University 2.0: Informing our

collective intelligence

Nancy Glock-Grueneich1

Our society, now global, is the first that must cope with the possible demise of our species-and of much life on our planet-as the result of our own actions. At the same time, we are also the first with instantaneous access to most of the recorded knowledge possessed by humankind. In response to both of these realities, we are in the midst of a rapidly escalating, self-organizing, global movement converging on a space of great potential good, a phenomenon Paul Hawken has named “the movement without a name”2. This massive instance of collective intelligence, with over a million independently initiated organizations and projects already in play, is without leader, ideology, organized agenda or center. And it is growing daily. It is a movement of individuals and organizations reacting to what they perceive, each in their own way, with their own networks. Some are responding to global threats, some to needs and opportunities in their immediate vicinity. Taken together these three facts have brought humanity both to the brink of breakdown and within reach of breakthrough. We have some reason to hope, for perhaps the first time in history, that we might create a truly livable future. Not a perfect world, but a world, as Sharif Abdullah writes, “that works for all.”3

Yet, if we are to wrest this slim chance from times so fearsome (and not only save ourselves, and our planet, but also improve ourselves), what knowledge do we need? What skills will let us influence society, in the midst of breakdowns it cannot escape, to turn the vast social and economic resources now locked in its existing institutions towards creating the world we need?

This chapter, companion to a second4, offers a preliminary list of the knowledge needed. It suggests how higher education, as one of those social institutions whose resources need to be bent to this cause, could become part of the solution. We start with the fact that what we might call “the university” has become no longer a center for learning, but a network for learning-a network potentially coterminous with global society itself. Its origins lie with the collecting together of written texts, texts that attracted scholars of renown and “nations” of students to “centers of learning” that grew into universities. The reverse is now occurring as the global distribution of knowledge is “followed” by scholars and learners moving on-line. Not unlike the stars that first concentrated energy, fused new atoms, then burst, scattering throughout the universe the newly formed elements of life, so universities, having concentrated and intensified all recordable human knowledge into ever narrower disciplines, are now bursting their boundaries. Reconnecting the splintered disciplines, new ideas are scattering as seeds across the fertile movements of the world.

Conversely, with self-organizing spaces and self-correcting knowledge systems coming into their own, is there anything now done in person, on campus, for the few that cannot in principle be done, on-line, for all? Can we at last assure universal access to higher education? Why not University 2.0, with campuses still key but used to leverage the rapid expansion of the capacities needed to create a livable future, and expand, not artificially restrict, quality, access, and liberation. Perhaps so, if we can: (1) Redirect money now concentrated on enabling the few, into approaches that would equally enable the many; (2) Share universally the power of higher learning, well organized and well taught; (3) Certify competence based not on competitive ranking but on demonstrated mastery; and thus (4) Avoid defining success as doing better than others, thus logically precluding the possibility of success for most.

Desiderata

How higher education could help inform collective intelligence

Empowerment

1. Extend to all citizens the process skills, norms and expectations known to enable community building, conflict resolution, collaborative problem solving, decision making, and systemic change.
2. Build into these processes the routine use of software, and protocols, that encode optimal forms of deliberative discourse and knowledge utilization as norms.
3. Envision and prepare for a culture of deliberative democracy and participatory design, where citizens expect, and officials routinely convene, these participatory processes, and act on the outcomes.
4. Teach new conceptions of citizenship centered in such processes and requiring the ability to use them with at least as much comfort and effectiveness as the traditional norms of ordinary business meetings.
5. Study and institutionalize as norms, the conditions known to develop mutual trust among people and greater concern for each other's needs and for the good of the whole, typically-and greater willingness toshare effort, and appreciate others views and contributions
6. Teach the “new story” (See Atlee) building on ritual, spiritual, and/or artistic foundations where helpful and teach how to use centering, meditation, and religious practices known to increase the capacity of people to handle difficulties, work together well and help others do so.
7. Teach applied systems theory.. Co-design with learners at every stage, risking mistakes and learning together. Welcome the transformation of goals as much as their fulfillment, keeping open to breakthrough.

Knowledge

1. Create access to a global knowledge network that includes all proven and promising solutions, easily retrieved by domain, and in forms readily usable for the purpose at hand.
2. Enable for each solution, social software that encourages exchange of experiences on what worked and didn't, adaptations, etc. Regularly harvest knowledge and distill it so as to continuously improve existing practice and theory, drive formal research, and keep standards, policy and funding practices fully current.
3. Build into this knowledge system a means for ready access to legitimate credentialing, for example one that links from immediate solutions, and invites users to “drill down” to organized curricula for every field, academic and professional, by which anyone, anywhere
   1. Could master the essentials on the subject
   2. Connect with colleagues, others studying the subject, mentors, etc.
   3. Find/create opportunities for hands on experience or classes
   4. Connect with those who can certify mastery and issue credentials
4. For all fields with global reach, create international standards, but only as frameworks or templates. The actual curricula should be built upon locally derived (even learner developed) examples, assignments, and guidelines. Keep updating frameworks, from input by learners and teachers, who also co-design improved and locally adapted materials that meet such global standards as appropriately apply.
5. Distribute to all the learning, knowledge management, and communication tools that might meet local needs and allow each to connect, record, and share from everywhere their lives, traditions, methods, solutions, etc.

Meta-Knowledge

1. Teach how to learn5, as well as knowledge of diverse cognitive and cultural contributions and requirements, how teams work, and why they're needed.
2. Offer a map of what knowledge there is, and its types and uses. Connect different modes of knowing and communicating, “ head, heart, and hands”, with their complementary strengths and interactions.
3. Assure skill in using knowledge: where to find it and how to assess, apply, share, and improve it.
4. Teach the “questioning of questions” and cognizance of the effect of, as well as skill in, framing issues with the purpose of deeper exploration and collaboration, usually, rather than the “winning” of arguments.
5. Expand the concept of “critical thinking” from an individual focused on argumentation and adversarial exchange, to one of deliberative discourse between collaborators seeking to build relationships, understand situations, improve communication, assess options, and make wise decisions.
6. Teach the value of conflicting views for uncovering all aspects of a problem, and for creating solutions that are both effective and acceptable.
   

How Can We Possibly Change Higher Education?

Notwithstanding its reputation for imperviousness to real change, the fact is that as one looks not just at formal institutions of higher education, but to the whole system-including its knowledge making and credentialing functions, corporate training, and international collegiality-then both structural change6 and incipient transformation can be discerned. Within these changes, driven by outside forces of technology, globalization and, increasingly, climate change, are the means to make such changes as those listed above. We need not start from scratch but need rather to stay alert for strategic opportunities to:

• Mission Reframe the mission, and rework reward systems, and graduation and professional requirements, so that mastery of the knowledge needed for a livable future is recognized as central, and mastery of its basics, required.
• Rules Embed in institutional protocols and professional practices, requirements and credentialing that reflect these goals and values, so they're “normal”.
• Standards Through professional associations, philanthropic priorities, and accrediting bodies, etc. work regionally, nationally and internationally to build in these skills and viewpoints in accreditation and professional protocols.
• Tools Encode the knowledge needed into software, websites, expert systems, ontologies, models, and knowledge systems, so that it is ubiquitous. Use supplementary materials, video clips, assignments, etc., to infuse this knowledge and these skills and values into existing curricula, so that working with them is frequent and compelling.
• Credentialing Make universally available the hardware, software, tools, and other support needed to make best use of this knowledge and to become credentialed in its essential professions, especiallyby those left out of the current system.

What's Working in the World

The Internet abounds with success stories and promising options, but searches for needed solutions too often yield results of uneven quality, lacking coherence and missing key questions. What is needed is a comprehensive and current knowledge base specifically for sharing stories from all quarters, and ideas, critiques, adaptations, traditions and for distilling from these stories essential information put into ubiquitously available and easily usedformats. This is a knowledge base for those in the “movement without a name”-those who don't yet even know they have “a million partners”-let alone have a way to share knowledge with them

To take but four examples from millions of change provoking stories: In San Francisco7, in a neighborhood so dangerous even fire trucks would not go into it without a police escort, local leaders and police took a brief training derived from resilience psychology, called Health Realization. As the leaders' insights and resulting changes in attitude, and behavior, penetrated the community, the homicide rate plummeted to zero and had stayed there for five years at the time of the report. In Senegal, women of Tostan8, a literacy and self-improvement program, initiated village wide efforts to end female genital cutting which have led to a rapidly expanding, village to village grassroots effort that had in ten years led to its voluntary abandonment by fully half of the practicing population.

In Nepal9, 6000 village banks have been started, by village women who learned accounting, banking, and small business management as part of learning to read-and did so entirely on their own money (with no loans from micro-finance organizations). The last 2000 of them did this entirely on their own initiative, in a process that had become self-replicating. In Gaviotas10, in Colombia, millions of indigenous varieties of trees thought permanently lost, were spontaneously regenerated when the community planted non-native trees that turned out to create the very conditions that allowed the native trees to return.

Harvard's business school was in recent years raising over a billion dollars just to develop new business case studies based on international examples. Where are the billion dollars to study what makes social systems succeed? Where are the distilled praxis, and fully developed case studies, of conflicts prevented or resolved, natural systems restored, violent neighborhoods made peaceful, and illiterate adults becoming successful inventors? It's not that these stories of “positive deviance” don't exist, it's just that they have not been the sustained focus of our knowledge development, our college curriculum, or our popular culture.

The Knowledge We Need

Such case studies are essential for several reasons. They release the energy made possible by hope-justified hope, not just wishful thinking-in this time when it is most urgently needed. They point to the direction wherein hope lies, suggesting where best to direct our efforts, at a time when we can ill afford false starts. And they suggest needed design principles as common patterns are distilled from them. The social dynamics and methodologies identified as making these successes possible suggest better norms for social practice than we now have, including better measures and reward structures and norms that reinforce social, not antisocial, behavior.

Such stories rarely make headlines or history. In history, who studies the wars that never happened?11 We are only now starting tosee the necessity of figuring out what keeps human systems healthy. Psychologists are taking on “resilience studies,” and problem-solving skills and dynamics focused on “appreciative inquiry”-but these studies are still marginal and under-funded.

What do we actually know of peace (other than that it seems to be a milksop word, lacking force, and suggesting some state of rest, some longed for stasis hardly to be achieved this side of heaven)? I wonder what we might know now if students in our military and other colleges had for generations pored over the past 3000 years of human history, studying its past social successes as assiduously as they have studied its past military campaigns. Or, if the multiple billions now spent for new weapons development were matched with equal numbers spent on new methods of social engagement and restoration. What if standing armies of millions, highly trained in the restorative skills needed, were set loose on the world to help improve it? And what if one quarter of the annual expenditures on armaments were spent to feed, clothe, and shelter and provide good water, medicine, and education to every human being on the planet -and the means for organic farming, appropriate technology, and small scale capital and green investment or decent jobs to all-thus removing major drivers of war?

Shared Solutions

Pushing the envelope of our knowledge management capabilities, we must at least invest the real dollars needed to leverage the work of tens of thousands of open source volunteers in creating as comprehensive and well organized an open knowledge system as we can muster, one that can hold all the promising ideas and proven solutions we have to date, for all of the problems we face. And then meet the challenge is to build the use of such knowledge into the day-to-day processes of every institution-school, library, NGO; local, state, and national government; international agency, corporation, and community. With these embedded in each institution's software, protocols, norms, reward systems, etc., a full shift in consciousness and practice could be achieved.

Here we arrive at the doorstep of “the Establishment”. Virtually all of the resources of intellect and authority needed to achieve the goals in this chapter, and in this book, are firmly in the control of existing institutions. Our objective, then, must be to recognize and leverage every opportunity to influence the outcomes of changes already occurring. We can direct these outcomes towards the development and competent use of this knowledge by those whose attitudes have shifted in the direction of mutual empowerment and informed concern for the whole.

Meta-knowledge

Knowledge about Knowledge-Meta-knowledge is a concept which is basic in developing knowledge management software. It is (or should be) equally basic for human competence, especially in these times. Indeed, formal schooling will be less and less about learning content, and more and more about how to handle content (and about how to handle ourselves!) Knowing when to get additional knowledge, where to find it, how to judge its accuracy and relevance, how to translate, compare, and synthesize different knowledge sources, how to apply it to a given question or situation, how to represent it for different purposes and audiences, and how to improve upon it, are basic skills. And giving back into the system is now the responsibility of all, providing modifications, critiques, examples, and cultural variants-both new options, and long standing traditions. In connecting our knowledge, we connect also to each other. We can recognize how our own work fits in, and is helping move us all towards the reality of a livable future. We can see our own significance and know we are part of something greater.

Learning to Learn12-That some succeed, and some do not, has long been chalked up to aptitude, interest, and circumstances. But in fact, learning is itself a skill, and one that can be taught. “C” even “D” students-from the most difficult of circumstances-have been reliably made into “A” and “B” students in a matter of a few months, able to carry heavy course loads, graduate from college, go on to career success. Hard data, replicated many times, show that once so changed, students don't fall back. It's not temporary but a permanent change in their habits of mind. We owe it to ourselves, and to our planet, to build on this knowledge of how to teach the skill of learning, and make it available to all. That is not to say all should be scholars, just that all should know themselves capable of making good use of these “book learning” skills when they need to.

Mapping Human Knowledge-The “structuring of ignorance,” as someone once called it, may be the most important work of formal education. Self-taught people (who “quit school because it was interfering with their education”) can frequently be more erudite than those who stayed in school. The one difficulty for the self-taught is that they often literally do not know that they do not know. Most of the content from school is soon forgotten. But that such content exists-and where to find it again, is not. The map with Paris on it is forever an invitation that is not available to one without that map and who never heard of Paris. Surfing the net is a peculiarly disorienting experience, where time and space collapse, so that context making disciplines, e.g. geography, history, anthropology, eetc., are critical.

It is the challenge and the privilege of our times to redraw the map. The entire repertoire of human knowledge-all that is capable of symbolic representation in some form-is now opening to us from all cultures as we begin to rediscover each other. We are now earnestly seeking new ways to differentiate and integrate, and writing a new story of the human adventure.

Critical Thinking-US colleges often include within their mission, and always in their rhetoric, that students will acquire the ability to “think critically.” Thinking critically is a notion that can cover everything from mastery of scholarly discourse and critique, writing and debating skills, informal logic, argumentation, and rhetoric (and/or self-defense) in the face of advertising and demagoguery. It can also include practical judgment and good sense, initiative, and the problem-solving skills that employers hope to find in their employees.

When working with several thousand faculty in the 108 community colleges of California to help them incorporate critical thinking skills across the curriculum, I would say:

“It progresses this way: we begin by getting students to answer questions we pose from material we've given them, and then questions we pose that take them beyond that material. Then we encourage them to ask their own questions-of an increasingly comprehensive sort, and then to find answers to their questions (picking up research skills). Then we teach them to question answers and finally, to question the questions.”

This sequence of sophistication in the use of knowledge is now the core of what must be taught. Not only to college students, but to all citizens-yielding to them universal access to higher learning. (Which I contrast with universal access to higher education, the latter being access to degrees and credentialing, specifically, or in a narrower but important sense, the chance to experience “college life”).

Questioning the Questions-How knowledge is presented is almost as important as the knowledge itself. We need alertness to the “spin” put on information, an alertness essential for our self-protection. We need both to learn that alertness as part of our education, and to apply it to our education. For example, we should notice how a notion that we are “lost in a cold, indifferent universe” has permeated what it means for something to be a “fact”, and why it is that cynicism seems closer to “hard” truth. “If bitter, it must be the better medicine.”

But, not so now. Now we need a restorative tonic that holds neither delusion nor disillusion. Tom Atlee suggests we see ourselves as “agents of conscious evolution,” the means by which life is growing itself anew. We cannot be truly “neutral” in what motivates our words nor in their effect-nor should we seek to, but we can make more conscious choices about where our words land us. We are now learning what words invite connection and enable constructive action.

We also need to build in reminders to double-check not only how we are saying things, but also on what the basis. By building into knowledge tools “just in time” pointers that raise key questions, we caution users, and incidentally teach “critical thinking” on the fly. On China's long march, each person had on their back a Chinese character to be studied by the person walking behind. This “learn and teach as we go” is a good model for the work of transformation.

Deliberative Discourse - The movement for a more participatory democracy has been much strengthened in recent decades by an abundance of methodologies, and the beginnings of good theory and empirical research13. As this knowledge matures it should become the backbone of civics and related fields, but also of much undergraduate education and most of the professions. Having not only the will, but also the competence, to work collaboratively, and to involveeffectively in the making of decisions or designs, all who are affected by them is the primary means to the future we seek. We have also the benefit of intensive efforts to develop software14 that make it feasible to carry on well-structured deliberative dialogue for large numbers, and at a distance. In using such tools, citizens can both contribute and learn higher order skills, including visual, intuitive, social-and other forms of-knowing and thinking-all essential to the work.

Empowerment

The basic premise of this book is that systems of human beings can, under the right conditions, reach agreements and take actions wiser than any one of them could have done alone (or that any few could have directed the whole system to accomplish). In this chapter there have been a few compelling examples of this premise in action, and a consideration of how our collective intelligence could be strengthened if we were to make access to higher learning universal. The means to achieve this aspiration-heretofore unrealizable-now exist. We have looked at how this ambition might be realized and how that could help us to create a livable future.

This knowledge is not only a means to that future, however. The continuing exercise of this knowledge is also a part of what makes that future worth having. Why then, do we not do it? It is not for lack of money nor of knowledge how to do it. It is about the upset to society that would result.

Rationing Success-The universal demand for education is prompted by the need to catch up, and by the need to stay ahead. We define “success” in the West, and now everywhere, as “doing better than others.” Education, it is promised-will yield a more competitive work force. You, or your kids, will be better off-and they'll “get ahead”-get better grades. Better job. Better salary. Be able to buy into a better neighborhood. So it is logically impossible for education to succeed for most students. (Unless they live in Lake Wobegon!) But supposing it were otherwise? It has been shown repeatedly that people from the most unpromising of circumstances can learn to hold their own intellectually15, but what would we do with a world where everyone had succeeded academically and expected to be rewarded accordingly? Even more challenging, what would we do with people whose education made them care about something other than “succeeding” in this competitive sense? The limiting factor is not money nor aptitudes. It is attitudes. We lack the political will to risk what it would mean if we made good on the promise of education, effective education-empowering education, for all. By rationing success, the current system makes people feel they deserve no more from the world than it's prepared to give them. Success for a few, mediocrity for many-and failures get nothing.

That could change soon, if we want. The technology for universal access is almost there. The institutions, having dealt for millennia, in scarcity now need to catch up to abundance. Soon the only limitation will be in our now outdated and dysfunctional notion of success and of why school matters. But, what if we intentionally change that notion? Suppose that by higher education we were now to mean “eliciting, enabling, and empowering our higher purpose”? And that if education as a whole were redesigned to support that goal everywhere? Suppose its job were to build our capacity to create a livable future, and we designed our learning and our knowledge systems for that end?

Empowered Participatory Governance-That's Archon Fung's term. He studied neighborhoods in Chicago,16 where police and community members met monthly to plan what needed to be done on that beat that month to make that neighborhood more secure, and who should do what-what part was the work of police, and what part the work of citizens. Each month they reviewed the plans from the previous meeting. They reviewed the progress they'd made, what was needed now, and how it would be accomplished. Police and interested citizens got training, and met from time to time with other neighborhoods to exchange lessons learned. It worked.

In the now famous city of Curitiba, in Paraná, Brazil, ordinary people help solve ordinary problems. Can't get garbage trucks into shantytowns? Offer tickets to the municipal buses (or a bag of groceries) for each bag of trash delivered to a pickup zone. Problem solved-by the very people who lived with it daily putting their heads together. In Washington, D.C. each neighborhood gets a part of the City's budget, and a say in the overall budget. Citywide annual participatory meetings have taught ordinary citizens how to make tough choices together. Citizens are given chances to share their particular wisdom; to discover that they have wisdom to share; to abide more readily by the choices made together; and to come to care more about each other, and about the whole than they had before-or had been believed capable of.

There's no particular reason why governance of the future couldn't make this the norm, and schools teach civics as if this is just what citizens do. Successful models-not foolproof-but solid, are many. They are replicable. Their skills are learnable. When water starts lapping at our downtown streets and won't go away, we will be forced to do something. If we can succeed now in the meanwhile to learn these ways of working together, then as the catastrophes bear down on us, the “something” we do may take us somewhere better, not somewhere worse.

Bringing Out the Best in Each Other-A world worth living in for all is less likely to be an object of attack. It is less likely to trigger and intentionally goad the addictions-to material goods, drugs, anger, power and armaments-that can never be satisfied, because the real needs are never met. It is less likely to act without regard for the health of the very systems upon which it depends for its own existence. We are genetically predisposed at least as much to cooperation as to combat. Since we are now forced to redesign our world anyhow, why not design it so as to bring out the best in us?

1 Nancy Glock-Grueneich, President of HIGHER EDge (www.higheredge.org), has her doctorate from Harvard Graduate School of Education, taught public policy and related subjects for 15 years, and oversaw program and faculty development for the California Community Colleges for 13 years. She Co-chairs the Editorial Board of the International Journal for Public Participation.

2 Hawken, Paul, Blessed Unrest, Ch. 1, Viking Press, 2007 (ISBN 0670038520)

3 After a phrase from Buckminster Fuller. Abdullah, S. (1999). Creating A World that Works for All. San Francisco:Berrett-Kohler. See also Atlee, T. & Zubizarreta, R. (2003). The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All. North Charleston, SC: Imprint/BookSurge.

4 Upcoming issue of World Futures http://tinyurl.com/y4zm7k

5 www.learningtolearn.com

6 E.g. the Lisbon Convention http://tinyurl.com/27rq4n; http://tinyurl.com/yqevpo

7 http://tinyurl.com/yonu92; http://tinyurl.com/ypysbn

8 www.tostan.org

9 http://tinyurl.com/yterlt

10 http://tinyurl.com/ypysbn

11 See Cameroon-Nigeria “non-War” over oil-rich Bakassi http://tinyurl.com/23bkh4

12 www.learningtolearn.com

13 www.thataway.org

14 http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/compendium; www.globalagoras.org

15 learningtolearn.com; Schoolboys of Barbianos, Letter to a Teacher (http://tiny.cc/Schoolboys) ; Warner, Syliva Ashton. 1963; 1986. Teacher. New York: Simon & Schuster; Koch, Kenneth. 1973, 1990. Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Teaching Great Poetry to Children; Borzoi Books ; How to Read; Stand and Deliver; Gruwell, Erin. 1999. Freedom Writers Diary. New York: Broadway Books; 2007. The Great Debaters (Movie).

16 http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7762.html

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