Topic: Economics

I realize that with all this blabbering I’ve been doing about social organizations, and politics, particularly the post on Health Care Cooperatives, some of you may have read something into my thinking that I think is very much not there. I think this resonates with the way people people read a certain kind of libertarian streak in Cory Doctorow’s work, which is I think is an uncomfortable association, at least in my reading.

There are two parts of my thinking that I think are important:

First, I think there is a not particularly insignificant range of social and economic functions that fall into the broad category of the “public interest,” that I think would (and are) ill served by the private institutions which are their current guardians. This was the crux of the argument of my health care argument, but I think there are other things that fall under the public interest: education, banking, “utilities” (water, sewage, power, TCP/IP data,) health care, and infrastructure (roads, public transit, rail, power distribution, ), as well as some operations that benefit from centralized organization like aviation.

Second, I would assert that “Market Forces,” are not sufficiently understood to merit trust in their efficacy. Furthermore, the large-scale global markets that have ruled supreme in the recent past tend to sacrifice long-term authenticity, for short term gains at the expense of individuals. This is the problem with corporations that I’ve been harping on for a long time. The way, as far as I can tell to de-incentivize this kind of economic activity, is to focus economic development on more smaller ventures and to decrease the importance of initial capital outlay on business models.

And that’s simply not something you can regulate or deregulate around. To erase the impact of corporate-styled business models on the economy, you have to hack scarcity in some way. Corporation-sized ventures beat cooperative-sized ventures today, because in most areas economies of scale in the production of concrete material, doom cooperative-sized enterprises. One of the effects of the development of technology in the next {{few}}¹ years will be, I suspect, to decrease the advantages of economies of scale.

If nothing else it’s an interesting time to be alive.

Here’s another one for the “economics” collection of posts that I’ve been working on for a while. Way back when, I started this series by thinking about Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and by the model of economic development presented in the final two books. In short economic activity is organized around ~150 person co-operatives that people “buy into,” and then work for as long as the co-op exists or until they sell their spot so that they can work on a different project/co-op.

In the series, these co-operatives arose as part of a response to the multi/trans/meta-national corporations which were the books antagonists. Corporations which had grown so big, that they resembled nations as much as they did companies in the contemporary perspective. The co-ops came around in part as a response to the metanat’s, but then the corporations themselves restructured in response to an ecological/sociological catastrophe, so that they eventually started to look more like the cooperatives. The “progressive,” meta-national corporation was called “Praxis,” in the stories and Praxis was the organization that lead the transformation from metanational capitalism to, what followed. As part of this series, I’d very much like to think about Praxis and what kinds of lessons we can bring back from this thought, beyond the simplistic “cooperatives good, corporations bad,” notion that I’ve been toting for months. Thus,

• The corruption and disconnect from authentic economic exchange in that the metanats display in the Mars Books, far outclasses anything that’s happening today. On the one hand, given the nature of Science Fictional criticism, this isn’t such a great barrier to importing ides from the books; on the other, we must also imagine that Praxis is able to “out compete” traditional meta-nationals because of the scale of the issue. That is, the Praxis critique and solution may be valid today, but things may have to get much worse before a Praxis-like solution becomes economically viable.

• Praxis succeeds in the story, not because it can out compete the meta-nationals at their own game, not because it’s “right.” I appreciate fiction (and reality,) where the winning economic solution wins on economic rather than moral terms. While I’m hardly a Market proponent, it’s hard to divorce economics from exchanges, and I think the following logic fails to convince me: “we change current cultural practice to do something less efficient that may create less value, because it complies better with some specific and culturally constrained ethic.”

  One part of my own thinking on this issue has revolved around looking for mechanisms that produce change and I think Praxis is particularly interesting from a mechanistic perspective.

• Praxis presents a case of a revolutionary-scale change, with evolutionary mechanisms, which is something that I think is hard to argue for, or encourage as the change itself is really a result of everything else that’s going on in the historical moment. Nevertheless, everyone in the story world is very clear that Praxis-post transformation is fundamentally not the same kind of organization that it was before. In a lot of ways it becomes its own “corporate successor state,” and I think that leaves us with a pretty interesting question to close with…

How do we setup and/or encourage successor institutions to the flawed economic organizations/coroprations we have today without recapitulating their flaws?

I’ve been flitting about the relm of political economics, technological infrastrucutre, and cyborg-related topics for a number of weeks, maybe months, and I haven’t written very much about open source. This post is hopefully a bit of a return to this kind of topic, mostly because I’ve been staring at a blog post for weeks, and I finally have something that’s nearly cogent to about an article that kind of pissed me off. Here goes

The article in question seeks to inform would-be-software entrepreneurs how they ought to compete against open source software, and to my mind makes a huge mess of the whole debate. Lets do some more in-depth analysis.

“Open source is only cheap if you don’t care about time,” is an interesting argument that sort of addresses the constant complaint that open source is “fussy.” Which it is, right? Right. One of the best open source business models is to provide services around open-source that make it less fussy. Also I think Free Software is often “a work in progress,” and is thus only occasionally “fully polished,” and is often best thought of as a base component that can be used to build something that’s fully customized to a specific contextual set of requirements. That’s part of the value and importance of free software.

I don’t think we can have our cake and eat it too on this one, (the cake is a lie!) and in a lot of ways I think this is really a positive attribute of free software.

The complaints regarding open source software seem to boil down to: “open source software doesn’t come with support services, and installation polish” (we’re working on it, but this is a commercial opportunity to provide support around open source products in general.)

So to consolidate the argument, the author seems to suggest that: “in order to beat open source software, which sucks because it’s not polished enough and doesn’t have support, I’m going to write a totally different code base, that I’ll then have to polish and support.”

My only real response is. “Have fun with that.”

Before I lay this to rest, I want to give potential “Commercial Software Vendors” (proprietary software vendors?) the following qualifications on the advice in the original article.

1. Save your users time: Sound advice. Though I think the best way to save users time is probably to integrate your product with other related tools. Make your product usable and valuable. Provide support, and take advantage skilled interaction designers to provide intuitive interfaces. Don’t, however, treat your users like idiots, or assume that because your product might have a learning curve it’s flawed. The best software not only helps us solve the problems we know we have, but also solves problems we didn’t know we had, and in the process creates tremendous value. Don’t be afraid to innovate.

Also, **save yourself time*, you can create more value for your customers by not reinventing the proverbial wheel. Use open source software to bootstrap your process, and if the value you create is (as it always is) in support and polish, you can do that to open source just as well as you can to your own software.

2. Market Hard, might work, but it’s all hit and miss. Open source might not be able to advertise, or send people on sales calls to enterprises, but open source has communities that support it, including communities of people who are often pretty involved in IT departments. Not always, mind you, but sometimes.

If you’re a “Commercial Software Vendor” you’re going to have a hell of a time building a community around your product. True fact. And word of mouth, which is the most effective way to predict sales, is killer hard without a community.

4. Focus on features for people who are likely to buy your product, is a great suggestion, and really, sort of the point of commercial software, as far as I can see. Custom development and consulting around open source if you can provide it, achieves the same goal. At the same time, I think a lot of open source enterprise software exists and succeeds on the absence of licensing fees, and so I think would-be-software vendors should be really wary to think of the enterprise as being “cash cows” particularly in the long run.

So in summary:

• Create value, real enduring value. Not ephemeral profitability, or in-the-moment utility.
• Be honest about what your business/endeavor really centers on, and do that as best you can.
• Understand the social dynamics of open source, not simply the technological constrains of the user experience.

And…. done.

I began to get to this in my post on health care and cooperatives, and governmental reform but I think it’s important to get to this point in its own post.

I guess what I’ve been gunning at (whether or not I realized it) is, “the shape of social/political change” in the contemporary world. What does change look like? What mechanisms can we use to create change? How do the existing ways that we think of revolutionary change fail to address the world we live in?

Samuel R. Delany, in his essay(s) Time Square Red, Time Square Blue presents what he calls “Contact” a potential instrument of social reform, of social “activism.” Contact, boils down to unstructured, seemingly random, intermingling of people in urban contexts. He argues for direct relationships, for an increase in cross-class cross-race relationships, by avoiding “gentrification” and social segregation. And he illustrates the efficacy of these methods with a number of pretty effective examples.

When I read this the first time, as well as the second and third, I thought remember thinking “wow, that was the first social critique I’ve read that not just presents an overwhelming critique of a cultural phenomena (gentrification, the sequestering of public sexuality) but that also presents a mechanism for social change.”

The problem with presenting mechanisms to promote social and political change is that the details are incredibly difficult to clarify, and it’s easy to present a valid critique without presenting an idea of how to effect change. It’s easy to call for action, and leave the nature of that action up to the in-the-moment activists. It’s far too easy to point out a social problem, even a superstructural issue, and then default to the methodology of previous generations (and issues,) to attempt to solve the problem. Here’s an example:

We see a lot of “recursion to Marxist-inspired methodology,” without much (I’d say) thinking about the industrial/material implications of Marx. This happens, to varying degrees in a number of areas: I think in some more casual Marxist-Feminism, in (some) environmental movements, and other movements that present “revolutionary social/political” critique. Revolutionary moments are indeed important times for some renegotiation of social values and systems, but it’s too easy to say “after the revolution….” and get all misty eyed, and forget that the critique at hand has very little to do with the disconnect between the ownership of resources, labor, and social power.

Furthermore, I think there are a lot of contemporary civil rights movements (Gay and Lesbian, Women, Immigrant) that refer back to the American Civil Rights Movement in a way that ignores the complexities of the current issue, or the complexity of the earlier issue. In any case, interlude over, I think I’m gunning for a way to get past this trap of casting contemporary struggles in the methodological terms of past struggles.

My contention is that in the next, 20 or 30 years¹ the biggest force of social change won’t be (exactly:) the mustering of revolutionary regiments, it won’t be about who we elect to legislatures and executive offices, it won’t be about where we march; but rather, about the communities we form, about the relationships we develop in these communities.

But tycho, I know you’re interested in communities, but *revolution?*

Indeed, it’s a stretch, but here’s the argument: when people get together, we make things. We see this in free software, we see this in start-ups, we see this in fan communities on the Internet. This production, is going to be an increasingly important part of our economic, political, and social activity, and the conversations the cross-class contact that occurs when people get together to work on something of common interest. Communities are the substrate for the transmission of ethical systems, and are the main way in which ideologies are transmitted to people. This is all incredibly important.

But tycho, materialism isn’t dead, you’re ignoring *things* which continue to have great importance!

Technology won’t make material things matter less at least in the way that this statement assumes. What technology will almost certainly do is make it possible for fewer people to do the work that once required required great infrastructure and capital outlay. Technology will allow us to coordinate collaboration over greater distances. Technology will lower the impact of large economies of scale on the viability of industries (smaller production runs, etc.) The end result is the things that take huge multi- and trans-national institutions (corporations) to produce today, could potentially be the domain of much smaller cooperatives.

We’ll realize, I think only somewhat after the fact, that the world has changed, and all the things that we used to think “mattered” don’t really. And I think, largely, we can’t plan for this. The “work” ahead of is, is to make things do work with other people, to collaborate and draw connections across traditional boundaries (nations, class, race, discipline, gender, skill sets), in the present and let the future attend to itself. These kinds of ad-hoc institutions are already forming, are already making things. And that’s incredibly cool.

Thoughts? I need to improve the history section of this, a good bit, and come up with more examples of the kinds of communities that exemplify this kind of organization, but this is a start.

This is I think part of a “phase two” of a series of articles I wrote a few months ago about political economies, about corporate structures, about “hacker centric” business models. In that vein of thought, I suppose this post was inevitable.

My argument, in “phase one” was that big “corporations” were poorly constituted to develop sustainable business models, to act in the public interest, and to further the best interests of their employees and customers. I made the argument that we needed structures in corporate law (and in culture at large) to recognize “co-operative” (coops) organizations that promoted organic self-organization, and more nimble institutions that could participate in “authentic economic exchange.”

I’ve been having a lot of conversations in the past few weeks that have revolved around the current progress of the health-care “reform” process in America, and I find that I keep coming to the same conclusion:

The rising costs of health care in the United States, is largely due to the overhead imposed by the insurance industry. Both in the increased bureaucracy that service providers have to endure (so service providers raise their fees to cover this cost,) and secondly in the form of the insurance companies’ own profit margin.

As a result, I’ve become convinced that the problem with rising health care costs is the insurance companies themselves and that any scheme that sees legitimacy in attempting to address “the health care problem” by taking the interests of the insurance companies as being integral to the solution, rather than the root of the problem has already failed to address the problem at hand.

What I’ve been saying, is we need to work backwards through this problem. The prevailing logic seems to be to figure out how much procedures cost, how much we as “clients” need to pay, and how much our employer/the government can afford based on those projections, and then how much we have to pony up to cover the gap. I think it makes much more sense to figure out how much people (doctors, nurses, technicians, clinical providers, etc.) need, how much supplies cost (lab work, supplies, chemicals, physical plant things,) include some fringe expenses (e.g. educational expenses, preventative outlay, technological infrastructure), and then figure out how to pay for these costs: co-pays, tax funding, health care trusts. That’s at least a viable solution.

With the base expenses taken care of, providers are more free to organize in complementary groups, in co-operatives that provide various kinds of general purpose and centralized services. Alliances can be formed to distribute clerical and management responsibility, on smaller scales. Makes sense.

Good luck in seeing that happen.

In my post against the venture capital model I think one key question that I think I failed to answer is “If we do away with venture capital, where does innovation happen?” This post locates a number of potentials answers to this question.

1. Innovation happens in academia and research-oriented institutions. This is where innovation has often happened, and it makes sense: you get smart driven people together and you give them resources and you say learn about the world, and see what new things you can make and think that haven’t been made and thought of before. The problem is that research is hard to fund and support, and the Academy is often drawn toward the other great role it fulfills in our society (education).

2. Innovation happens in external communities. Red Hat, and Sun both externalize innovation via the Fedora Project and Open Solaris projects. Many web-development consultancies externalize their innovation to Open Source projects like Ruby on Rails, and Drupal. It’s a pooling of research and development via externalization, and I think it’s a trend that we’ll probably begin to see more of.

3. Innovation will happen during 20% time. Google was famous for doing this, initially and I think it’s something that we don’t hear much of as corporate purses begin to tighten as maximum productivity reappears as the leading way to save corporate business models (See, flawed system,) but I think the concept that some measure of unstructured time will lead to innovation is generally a sound concept.

4. Innovation, start-ups, the same way that they are formulated now, except without venture capital, so that innovation still happens in start-ups, but business plans will have to be focused on sustainable growth, scaling practices, and profitability. This shifts the focus of start-ups to think about “how do we implement this cool idea in a way that will work,” rather than “what would happen if we did this cool thing.” Seems a productive nearly-paradigm shift.

Other ideas?

I read this article by Joel Spoolsky about the first dot-com bust and it help crystallized a series of thoughts about the role of venture capital in the development of technology and software, particularly of Internet technologies. Give it a shot. Also, I think Cory Doctorow’s “Other People’s Money,” is a helpful contributor to this train of thought.

The question I find myself asking myself is: to what extent is the current development of technology--particularly networked technology--shaped by the demands of the venture capital market? And of course, what kind of alternative business models exist for new technologies?

I guess I should back up and list the problems I have with the VC model. And by VC model I mean private investment firms that invest large sums of money in “start up” companies. Those issues are:

• Breaking even, even in--say--five years, is exceptionally difficult from a numbers perspective, let alone turning a profit of any note. This is largely because VC funding provides huge sums of money (it is after all really hard to give away 20 billion a year in 60-120k a year tops.) and so seed sums are larger than they need to be, and this has a cascade effect on the way the business and technology develops, particularly in unsustainable ways.
• VC-funded start-ups favor proprietary software/technologies, because the payoff is bigger up front, which is often the case. It’s hard to make the argument that you need seed money for a larger, more slow moving product… Small and quick seem to work better.
• The VC-cycle of boom and bust (which is sort of part and parcel with plain-old-capitalism) means that technology development booms and busts: so that a lot of projects tank when the market crashes, and that the projects that get funded during the booms are (probably mostly) not selected for their technological merit.
• VC firms tend to be very responsive to fads and similar trends in the market. (e.g. dot-com bubble, web 2.0, Linux in the mid nineties, biotech stuff, etc.) which means that VC firms generate a great deal of artificial competition in these markets, which disperses efforts needlessly, without (as near as I can tell) improving the quality of software developed (eg. in the microblogging space, for example, the “first one out of the gate,” twitter, “won” without apparent regard for quality or feature set.)

Venture capital funding provides outfits and enterprising individuals with the resources for “capital outlay” and initial research-and-development costs, and in doing so fills an economic niche that is otherwise non-existent, and this is a good thing indeed. At the same time I can’t help but wonder if the goals an interests of venture capitalists aren’t--in some ways--directly at odds with the technology that they aim to develop.

I also continue to question the ongoing role of this kind of “funding structure” (for lack of a better term). I think it’s pretty clear that the effect of continuing technological development is the fact that the required “capital outlay” of any given start up is falling like a rock as advanced technology is available at commodity-prices (eg. VPSs, Lulu.com), as open source software tightens development cycles (eg. Ruby on Rails, JQuery). Both of these trends, in combination with the long-standing problems with VC funding, means that I think it’s high time we ask some fairly serious questions about the development of this technology. I’ll end with the question at the forefront of my thinking on the subject:

Where does (and can) innovation and development happen outside of the context of venture-capital funded start ups in the technology world?

I think I’ve touched on this question before but with the last technology as infrastructure post it seems like another opportunity to talk about the intersections between this topic--thinking about technology as infrastructure--and about the sort of small scale/cooperative economics that I was writing a lot about a couple of months back.

The question on my mind at the moment is, “What do the business models of technology firms look like, in a software-freedom-loving, non-corporate/cooperative-business way?”

And I’m not sure what the answers to this question are. Not really. I’ve been thinking about business models for the producers of software/technology services during earlier moments.

We have the example of the 70s and 80s when the prevailing technology companies were ATT and IBM. ATT made their money selling phone service, and licensing UNIX. IBM made their money selling mainframes. In the eighties and nineties we had the prevailing Microsoft lead “proprietary software licensing” business models, where consumers paid for the legal write to run code on their computers.

In the nineties and early naughties the successful business models were either from people buying hardware (ie. Sun Microsystems and IBM) or people buying support for operating systems (ie. RedHat). We’ve also seen some more stable business models centered around subscriptions-for-services (this seems to be what all the successful startups are doing), and more of the time honored selling hardware, and there are some support-services based companies that remain successful (eg. RedHat), the support market consolidated a lot recently. And it’s not like the Microsoft-consumer model doesn’t still exist.

So when we look at “infrastructural technology” it sure looks like there are some kinds of businesses that will continue to flourish:

• The people making mainframes/servers and the high level computing systems that provide the infrastructure.
• The people who provide the tools that make low level tools successful and useful to users. (eg. What UbuntuOne provides on top of SSH and rsync; What gmail provides on top of IMAP; What MobileMe provides ontop of WebDAV/CalDAV/IMAP).

These strike me as rather conventional business models, given the history. Does infrastructural computing also:

• further the development of subscription-based businesses?
• create a new kind of challenge in customizing solutions for organizations and groups that translate raw resources into “finished output?” Is this too much like IMAP --> Gmail?
• [other possibilities created by you, here]

I’m trying to approach this by asking myself “what creates value in this market,” rather than “where’s the money.” It strikes me that value exists in making systems “work” in a way that’s customized to the task at hand. It strikes me that value is created when individuals and organizations are able to take ownership of their own data and computing. Gmail is valuable, but running my own IMAP server is more valuable. Running my own IMAP server without the fuss of needing to personally manage the hardware and software of the server is even more valuable.

What else does the hive mind have for us?

I’ve been writing for weeks and weeks about co-ops, authentic exchange and commerce, the practice of openness and business models, and other related topics. Between the crashing economy, my ongoing contemplation of open source, and a new project that I’m almost ready to announce, thinking about the substance of economies and the power of economies to define other aspect of our social experience has seemed really appealing. And it has been.

I came across this article by Jason Stoddard a while back, and I’ve realized that I would be remiss in these posts, if I didn’t somehow tie it into writing and science fiction, and Stoddard’s post provides a great hook into this connection. He’s also, basically spot on right.

Interestingly, the beginning of this series grew out of my experiences reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy,” which spent a lot of time (particularly in the last two volumes) contemplating corporations and capitalism. Indeed, in the Mars books, Robinson posits what some readers (without careful examination) might think of as the typical “evil mega-corporations.”

Though I think he succeeds at avoiding the traps of having as villains “scheming business people in suits,” by making sure that none of the executives appear in the stories. The closest we get to having a “corporate villain,” is a character who allies themselves with the corporations for personal advancement. The result is that, the corporations lumber around, always doing the wrong thing, always getting in the way of the main characters, but they never loose the extra-human nature of being corporations.

Maybe that’s part of the problem with writing fiction about corporations. Fiction tends to revolve around people and social systems of comprehensible complexity and corporations are shaped and steered by a great number of people, and there’s too much complexity in corporations to really capture accurately in fiction.

While Stoddard’s argument (Corporations exist to make money, they’re not evil by nature) is factually true and good advice to anyone writing ‘corporate drama’ fiction, I think writers (and the rest of us) might benefit from thinking about some other “nitty gritty” aspects of corporations. Just because corporations may be “generally a bad thing in the world,” difficult to write about, and “not simply evil for the purposes of fiction” nonetheless I think it is important to think about the social/political effect corporations and to write about them in fiction.

The following list is rough, and incomplete, and I encourage you all to help me out in comments!

• Corporations have a few overriding drives: to grow, to make profit (both by minimizing expenses and by increasing revenue), and to continue to exist. All actions and strategies undertaken by corporations should make sense in context of one or more of these drives.
• Corporate cultures are largely self selecting, so “radicals” in corporate settings are really unlikely, either because they’re likely to leave or because their self-interest eventually falls in line with the company’s interest.
• Corporations employ huge numbers of people, but we can assume that the number of people at any given company doing things that support the main mission of a company but that aren’t “the thing the company does.” Phyisical Plant “things,” clerical tasks, human resources, “infrastructure,” operations/financial tasks, internal legal work, and so forth. Probably as much as a quarter or a third of the staff probably falls into one of these categories.
• Corporations are rarely unilateral. Ever. They have many operations, many projects, many divisions, and thus can be resilient to things changing “around them.” This also means that coorporations are less likely to take umbrage at potentially threatening individuals and companies, than a single individual would in a similar situation.
• Career advancement, in companies or elsewhere, generally happens to some greater or lesser extent by moving horizontally between companies rather than “through the ranks.”
• The bigger the corporation the more specialized the roles of the workforce would tend to be.
• For the most part, I think it safe to assume that most corporations don’t have a great deal of “classified” information, or information that’s heavily embargoed. This comes as a great blow to conspiracy theorists, but secrets are hard to keep with regards to projects that a lot of people need to know about, and if all the other things we know about corporations are true (size, attrition, etc.) “great secrets” are unlikely to remain great secrets for long.

In light of all these things I think there are a lot of opportunities for realistic story telling, but it’s not always so straight forward.

In anycase, I look forward to thinking about this some more with you.

One element that has been largely missing from my ongoing rambling analysis of economies, corporations, co-ops, and institutions has been higher education and universities. Of course Universities are institutions, and function in many ways like large corporations, but, nostalgia notwithstanding, I don’t think it’s really possible to exempt Universities or dismiss them from this conversation.

Oh, and, there was this rather interesting--but remarkably mundane--article that I clipped recently about that addressed where universities are “going” in the next decade or two. I say mundane, because I think the “look there’s new technology that’s changing the rules game” is crappy futurism, and really fails to get at the core of what kinds of developments we may expect to see in the coming years.

Nevertheless… Shall we begin? I think so:

• The expansion of university in the last 60 years, or so, has been fueled by the GI-Bill and the expansion of the student-loan industry. With the “population bubble” changing, and the credit market changing, universities will have to change. How they change is of course up in the air.
• There aren’t many alternatives to “liberal arts/general education” post-secondary education for people who don’t want, need, or have the preparation for that kind of education at age 18. While I’m a big proponent (and product of) a liberal arts education, there are many paths to becoming a well rounded and well educated adult, and they don’t all lead through traditional-four-year college educations (or equivalents, particularly at age 18.)
• Technology is changing higher education and scholarship, already, with all likelihood faster than technology has been and is changing other aspects of our culture (publishing, media production, civic engagement, etc.). Like all of these developments of culture, however, the changes in higher education are probably not as revolutionary as the article suggests.
• There will probably always be a way in which degree granting institutions will be a “useful” part of our society, but I think “The College,” will probably change significantly, but I think forthcoming changes probably have less to do with education and the classroom, and more to do with the evolving role of the faculty.
• As part of the decline of tenure-systems, I expect that eventually we’ll see a greater separation (but not total disconnect) between the institutions which employ and sponsor scholarship, and the institutions that educate students.
• It strikes me that most of the systems that universities use to convey education online (Blackboard, moodle, etc.,) are hopelessly flawed. Either by virtue of being difficult and “gawky” to use, or because they’re proprietary systems, or that they’re not designed for the task at hand, all of the systems that I’m aware of are as much roadblocks to the adoption of new technology in education as anything else.
• Although quality information (effectively presented, even) is increasingly available online for free, what makes this information valuable in the university setting, including interactivity, feedback on progress, individual attention, validation and certification of mastery, are all of the things that universities (particularly “research”-grade institutions) perform least successfully at.
• We’ve been seeing research and popular press stuff on the phenomena of “prolonged adolescence,” where young people tend to have a period of several years post-graduation where they have to figure out “what next,” sometimes there’s graduate school, sometimes there’s odd jobs. I’ve become convinced that in an effort to help fill the gap between “vocational education” and “liberal arts/gen ed.” we’ve gotten to the point where we ask people who are 18 (and don’t have a clue what they want to do with their lives, for the most part) to make decisions about their careers that are pretty absurd. Other kinds of educational options should exist, that might help resolve this issue.

Interestingly these thoughts didn’t have very much to do with technology. I guess I mostly feel that the changes in technology are secondary to the larger economic forces likely to affect universities in the coming years. Unless the singularity comes first.

Your thoughts, as always, are more than welcome.