Cognitive Surplus: Teaching in an Age of Abundance

I’m reading Clay Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky’s central argument is that people now have the means (participatory media via the Internet) to do more with their free time—their “cognitive surplus”—than just sit around and watch TV. They can now use their cognitive surplus to contribute to society in ways important (like crisis-mapping via Ushahidi) and silly (like creating silly captions for pictures of cats).  And since so many people can now pool these contributions, you have the potential for big changes in society.

You can read more about Shirky’s argument on NPR, Wired Magazine, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’d like to think through some possible implications for higher education, as something of a follow-up to my post “Coming Changes in the Industrial Model of Education?”

After introducing his argument in Chapter 1, Shirky discusses the mechanisms that allow people to contribute and share their cognitive surplus in Chapter 2, “Means.” Shirky notes that in the world in which he grew up, “anyone could produce a photograph, a piece of writing, or a song, but they had no way to make it widely available.” He writes, “If you were a citizen of that world, and you had something you need to say in public, you couldn’t. Period.” Now, however, anyone with an Internet connection can share their thoughts, ideas, perspectives, and creations with the entire world. (This is similar to Chris Anderson’s argument in The Long Tail that the tools of production are now available to all, which leads to the creation and distribution of content that populates the long tail of media content.)

This means that what was once scarce (media content) is now abundant. Shirky notes that this has important implications for those in industries that are built around scarcity. Shirky writes:

“Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste… When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of the value is tied to its scarcity.”

(“Cheap enough to waste” reminds me of Chris Anderson’s other book, Free, where he makes a similar argument.)

Shirky uses the publishing industry as an example:

“Publishing had to be taken seriously when its cost and effort made people take it seriously—if you made too many mistakes, you were out of business. But if these factors collapse, then the risk collapses, too. An activity that once seemed inherently valuable turned out to be only accidentally valuable, as a change in the economics revealed.”

This is the connection to my previous post responding to Britt Watwood’s post about the book Groundswell. Are there activities in which higher education faculty engage that seem inherently valuable that are only accidentally valuable due to scarcity?

Information used to be hard to get. If you needed information about a subject, you needed to go to the library and find a book written by an expert or talk to an expert directly. This meant that content experts played an important role in higher education by providing information to students about their areas of expertise. Now, however, information is abundant. Perhaps the value of having faculty provide information to students was accidental, not inherent. Perhaps that faculty activity should be replaced by other activities that are more inherently valuable, like teaching students how to find information, evaluate its quality, and apply it to solve novel problems?

What do you think? Are there elements of teaching that have less value now because of shifts in scarcity and abundance? What aspects of teaching maintain their value in an age of cognitive surplus? And how should we go about teaching students who have “never lived in an environment where they weren’t able to speak in public,” as Shirky writes?