credentialing is at least as significant (often more so) and, at least for some, so are research or various forms of service.  But, depending on your perspective and context, a university or college might also or alternatively be thought of quite differently as, for example:

  • a driver of peace or prosperity in a society;
  • a creator of knowledge in the world;
  • a support for local economies;
  • training for industry;
  • a market for contract cheating;
  • a home for sports teams;
  • a sharer and preserver of cultural artifacts;
  • an incubator for the performing arts;
  • a means to get a better job;
  • a medical facility;
  • a production line for professors;
  • an enabler of social mobility;
  • a profit-/surplus-making business;
  • a political pawn;
  • a selection filter for smart people;
  • and so on, and on, and on.

You might reasonably object that you could take any one of these away apart from the teaching role and you would still be left with a recognizable educational institution and, indeed, some are possible only because of the teaching role. However, to some people, somewhere, some time, every one of those roles is the role that matters most, and might be a target for transformation. Like every instantiated technology, a university or college is an assembly. In fact it is a huge assembly. It is part of and contains countless other assemblies, and is thoroughly, deeply entangled with a host of other systems and subsystems on which it depends and that depend on it.  Everyone within it or interacting with it perceives it from a different perspective, in different ways at different times, working together or independently as mutually affective coparticipants to do whatever it is that, from each of those different perspectives, it does. In many ways, as a whole, it thus resembles an ecosystem and, like an ecosystem, each individual part can be perceived as having a goal and a relationship with other parts, and with the whole, but the whole itself does not. I think this is probably a feature of institutions in general, and may be what distinguishes them most clearly from simple organizations and businesses.

So what?

As long as the distinct roles, from each individual’s perspective, do their jobs, this is not a problem. If you are interested in, say, in getting an education then you can largely ignore everything else an educational institution does and judge it solely by whether it teaches, notwithstanding the huge complexities of knowing what that even means, let alone with what proxies to measure it.

Unfortunately, a fair number of these roles deeply and negatively impact others. For me, by far the biggest problem is that the credentialing role is fundamentally at odds with the teaching role, due to the profound negative impact of extrinsic motivation on intrinsic motivation (I’ve written a lot about this, e.g. in these slides and in How Education Works so I won’t repeat the arguments again here). Combined with the side effects of trying to teach everyone the same thing at the same time, this results in the vast majority of our most cherished teaching and assessment methods being nothing more than ways of restoring or replacing the intrinsic motivation sucked out of students by how we teach and assess.  Other big conflicts matter too, though. For instance, when patents or copyrights are at stake, the business role battles with the underlying goal of increasing knowledge in the world, turning non-rival knowledge into a rivalrous commodity; ditto for the insanity that is journal publishing, where the public pays us to provide our editorial and reviewing services for papers on research that they also pay for, then the journals sell the papers back to us or charge us for sharing them, making obscene profits for an increasingly trivial service; similarly, the research role, that should in principle exist in a virtuous circle with teaching, is too often in competition with it and, in many institutions, teaching loses; the filtering role that rewards most universities (not mine) for excluding as many students as possible is in direct conflict with a mission to bring higher forms of learning to as many people as possible, and undermines the incentive to teach well because those carefully selected students will learn pretty well regardless of how well they are taught. There are countless other examples like this: public vs private good, excellence vs equity, local vs global responsibilities, supporting student diversity vs economic stability, and so on. Fixing one role invariably impacts others, usually negatively. These are structural issues that will persist as long as higher education continues to play those roles. The solutions to the problems in one role are the problems that other roles have to solve, and (to a large extent) they must be.

At a micro scale the problem is even more ubiquitous. Everyone is solving problems in their own local sphere, creating problems for others in their own local spheres, whose solutions cause problems for others, and so it goes around and comes around. Every time we create a solution to one problem we give rise to other problems elsewhere. To give a few trivial and commonplace examples of issues I am trying to deal with right now:

  • I recently learned of two courses that could not be launched because tutors for the single course that they replace would have to be rehired and lose benefits gained for long service. In terms of priorities and primary roles, this implies that offering stable employment to staff matters more than teaching. That’s not the intent of any particular individual involved in the process but it’s how the system works, thanks to union agreements that solved different problems a long time ago.
  • For nearly 50 years now, our undergraduate students have had 6 months to complete a course, unless they are grant-funded (an important minority), in which case they only get 4 months because funding bodies assume universities always teach in semesters of a standardized length and demand results within that timeframe. And so we are in the process of making all contracts 4 months, knowing full well that students will be more pressured, cheating will increase, and pass rates will go down, but at least it will be fairer.
  • When we commit structures to code they are supposed to model the system but, having done so, they normally dictate it. For instance, my need for all of our faculty to be able to see the teaching sites of all of our courses (a critical part of my strategy to improve our teaching) is under threat due to the cascading roles used to determine who can do what that are baked into the implementation of our LMS and that make it difficult and long-winded for our editors to edit our courses, because the roles have to be modified each time they use its impersonation function that is necessary for viewing courses as they will be experienced. The obvious solution is to fix those roles, not remove access for those who need it, but the editors lack such rights, and those who have them support other faculties with different and conflicting needs.
  • We have recently shifted to a centralized front-line support system, explicitly to deal with common difficulties students have in navigating and using our administrative systems and websites. The more obvious solution would be to make those systems work better in the first place. Instead, we employ vast numbers of people whose job it is to patch over gaps, errors, and poor design decisions made elsewhere. This reduces the pressure to fix the systems, so the need persists, except that now we have a whole load of people with jobs that would be in jeopardy if we fix them. We employ many people whose job is to fix problems caused by issues with how others do theirs: people dedicated to exam cheating, say, or accommodating disabilities, or the aforementioned editors. There’s a fine and indistinct line between dividing a workload so that people with the right expertise do the right things, and creating a workload because people with the wrong expertise have done the wrong things.

I could easily write pages of similar examples and, if you work for a university or college, I’m sure you could too: the specific problems may be peculiar to Athabasca University, but the underlying dynamics are ubiquitous in higher education and, for that matter, most large organizations. And I’m sure that you can think of ways to deal with any of them but that’s exactly the point: fixing them is what we all do, all the time, every day, on a grand scale, and educators have been doing so for nearly 1000 years so the number of fixes to fixes to fixes to fixes is vast.  For almost any role or activity, no matter how small or how large, there is probably another role and set of activities on which it impinges, directly or otherwise.

The big problem is that, on the whole, we create counter-technologies to fix the worst of the problems and that’s a policy of despair, every counter-technology creating new problems for further counter-technologies to solve. In fact, a large part of the reason for all those many roles is precisely because counter-technologies were created to solve what probably seemed like pressing problems and, in an inevitable Faustian bargain, created the problems we now need to address. Every one of these counter-technologies increases the robustness of the whole, increasing the interdependencies, making the patterns more and more indelible so, even if we do occasionally come up with something truly different, the overall system holds together as a massive web of mutually interdependent pieces more strongly than ever.

The more things change…

For all the many structural problems, it would be a synecdochic fallacy of mistaking the part for the whole to describe higher education as broken. Sure, thanks to all those competing roles (especially credentialing) it is not particularly great at education (at least), so transformation is devoutly to be wished for but, by the most basic and essential criterion of all –  survival – it is rampantly successful. In fact, it is exactly those competing and complementary roles that have sustained it because a diverse ecosystem is a resilient ecosystem. The webs of dependencies are mutually sustaining even, to a well-evolved point, when one is antagonistic to the other.

For nearly a millennium the university and its brethren have not only survived but have now spread to almost every populated region of the world, and they continue to expand. Within my lifetime, in my country of birth, enrolments in higher education have risen from around 5% of the population to around 50%. To achieve such success, it has had to evolve: the invention of written exams, say, in the 18th Century, Humboldtian models that justified and embedded research, the adoption of flexible curricula, or the admittance of women in the 19th Century, were all huge changes. It has lost the trivium and quadrivium along the way, and diversified enormously in the range of subjects taught. The technological systems are way more advanced and varied than they were.  There are regional variations, and a few speciated niches (colleges, open universities, distance education, etc). Administratively, a lot has changed, from recruitment and enrolment to the roles of professional bodies, industry, and governments.  It is constantly evolving, for sure.

But.

The main technological features that universities acquired in the first century of their existence are still fully present, in virtually unaltered form.  Courses, classes, terms/semesters, professors, credentials, methods of teaching, organizational structures, methods of assessment, and plenty more are visibly the same species as their mediaeval forebears, and remain the central motifs of virtually all formal higher education. We may use a few more polyesters and zippers, and the gowns now come in women’s sizes but, at least once a year, many of us even dress the same, a behaviour shared with only a few other institutions like (in some countries) the legal profession or the church. On the subject of which, most universities continue to have roles like dean, chancellor, rector, provost, registrar, bursar and even the odd beadle (what even is that?) that not only reveal their ecclesiastic origins but also how little the basic entities in the system have since evolved.

If the purpose of higher education were simply to educate then we would expect it to work a lot better and to see a whole load more variation in how it is done, especially given the wide range of technologies that can now be used to overcome the problems caused by those features, but we don’t. It’s not just the purpose that survives: it’s the form. We can radically alter a great many processes  but changing at least one or two of the central motifs themselves – which, to me, is what “transformation” must entail – is hardly never even on the table.

Adaptation, not transformation

If the institution had a clear overriding goal then we could re-engineer it to work differently, but this is not an engineering problem: it’s an evolutionary problem. We build with what we have on what we have, a process of tinkering or bricolage that is anything but engineered. It is, though, not natural but technological evolution. In natural ecosystems massive disruption can occur when populations become isolated, or when the environment radically changes. Technological evolution emerges through recombination and assembly of parts, not genes, and the technologies of higher education have evolved to be globally connected and massively intertwingled with nearly every other part of nearly every society, making isolation virtually impossible. In nature, ecosystems can be disrupted by invasive species, parasites, etc, but our educational systems – technologies one and all – have evolved to be great at absorbing stuff rather than competing with it, so even that path is fraught. Even something as apparently disruptive as generative AI, which is impacting almost every aspect of the system and all the systems with which it interacts, is currently causing reinforcement of objectives-driven models of teaching, (at least in Western countries) cultural individualism, and highly traditionalist solutions to fears of cheating like written and oral exams at least as much as it is inspiring change.

For those of us who care about the education role, there are plenty of ways we could actually transform it if we had the power to make the necessary changes. Decoupling learning and assessment would be a good start. Not just separating teaching and tests: that would just result in teaching to the test, as we see now. The decoupling would have to be asymmetrical, so the assessed tasks would demand synthesis of many taught things. Or we could get rid of classes and courses: to a large extent, this is what (despite the name) many Connectivist MOOCs have attempted to do, and it is also the pattern behind things like the Kahn Academy or Connect North’s AI Tutor Pro, not to mention traditional PhDs (at least in some countries), apprenticeship models of learning, most instructional videos on sites like YouTube, or Stack Exchange or Quora, and the bulk of student projects (like MOOCs, labelled as courses but lacking most if not all of their traditional trappings). Or we could keep courses but drop the schedules and time limits. If nothing else, imagining how things might work if we messed with those central motifs is a good way to stimulate creative use of what we have. If done at scale, such things could make a huge impact on our educational systems.

But they probably won’t.

The problem always comes back to the fact that, though (collectively) we could change the fitness landscape itself, making survival dependent on whatever we think matters most, we are unlikely to agree what does matter most. For some, better higher education would be measured in credentials, or explicit learning outcomes, or better fits with industry needs. Others would like it to advance their personal careers or status, or to do research without a profit motive. For me, improvements would be in far harder-to-measure aspects like building safer, kinder, smarter, more creative societies. Unfortunately (for me and others who feel that way), thanks to pace layering, the ones who could shape the fitness landscape the most are governments, and they are the least likely to do so. Governments tend to prefer things that are easier to measure, quicker to show results, that are most likely to keep voters voting for them and sponsors (especially from industry) sponsoring them. Increasingly, institutional mandates are measured by industry-impact, which does erode some traditional aspects of higher education but that reinforces the big ones, like the measurable, assessed, outcome-driven course, with its classes, its schedules, its semesters, its textbooks, its assessments, its teachers, and so on. It doesn’t have to, in principle but, in practice, those are not the things we adapt. If radical transformation ever does occur it will therefore most likely be the result of something so disruptive that the loss of higher education would be a minor concern: devastation caused by climate change, or nuclear war, or being hit by a large asteroid, for instance. And, to be honest, I’m not even sure that would be enough.

The limited chances of success should not discourage us from tinkering, all the time, whenever we can. Evolution must happen because the world that higher education inhabits evolves so, if this is the system we are stuck with, we should make it do what we want it to do as best we can.  There are usually ways to reduce dependencies, techniques to decouple antagonistic roles, strategies of simplification, approaches to parcellating the landscape (skunkworks, etc), and values-based principles for prioritizing activities that can make it more likely that the changes will be successful and persistent. However, if we have learned anything from biological studies over the past many decades, it is that you shouldn’t mess with an ecosystem. Whatever we do will put it out of balance, and self-organizing dynamics will ensure that either the balance will be restored, or that it spirals out of control and breaks altogether. Either way, it will never be exactly what we planned and, on average, it will tend to eventually keep things much the same as they are while making most of it worse while it restabilizes itself.

Knowing that, though, can be useful. If every change will result in changes elsewhere, it is not enough to monitor the direct impact of an intervention: rather, we need to figure out ways of harvesting the outcomes across the system and/or, as best we are able, to model them in advance. No one has access to more than a fraction of the information needed, not least because a because a significant amount of it is tacit, embedded in the culture and practices of people and communities within the system. However, we can try to intentionally capture it, to tell stories, to share experiences and understandings across all those many niches. We can do what we can to make the invisible visible. We can talk. And we have technologies to help, inasmuch as we can train AIs to know our stories and ask them about the impacts of things we do, and point out impacts that would be difficult if not impossible for any person to do. And that, I think, is the only viable path we have. The problems we generally have to deal with are a direct result of local thinking: solutions in one space that cause problems in another. The less locally we think about such things, the greater the chances that we will avoid unwanted impacts elsewhere or, equally good, that we will cause wanted impacts. To achieve that demands openness and dialogue, channels through which we can share and communicate, and some way of compressing, parsing, and relaying all that so that sharing and communication is not the only thing we ever do. This is not an impossibly tall order but it certainly isn’t easy.

Generative vs Degenerative AI (my ICEEL 2025 keynote slides)

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AI Santa fighting KrampusI gave my second keynote of the week last week (in person!) at the excellent ICEEL conference in Tokyo.  Here are the slides: Generative AI vs degenerative AI: steps towards the constructive transformation of education in the digital age. The conference theme was “AI-Powered Learning: Transforming Education in the Digital Age”,  so this is roughly what I talked about…

Transformation in (especially higher) education is quite difficult to achieve.  There is gradual evolution, for sure, and the occasional innovation, but the basic themes, motifs, and patterns – the stuff universities do and the ways they do it – have barely changed in nigh-on a millennium. A mediaeval professor or student would likely feel right at home in most modern institutions, now and then right down to the clothing. There are lots of path dependencies that have led to this, but a big part of the reason is down to the multiple subsystems that have evolved within education, and the vast number of supersystems in which education participates. Anything new has to thrive in an ecosystem along with countless other parts that have co-evolved together over the last thousand years. There aren’t a lot of new niches, the incumbents are very well established, and they are very deeply enmeshed.

There are several reasons that things may be different now that generative AI has joined the mix. Firstly, generative AIs are genuinely different – not tools but cognitive Santa Claus machines, a bit like appliances, a bit like partners, capable of becoming but not really the same as anything else we’ve ever created. Let’s call them metatools, manifestations of our collective intelligence and generators of it. One consequence of this is that they are really good at doing what humans can do, including teaching, and students are turning to them in droves because they already teach the explicit stuff (the measurable skills and knowledge we tend to assess, as opposed to the values, attitudes, motivational and socially connected stuff that we rarely even notice) better than most human teachers. Secondly, genAI has been highly disruptive to traditional assessment approaches: change (not necessarily positive change) must happen. Thirdly, our cognition itself is changed by this new kind of technology for better or worse, creating a hybrid intelligence we are only beginning to understand but that cannot be ignored for long without rendering education irrelevant. Finally genAI really is changing everything everywhere all at once: everyone needs to adapt to it, across the globe and at every scale, ecosystem-wide.

There are huge risks that it can (and plentiful evidence that it already does) reinforce the worst of the worst of education by simply replacing what we already do with something that hardens it further, that does the bad things more efficiently, and more pervasively, that revives obscene forms of assessment and archaic teaching practices, but without any of the saving graces and intricacies that make educational systems work despite their apparent dysfunctionality. This is the most likely outcome, sadly. If we follow this path, it ends in model collapse for not just LLMs but for human cognition. However, just perhaps, how we respond to it could change the way we teach in good if not excellent ways. It can do so as long as human teachers are able to focus on the tacit, the relational, the social, and the immeasurable aspects of what education does rather than the objectives-led, credential-driven, instrumentalist stuff that currently drives it and that genAI can replace very efficiently, reliably, and economically. In the past, the tacit came for free when we did the explicit thing because the explicit thing could not easily be achieved without it. When humans teach, no matter how terribly, they teach ways of being human. Now, if we want it to happen (and of course we do, because education is ultimately more about learning to be than learning to do), we need to pay considerably more deliberate attention to it.

The table below, copied from the slides, summarizes some of the ways we might productively divide the teaching role between humans and AIs:

Human Role (e.g.)

AI role (e.g.)

Relationships

 Interacting, role modelling, expressing, reacting. Nurturing human relationships, discussion catalyzing/summarizing

Values

 Establishing values through actions, discussion, and policy. Staying out of this as much as possible!

Information

 Helping learners to see the personal relevance, meaning, and value of what they are learning. Caring. Helping learners to acquire the information. Providing the information.

Feedback

 Discussing and planning, making salient, challenging. Caring. Analyzing objective strengths and weaknesses, helping with subgoals, offering support, explaining.

Credentialling

 Responsibility, qualitative evaluation. Tracking progress, identifying unprespecified outcomes, discussion with human teachers.

Organizing

 Goal setting, reacting, responding. Scheduling, adaptive delivery, supporting, reminding.

Ways of being

 Modelling, responding, interacting, reflecting. Staying out of this as much as possible!

I don’t think this is a particularly tall order but it does demand a major shift in culture, process, design, and attitude.  Achieving that from scratch would be simple. Making it happen within existing institutions without breaking them is going to be hard, and the transition is going to be complex and painful. Failing to do so, though, doesn’t bear thinking of.

Abstract

In all of its nearly 1000-year history, university education has never truly been transformed. Rather, the institution has gradually evolved in incremental steps, each step building on but almost never eliminating the last. As a result, a mediaeval professor dropped into a modern university would still find plenty that was familiar, including courses, semesters, assessments, methods of teaching and perhaps, once or twice a year, scholars dressed like him. Even such hugely disruptive innovations as the printing press or the Internet have not transformed so much as reinforced and amplified what institutions have always done. What chance, then, does generative AI have of achieving transformation, and what would such transformation look like?
In this keynote I will discuss some of the ways that, perhaps, it really is different this time: for instance, that generative AIs are the first technologies ever invented that can themselves invent new technologies; that the unprecedented rate and breadth of adoption is sufficient to disrupt stabilizing structures at every scale; that their disruption to credentialing roles may push the system past a tipping point; and that, as cognitive Santa Claus machines, they are bringing sweeping changes to our individual and collective cognition, whether we like it or not, that education cannot help but accommodate. However, complex path dependencies make it at least as likely that AI will reinforce the existing patterns of higher education as disrupt them. Already, a surge in regressive throwbacks like oral and written exams is leading us to double down on what ought to be transformed while rendering vestigial the creative, relational and tacit aspects of our institutions that never should. Together, we will explore ways to avoid this fate and to bring about constructive transformation at every layer, from the individual learner to the institution itself.

Announcing the First International Symposium on Educating for Collective Intelligence (and some thoughts on collective intelligence)

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First International Symposium on Educating for Collective Intelligence | UTS:CIC

Free-to-register International online symposium, December 5th, 2024, 12-3pm PST

Start time:

This is going to be an important symposium, I think.

I will be taking 3 very precious hours out of my wedding anniversary to attend, in fairness unintentionally: I did not do the timezone conversion when I submitted my paper so I thought it was the next day. However,  I have not cancelled despite the potentially dire consequences, partly because the line-up of speakers is wonderful, partly because we all use the words “collective intelligence” (CI) but we come from diverse disciplinary areas and we mean sometimes very different things by them (so there will be some potentially inspiring conversations) and partly for a bigger reason that I will get to at the end of this post.  You can read abstracts and most of the position papers on the symposium website,

In my own position paper  I have invented the term ochlotecture (from the Classical Greek ὄχλος (ochlos), meaning something like “multitude” and τέκτων (tektōn) meaning “builder”) to describe the structures and processes of a collection of people, whether it be a small seminar group, a network of researchers, or a set of adherents to a world religion. An ochlotecture includes elements like names, physical/virtual spaces, structural hierarchies, rules, norms, mythologies, vocabularies, and purposes, as well as emergent phenomena occurring through individual and subgroup interactions, most notably the recursive cycle of information capture, processing, and (re)presentation that I think characterizes any CI. Through this lens, I can see both what is common and what distinguishes the different kinds of CI described in these position papers a bit more clearly. In fact, my own use of the term has changed a few times over the years so it helps me make sense of my own thoughts on the matter too.

Where I’ve come from that leads me here

symbolic representation of collective intelligenceI have been researching CI and education for a long time. Initially, I used the term very literally to describe something very distinct from individual intelligence, and largely independent of it.  My PhD, started in 1997, was inspired by the observation that (even then) there were at least tens of thousands of very good resources (people, discussions, tutorials, references, videos, courseware etc) openly available on the Web to support learners in most subject areas, that could meet almost any conceivable learning need. The problem was and remains how to find the right ones. These were pre-Google times but even the good-Google of olden days (a classic application of collective intelligence as I was using the term) only showed the most implicitly popular, not those that would best meet a particular learner’s needs. As a novice teacher, I also observed that, in a typical classroom, the students’ combined knowledge and ability to seek more of it far exceeded my own.  I therefore hit upon the idea of using a nature-inspired evolutionary approach to collectively discover and recommend resources, that led me very quickly into the realm of evolutionary theory and thence to the dynamics of self-organizing systems, complex adaptive systems, stigmergy, flocking, city planning, markets, and collective intelligence.

And so I became an ochlotect. I built a series of self-organizing social software systems that used stuff like social navigation (stigmergy), evolutionary, and flocking algorithms to create environments that both shaped and were shaped by the crowd. Acknowledging that “intelligence” is a problematic word, I simply called these collectives, a name inspired by Star Trek TNG’s Borg (the pre-Borg-Queen Borg, before the writers got bored or lazy). The intelligence of a “pure” collective as I conceived it back then was largely to be found in the algorithm, not the individual agents. Human stock markets are no smarter than termite mounds by this way of thinking (and they are not). I was trying to amplify the intelligence of crowds while avoiding the stupidity of mobs by creating interfaces and algorithms that made value to learners a survival characteristic. I was building systems that played some of the roles of a teacher but that were powered by collectives consisting of learners.  Some years later, Mark Zuckerberg hit on the idea of doing the exact opposite, with considerably greater success, making a virtue out of systems that amplified collective stupidity, but the general principles behind both EdgeRank and my algorithms were similar.

When I say that I “built” systems, though, I mean that I built the software part. I came to increasingly realize that the largest part of all of them was always the human part: what the individuals did, and the surrounding context in which they did it, including the norms, the processes, the rules, the structures, the hierarchies, and everything else that formed the ochlotecture, was intrinsic to their success or failure.  Some of those human-enacted parts were as algorithmic as the software environments I provided and were no smarter than those used by termites (e.g. “click on the results from the top of the list or in bigger fonts”), but many others were designed, and played critical roles.  This slightly more complex concept of CI played a major supporting role in my first book providing a grounded basis for the design of social software systems that could support maximal learner control. In it I wound up offering a set of 10 design principles that addressed human, organizational, pedagogical and tech factors as well as emergent collective characteristics that were prerequisites if social software systems were to evolve to become educationally useful.

Collectives also formed a cornerstone of my work with Terry Anderson over the next decade or so, and our use of the term evolved further. In our first few papers, starting  in 2007, we conflated the dynamic process with the individual agents who made it happen: for us back then, a collective was the people and processes (a sort of cross between my original definition and a social configuration the Soviets were once fond of) and so we treated a collective as somewhat akin to a group or a network. Before too long we realized that was dumb and separated these elements out, categorizing three primary social forms (the set, the net, and the group) that could blend, and from which collectives could emerge and interact, as a different kind of ochlotectural entity altogether. This led us to a formal abstract definition of collectives that continues to get the odd citation to this day. We wrote a book about social media and learning in which this abstract definition of collectives figured largely, and designed The Landing to take advantage of it (not well – it was a learning experience). It appears in my position paper, too.

Collectives have come back with a vengeance but wearing different clothes in my work of the last decade, including my most recent book. I am a little less inclined to use the word “collective” now because I have come to understand all intelligence as collective, almost all of it mediated and often enacted through technologies. Technologies are the assemblies we construct from stuff to do stuff, and the stuff that they do then forms some of the stuff from which we construct more stuff to do stuff. A single PC alone, for instance, might contain hundreds of billions of instances of technologies in its assembly. A shelf of books might contain almost as many, not just in words and letters but in the concepts, theories, and models they make. As for the processes of making them, editing them, manufacturing the paper and the ink, printing them, distributing them, reading them, and so on… it’s a massive, constantly evolving, ever-adapting, partly biological system, not far off from natural ecosystems in its complexity, and equally diverse. Every use of a technology is also a technology, from words in your head to flying a space ship, and it becomes part of the stuff that can be organized by yourself or others. Through technique (technologies enacted intracranially), technologies are parts of us and we are parts of them, and that is what makes us smart.  Collective behaviour in humans can occur without technologies but what makes it collective intelligence is a technological connectome that grows, adapts, evolves, replicates, and connects every one of us to every other one of us: most of what we think is the direct result of assembling what we and others, stretching back in time and outward in space, have created. The technological connectome continuously evolves as we connect and orchestrate the vast web of technologies in which we participate, creating assemblies that have never occurred the same way twice, maybe thousands of times every day: have you ever even brushed your teeth or eaten a mouthful of cereal exactly the same way twice, in your whole life? Every single one of us is doing this, and quite a few of those technologies magnify the effects, from words to drawing to numbers to  writing to wheels to screws to ships to postal services to pedagogical methods to printing to newspapers to libraries to broadcast networks to the Internet to the World Wide Web to generative AI. It is not just how we are able to be individually smart: it is an indivisible part of that smartness. Or stupidity. Whatever. The jury is out. Global warming, widening inequality, war, epidemics of obesity, lies, religious bigotry, famine and many other dire phenomena are a direct result of this collective “intelligence”, as much as Vancouver, the Mona Lisa, and space telescopes. Let’s just stick with “collective”.

The obligatory LLM connection and the big reason I’m attending the symposium

My position paper for this symposium wanders a bit circuitously towards a discussion of the collective nature of large language models (LLMs) and their consequent global impact on our education systems. LLMs are collectives in their own right, with algorithms that are not only orders of magnitude more complex than any of their predecessors, but that are unique to every instantiation of them, operating from and on vast datasets, presenting results to users who also feed those datasets. This is what makes them capable of very convincingly simulating both the hard (inflexible, correct) and the soft (flexible, creative) technique of humans, which is both their super-power and the cause of the biggest threat they pose. The danger is that a) they replace the need to learn the soft technique ourselves (not necessarily a disaster if we use them creatively in further assemblies) and, more worryingly, b) that we learn ways of being human from collectives that, though made of human stuff, are not human. They will in turn become parts of all the rest of the collectives in which we participate. This can and will change us. It is happening now, frighteningly fast, even faster and at a greater scale than similar changes that the Zuckerbergian style of social media have also brought about.

As educators, we should pay attention to this. Unfortunately, with their emphasis on explicit measurable outcomes,  combined with the extrinsic lure of credentials, the ochlotecture of our chronically underfunded educational systems is not geared towards compensating for these tendencies. In fact, exactly the reverse. LLMs can already both teach and meet those explicit outcomes far more effectively than most humans, at a very compelling price so, more and more, they will. Both students and teachers are replaceable components in such a system. The saving grace and/or problem is that, though they matter, and they are how we measure educational success, those explicit outcomes are not in fact the most important ends of education, albeit that they are means to those ends.

The things that matter more are the human ways of thinking, of learning, and of seeing, that we learn while achieving such outcomes; the attitudes, values, connections, and relationships; our identities and the ways we learn to exist in our societies and cultures. It’s not just about doing and knowing: it’s about being, it’s about love, fear, wonder, and hunger. We don’t have to (and can’t) measure those because they all come for free when humans and the stuff they create are the means through which explicit outcomes are achieved. It’s an unavoidable tacit curriculum that underpins every kind of intentional and most unintentional learning we undertake, for better or (too often) for worse. It’s the (largely) non-technological consequence of the technologies in which we participate, and how we participate in them. Technologies don’t make us less human, on the whole: they are exactly what make us human.

We will learn such things from generative AIs, too, thanks to the soft technique they mimic so well, but what we will learn to be as a result will not be quite human. Worse, the outputs of the machines will begin to dominate their own inputs, and the rest will come from humans who have been changed by their interactions with them, like photocopies of photocopies, constantly and recursively degrading. In my position paper I argue for the need to therefore cherish the human parts of these new collectives in our education systems far more than we have before, and I suggest some ways of doing that. It matters not just to avoid model collapse in LLMs, but to prevent model collapse in the collective intelligence of the whole human race. I think that is quite important, and that’s the real reason I will spend some of my wedding anniversary talking with some very intelligent and influential people about it.