Information Scarcity & Information Abundance

I have written on this topic a number of times in the past. From a world (and an educational philosophy) built on information scarcity, we now find ourselves in a world of information abundance.

I don’t know that we (as a community) have done very well in embracing this fundamental shift in the ground beneath our feet. The foundations of our institutions are built on the fundamental assumption that information is scarce. Now that information is abundantly available, where is the discussion taking place about what this might mean in terms of our educational model, and there is certainly no clear leadership from the top in showing us the way to adjust to the new world.

Close your eyes and carry on!

In John Naughton’s ALT-C 2011 keynote, on of his examples of the internet overwhelming a business model is the newspaper business. In the case of the news business, it wasn’t the fundamental business of journalism that has been swept away by the internet, but the funding of the journalism business through the selling of classified ads that has disappeared. Most of us thought the business model was all about journalism, however, the managers knew that the money came in through classified ads, and journalism was the public face of the advertising business.

In higher education, the business model is all about carrying out research, being supported by teaching and learning and the funding that this attracts. The idea worked out brilliantly well when information was scarce and anyone who seriously wanted to learn needed to pay homage to the vast knowledge repositories that were lecturers, university libraries, and the universities themselves. Students and governments pay enormous amounts to institutions to access and study the knowledge that was available, and only available, through them.

We no longer live in a world where information is scarce. Information, and I mean all information (in spite of institutional resistance) is (or soon will be) freely available (sci-hub?). Our entire model of education is based on information being scarce. In his ALT-C address, John Naughton was asked how the journalism world missed the internet tidal wave that swamped them, and he replied that when you are deep inside a sinking ship, you really don’t know what is happening around you. I guess that after the Costa Concordia wreck, you could say that we in the higher education ship are experiencing that space in time while we kind of feel hat something isn’t quite right, but before we can really see the water running up the corridors (at which point it will be too late) while the captain is assuring us that we are fine and simply experiencing an electrical fault and that there is nothing to worry about.