原文链接：The Impending Demise of The University
作者：Don Tapscott
译者：Esther
版权声明：本文可以任意转载，转载时请务必保持作者、译者署名的完整性。
For fifteen years, I’ve been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the University. I’ve not been alone. In 1998, none other than, Peter Drucker predicted that big universities would be “relics” within 30 years.
有15年，我一直在争论数字革命将挑战大学的许多基础方面。我不是孤军奋战。1998年，甚至彼得·杜拉克也预测大型高校将于30年内成为“遗迹”。
Flash forward to today and you’d be reasonable to think that we have been quite wrong. University attendance is at an all time high. The percentage of young people enrolling in degree granting institutions rose over 115% from 1969-1970 to 2005-2007, while the percentage of 25- to 29-year-old Americans with a college degree doubled. The competition to get into the greatest universities has never been fiercer. At first blush the university seems to be in greater demand than ever.
回到今天，你若觉得我们都错了，那也有道理。大学出勤率比以往任何时候都高。2005-2007期间，报名参与学位颁发机构的年轻人比例比1969-1970增长了115%，而25-29岁有大学文凭的美国人比例翻番了。上名校的压力从未如此激烈。乍一看，大学似乎比以往更走俏。
Yet there are troubling indicators that the picture is not so rosy. And I’m not just talking about the decimation of university endowments by the current financial meltdown.
不过，有些指数存在问题，表明图像并非如此充满希望。而且我说的还不是由于当前经济不景气大学捐款数量锐减。
Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge sweeney both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.
随着网络作为容器，也作为人们之间交换知识的全球平台，它无情地成了知识sweeney(?)的主要基础设置，大学终于失去了其对高等学习的垄断。
Meanwhile on campus, there is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.
与此同时，大学的基础运作方式——教学模型也受到根本性挑战。具体说，许多大学提供的学习模型与在数字化时代成长的年轻人最佳自然学习方式之间日益加剧的差别。
The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.
教授站在讲台上，面前是一大群学生，这种老师讲座，仍是很多大学生活中固定的一幕。这种模型以教师为中心、单向、均码，学生在学习过程中被孤立。成长于互动的数字世界的学生，却以不同方式学习。受教于Google和维基百科，他们想提问，而不是依靠教授寻求详细的路标。他们想要生动的对话，不是讲座。他们想要互动教育，而不是只适合产业革命时代甚至婴儿热时代的广播教育。这些学生对大学提出了新要求，如果大学试图忽略他们，那么无异于自掘坟墓。
The model of pedagogy, of course, is only one target of criticism directed toward universities.
教学法的模型当然只是针对大学批判的目标之一。
The Many Challenges to the University
大学面对的诸多挑战
Most resources of large universities are directed towards research, not learning. The universities are not primarily institutes of higher learning, but institutes for science and research. In his book Rethinking Science, Michael Gibbons developed a scathing critique of the current model science as conducted in the university.
大型高校的大多数资源都指向研究，而非学习。基本上，大学不是高等学习机构，而是科学研究机构。在迈克尔·吉布森的《重新思考科学》一书中，他对大学里当前的模型科学进行了严厉批判。
Recently the questioning has heated up on other fronts. In the New York Times last month, Mark Taylor, chairman of Columbia University’s religion department, whipped up a storm of academic controversy with a provocative OpEd page article called “The End of University as We Know It”.
最近，在其他领域质疑已经白热化。在上月《纽约时报》哥伦比亚大学宗教系主任马克·泰勒在开放教育上发表了颇具煽动性的一篇文章，名为《终结现在的大学》，在学术界掀起了轩然大波。
“Graduate education,” he began, “is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).” The key problem, he noted, began with Kant in his 1798 work, “The Conflict of the Faculties.” Kant argued that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”
“研究生教育”，他开门见山地写道，“乃是高等学习的底特律。美国大学中，大多数研究生课程所生产的产品没有市场（教育岗位的候选人，可这些岗位纯属子虚乌有），培养的技能也需求递减（子领域的子领域研究，只能在寥寥无几志同道合的同事才阅读的期刊上发表杂志），而这一切的成本都在迅速增长（有时学生贷款超过10万美元）。”他指出关键问题的肇端在于康德1798年的著作《学科之争》。康德认为，大学应该“通过大批生产来处理学习的全部内容，也就是说，通过分工，这样每个科学分支都有公共教师或教授作为其指定的代理人。”
Taylor argued that graduate education must be restructured at a fundamental level to move away from the ultra-narrow scholarship. Among other things, he called for more cross-disciplinary inquiry, the creation of problem-focused programs, with a sunset clause, as well as more collaboration between all educational institutions, and the abolition of tenure. One week later, the outcry from fellow academics filled the entire letters page on the Sunday New York Times. One of his own colleagues at Columbia said it was “alarming and embarrassing” to hear “crass anti-intellectualism” emerge from his own institution. Another academic accused Taylor of “poisoning the waters of higher education.”
泰勒认为，必须在基础层面重新建构研究生教育，离开狭窄片面的知识。除了其他方面，它呼吁更多跨学科调查，创造以问题为导向的项目，带届满条款，并在所有教育机构中产生更多合作，废除终身教授任期。一周之后，来自学术界同行的反对充斥着周日版《纽约时报》的整个来信版面。泰勒哥大的一位同事说，听到自己学院竟然出现“粗鲁的反智令人震惊又尴尬难堪”。另一学者指责泰勒“给高等教育之水投毒”。
The Model of Pedagogy
教学模型
Whatever the merits of Taylor’s call to restructure higher education, I think he is right to call for a deep debate on how universities function in a networked society. Yet I think he misses the most fundamental challenge to the university as we know it. The basic model of pedagogy is broken. “Broadcast learning” as I’ve called it is no longer appropriate for the digital age and for a new generation of students who represent the future of learning.
不论泰勒呼吁重组高等教育的功劳何在，我认为，他呼吁就大学如何在网络化社会中运作都是正确的。不过，我觉得他遗漏了大学所面对的最基本的挑战。基本教学模型分崩离析。我所谓的“广播学习”不再适合于数字时代，不再适合代表未来学习的新一代学生。
In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: “I’m a professor and I have knowledge. You’re a student you’re an empty vassal and you don’t. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you.”
在学生大规模生产的工业模型中，教师是广播员。根据定义，广播是以单向线性方式从发射者到接受者的信息传播。在学习过程中，老师是传输者，学生是接受者。公式大概是这样：“我是教授，我拥有知识。你是学生，是个空容器，没有知识。准备好，知识来了。你的目标是将这些数据装进你的短期记忆中，通过练习和重复，建构更深刻的认知结构，这样我给你考试时，你才能给我背出来。”
The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.
讲座的定义已经成为老师的笔记变成学生的笔记之过程，不经任意一方的大脑。
As someone who gives many lectures a year, I appreciate the irony of this view. But I understand that my lectures are not a good way of learning. They play a limited role of interesting an audience, changing their view or possibly motivating them to do something different. But I dare say that 90 percent of what I’ve said is lost.
作为一年要作若干讲座的人，我深谙此观点中的讽刺意味。但是，我理解我的讲座并不是学习的好方法。它们对吸引听众、改变他们的观点，调动他们从事不同事情所起到的作用非常有限。不过，我敢说，我讲的90%内容都丢失了。
True, this broadcast model is enhanced in some disciplines through essays, labs and even seminar discussions. And of course many professors are working hard to move beyond this model. However, it remains dominant overall.
通过论文、实验室甚至研讨会讨论，这种广播模型在某些学科得到巩固。当然，很多教授都努力工作超越该模型。然而，整体上，它依然占统治地位。
Technology and the web provide an important element of a new model, but so far few have adopted it. If someone frozen 300 years ago miraculously came alive today and looked at the professions — a physician in an operating theater, a pilot in a jumbo cockpit, a engineer designing an automobile in a CAD system — they would surely marvel at how technologies had transformed the knowledge work. But if they walked into a university lecture hall, they would no doubt be comforted that some things have not changed.
技术和网络提供了新模型的重要要素，但截止目前，甚少有人采用。如果300年前冷冻的人今天复活，看看各个行业——手术室的外科医生，超大喷气机驾驶舱的飞行员，用CAD系统设计汽车的工程师——他们肯定会对技术如何改变知识工作而惊叹。但如果他们走进大学演讲厅，毫无疑问，他们会感到很舒心，仍有未曾改变的东西。
The New Generation of Students
新一代学生
The broadcast model might have been perfectly adequate for the baby-boomers, who grew up in broadcast mode, watching 24 hours a week of television (not to mention being broadcast to as children by parents, as students by teachers, as citizens by politicians, and when then entered the workforce as employees by bosses). But young people who have grown up digital are abandoning one-way TV for the higher stimulus of interactive communication they find on the Internet. In fact television viewing is dropping and TV has become nothing more than ambient media for youth — akin to Muzak. Sitting mutely in front of a TV set — or a professor — doesn’t appeal to or work for this generation. They learn differently best through non-sequential, interactive, asynchronous, multi-tasked and collaborative.
对于婴儿潮一代，广播模型可能足矣，因为他们在广播模式下成长，每周看24小时电视（暂且不提作为孩子，由家长广播，作为学生，由教师广播，作为公民，由政治家广播，进入劳动大军之后，作为雇主由老板广播。）但是以数字化方式成长起来的年轻人放弃了单向电视，追求他们在互联网上找到的互动沟通作为更高刺激。实际上，看电视的时间已经减少，电视已然成为年轻人的外围媒体——与缪扎克音乐类似。在电视机——或教授——前呆坐着，无法吸引这一代人，也不起作用。他们通过无序、互动、非同步、多任务及合作学习得最好。
Young Americans under 30 are the first to have grown up digital. Growing up at a time when cell phones, the Internet, texting and Facebook are as normal as the refrigerator. This interactive media immersion at a formative stage of life has affected their brain development and consequently the way they think and learn.
美国80后是数字化成长第一代。他们生长之际，手机、互联网、短信和Facebook跟冰箱一样正常。在人生定型阶段，这种互动媒体的兴起影响了他们大脑发展及他们思考学习的方式。
Some writers, of course, think that Google makes you stupid; it’s so hard to concentrate and think deeply amid the overwhelming amounts of bits of information online, they contend. Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, even calls them the “dumbest generation” in his recent book on the topic.
当然，有些作家认为谷歌会让你变得愚蠢；他们认为，在浩瀚的信息中，难以集中记忆力，无法深入思考。埃默里大学的英语教授马克·鲍尔林甚至在他最近关于此话题的书中，将其成为“最愚蠢的一代”。
My research suggests these critics are wrong. Growing up digital has changed the way their minds work in a manner that will help them handle the challenges of the digital age. They’re used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle the information overload. They expect a two-way conversation. What’s more, growing up digital has encouraged this generation to be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting for a trusted professor to tell them what’s going on, they find out on their own on everything from Google to Wikipedia.
我的研究表明这些批评都不对。以数字化方式成长起来已经改变了他们大脑思维的方式，这帮助应对他们数字时代的挑战。他们习惯了多任务、学会了处理信息过载。他们期待双向对话。更主要的，数字化方式成长鼓励这一代成为积极而尖锐的发问者。他们不是等着信任的教授告诉他们出现什么，他们通过Google到维基百科，自己寻找所有内容。
If universities want to adapt the teaching techniques to their current audience, they should, as I’ve been saying for years, make significant changes to the pedagogy. And the new model of learning is not only appropriate for youth — but increasingly for all of us. In this generation’s culture is the new culture of learning.
如果大学想改变教学技巧来迎合当前听众，他们应该，如我历年来所说，让教学法有重大变化。学习的新模型不仅适合年轻人——对我们所有人，都日益如此。这一代的文化是学习的新文化。
The professors who remain relevant will have to abandon the traditional lecture, and start listening and conversing with the students — shifting from a broadcast style and adopting an interactive one. Second, they should encourage students to discover for themselves, and learn a process of discovery and critical thinking instead of just memorizing the professor’s store of information. Third, they need to encourage students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the university. Finally, they need to tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.
还能参与其中的教授必须放弃传统讲座，开始聆听学生的想法，并与他们对话——脱离广播式授课，采用互动方式。其次，他们应鼓励学生自我发现，学习发现和批判性思考的过程，而不仅仅是记忆教授储存的信息。第三，他们需要鼓励学生彼此合作，同时与校外人士合作。最后，他们需要改变教育风格以满足学生的个人学习风格。
Because of technology this is now possible. But this is not fundamentally about technology per se. Rather it represents a change in the relationship between students and teachers in the learning process.
由于技术，这些现在变为可能。但是，这并非关乎技术本身。它代表师生在学习过程中的关系改变。
The Most Vulnerable Universities
最脆弱的大学
The ability to engage young people at university obviously depends on the institution, and the individual professor. The great liberal arts colleges are doing a wonderful job of stimulating young minds because with big endowments and small class sizes students can have more of a customized collaborative experience. My son Alex graduated from Amherst College, a small undergraduate university with a student teacher ratio of 8-1. His teachers included a Pulitzer prize winner, Nobel Laureate and overall professors who live to work with students who enable them to learn.
大学吸引年轻人的能力显然取决于机构及每位教授。伟大的文理学院都在积极有效地鼓励年轻人，因为有了丰厚的赠与和小班模式，学生有更多量身定做的合作经验。我儿子艾里克斯毕业于安默斯特学院，这是一所规模很小的本科大学，师生比例为1：8。他的老师们包括一位普利策获奖者，诺贝尔获奖者，所有教授都与促使他们学习的学生一起努力。
But the same cannot be said of many of the big universities that regard their prime role to be a centre for research, with teaching as an inconvenient afterthought, and class sizes so large that they only want to “teach” is through lectures.
但对于很多认为自己的首要角色是成为研究中心的大型高校，情况并非如，他们认为教书不过是不甚方便的事后之思，班级如此之大，他们唯一想“教授”的方式就是通过讲座。
These universities are vulnerable, especially at a time when students can watch lectures online for free by some of the world’s leading professors on sites like Academic Earth. They can even take the entire course online, for credit. According to the Sloan Consortium, a recent article in Chronicle of Higher Education tells us, “nearly 20 per cent of college students — some 3.9 million people — took an online course in 2007, and their numbers are growing by hundreds of thousands each year. The University of Phoenix enrolls over 200,000 each year.”
这些大学很脆弱，尤其当学生可以在学术地球等网站在线免费收看世界顶级教授的讲座时。他们甚至可以在线完成所有课程，换取学分。《高等教育纪事报》中一篇近期文章指出，据史隆联盟说，“2007年，大概有20%的大学生——大约390万人——在线上课，此数据每年还在以成千上万的人数增长。凤凰大学每年录取200，000人。”
The New Model
新模型
Some leading educators are calling for this kind of massive change; one of these is Richard Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He says the education model has to change to suit this generation of students. Smart but impatient, they like to collaborate and they reject one-way lectures, he notes. While some educators view this as pandering to a generation, Sweeney is firm: “They want to learn, but they want to learn only from what they have to learn, and they want to learn it in a style that is best for them.”
有些先导教育者呼吁这种大型变化；理查德·斯文尼便是其中之一，他是新泽西技术学院的图书馆员。他说教育模型必须改变以满足这一代学生，他们聪明但没有耐心，喜欢合作，摈弃单向演讲。有些教育者将这看做色诱，而斯文尼却很坚定：“他们想学习，但只想学他们必须学的东西，而且想以最适合自己的方式学习。”
There are shining examples of interactive education, though. Dr. Maria Terrell, who teaches calculus at Cornell University, used an interactive method that’s part of a program called “Good Questions,” which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
有不少互动教育的精彩范例，不过在康奈尔大学教授微积分的玛利亚·特雷尔博士使用了属于名为“好问题”的项目的一部分互动方法，该项目由国家科学基金会资助。
One strategy being used in this program is called just-in-time teaching; it is a teaching and learning strategy that combines the benefits of Web-based assignments and an active-learner classroom where courses are customized to the particular needs of the class. Warm-up questions, written by the students, are typically due a few hours before class, giving the teacher an opportunity to adjust the lesson “just in time,” so that classroom time can be focused on the parts of the assignments that students struggled with. Harvard professor Eric Mazur, who uses this approach in his physics class, puts it this way: “Education is so much more than the mere transfer of information. The information has to be assimilated. Students have to connect the information to what they already know, develop mental models, learn how to apply the new knowledge, and how to adapt this knowledge to new and unfamiliar situations.
本项目中所用的一条策略称为及时教学，这种教学策略融合了以网络为基础的作业布置及积极学习者教室的优点，课程因材施教，以满足班级的具体需求。由学生们写的热身问题在课前几小时准备好，让老师有机会“及时”调整课程，这样课堂时间可以聚焦于学生们痛苦挣扎的作业部分。哈副教授艾瑞克·马祖尔在自己的物理课上使用这种方法，他如是说：“教育远远不止简单的信息传输。信息必须被吸收。学生必须将信息连接于他们已经知道的东西，开发脑力模型，学习如何应用新知识，如何将此知识适应于不熟悉的新环境。
This technique produces real results. An evaluation study of 350 Cornell students found that those who were asked “deep questions” (that elicit higher-order thinking) with frequent peer discussion scored noticeably higher on their math exams than students who were not asked deep questions or who had little to no chance for peer discussion. Dr. Terrell explains: “It’s when the students talk about what they think is going on and why, that’s where the biggest learning occurs for them…. You can hear people sort of saying, ‘Oh I see, I get it.’ … And then they’re explaining to somebody else … and there’s an authentic understanding of what’s going on. So much better than what would happen if I, as the teacher person, explain it. There’s something that happens with this peer instruction.”
这种技巧产生了真正的结果。对350名康奈尔大学学生评估研究发现，被问及“深层次问题”（产生高级思考）以及经常和同侪讨论问题的学生在数学考试中成绩比没有被问及深入问题或同侪讨论微乎其微的学生，明显高得多。特雷尔博士解释说：“当学生谈论他们认为出现了什么情况，为什么会有这种情况时，他们才能最大程度地学习……你会听到人们说，‘哦，我明白了，知道了。’……然后，他们向其他人解释……对于出现的情况有了真正的理解。这比我作为老师向他们解释要强得多。这种同侪教育还是有点不同。”
Interactive education enables students to learn at their own pace. I saw this myself back in the mid-1970s when I was taking a statistics course for my graduate degree in educational psychology at the University of Alberta in Canada. It was one of the first classes conducted online — an educational groundbreaker from Dr. Steve Hunka, a visionary in computer-mediated education. This was before PCs, so we sat down in front of a computer terminal that was connected to a computer-controlled slide display. I could stop at any time and review, and test myself to see how I was doing. The exam was online too.
互动教育促使学生以自己的步伐学习。早在1970年代中期，我自己的体验就说明了这一点，当时我为了获取加拿大阿尔伯特大学教育心理学硕士学位而上统计学课。那是首批在线教育之一——斯蒂夫·汉卡博士的创新，他是计算机辅助教育的梦想家。那是PC问世之前，所以我们坐在与计算机控制的幻灯显示相连的计算机终端前，我随时可以停下，重复看，测试自己做得如何。考试也是在线举行。
There were no lectures. Just as well: the statistics lecture is by definition a bust. There is no “one-size-fits-all” for statistics – everyone in the lecture hall is either bored or doesn’t get it. Instead, we got face-to-face time with Dr. Hunka, who was freed up from being a transmitter of data to someone who customized a learning experience for each of us, one on one.
没有讲座。从定义上讲，统计学讲座是个失败。统计学没有均码——演讲厅里的每个人不是感到无聊，就是不理解。实际上，我们有与汉卡博士面对面的时间，他已从数据传输中解脱出来，变身为对我们每个人——1对1——因材施教的人。
Back then, online learning was expensive, but today the tools on the Net make it a great way to teach and free up the teacher to design the learning experience and converse with the students on an individual and more meaningful basis. It works. The research evidence is very strong and dates back years: “Compared with students enrolled in conventionally taught courses, students who use well-crafted computer-mediated instruction … generally achieve higher scores on summary examinations, learn their lessons in less time, like their classes more, and develop more positive attitudes towards the subject matter they’re learning,” according to an article as long ago as 1997 called “Technology in the Classroom: from Theory to Practice,” which appeared in Educom Review. “These results hold for a broad range of students stretching elementary to college students, studying across a broad range of disciplines, from mathematics to the social sciences to the humanities.”
回顾当时，在线学习很昂贵，但今天，网络工具使之成为教学的好方法，解放老师来设计学习经验，并与学生单独进行更有意义的交谈。这种方法行之有效。研究证据非常强大有力，可追溯到数年前：“与传统教授课程下的学生相比，使用精心设计的计算机辅助教学的学生……通常在总结考试上获得更高成绩，在较短时间内学会课程，更喜欢他们的课程，对他们所学的课程培养出更多积极态度，”这是1997年刊登在Educom Review一篇名为《教室技术：从理论到实践》的文章观点。“这些观点对更广泛的学生群都适用，从小学到大学，跨越各个学科，从数学到社会科学到人文学科。”
Challenging the Purpose of the University
挑战大学的目的
The issue of pedagogy raises a deeper issue — the purpose of the university. In the old model, teachers taught and students were expected to absorb vast quantities of content. Education was about absorbing content and being able to recall it on exams. You graduated and you were set for life — just “keeping” up in your chosen field. Today when you graduate you’re set for say, 15 minutes. If you took a technical course half of what you learned in the first year may be obsolete by the 4th year. What counts is your capacity to learn lifelong, to think, research, find information, analyze, synthesize, contextualize, critically evaluate it; to apply research to solving problems; to collaborate and communicate.
教学法的问题提出一个更深刻的问题——大学的目的。在旧有模型中，老师教书，期望学生能够吸收大量内容。教育关乎吸收内容，能够在考试时背诵出来。你毕业了，人生定了——只需在你所选的领域中“持守”既可。时至今日，当你毕业时，你只能安定，比如说，15分钟。如果你上了一门技术课，到第四年时，你第一年所学的一半可能都已过时。靠得住就是你终身学习的能力，思考、研究、寻找信息、分析、合成、融入背景、批判性评估；将研究应用于解决问题；合作与沟通。
But now that students can obviously find the information they’re looking for in an instant online in the crania of others online, this old model doesn’t make any sense. It’s not only what you know that really counts when you graduate; it’s how you navigate in the digital world, and what you do with the information you discover. This new style of learning, I believe, will suit them.
既然学生显然从其他在线者的头脑中得到信息，这种旧模式不再有意义。真正重要的不仅仅是毕业时你所拥有的知识；你如何在数字世界导航、如何处理发现的信息也同样重要。我相信，这种新的学习方式对他们很合适。
Universities should be places to learn, not to teach.
大学应该是学习的地方，而不是教授的地方。
Net Geners, immersed in digital technology, are keen to try new things, often at high speed. They want university to be fun and interesting. So they should enjoy the delight of discovering things for themselves. As Seymour Papert, one of the world’s foremost experts on how technology can provide new ways to learn put it: “The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.”
网络新生代浸淫于数字技术中，热衷于尝试新事物，而且速度迅猛。他们希望大学好玩有趣。所以他们应该享受自己发现东西的乐趣。正如就技术如何提供新的学习方法的世界顶级专家赛摩尔·帕波特所说：“教育的丑闻是每次你教授东西时，你就剥夺了孩子发现的乐趣与优势。”
A Challenge to Teaching
教学的挑战
John Seely Brown is director emeritus of Xerox PARC and a visiting scholar at USC. He noticed that when a child first learns how to speak, she or he is totally immersed in a social context and highly motivated to engage in learning this new, amazingly complex system of language. It got him to thinking that “once you start going to school, in some ways you start to learn much slower because you are being taught, rather than what happens if you’re learning in order to do things that you yourself care about…. Very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world, you’re kind of always willing to probe things … you can actually be joyful about discovering something you didn’t know … and you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”
约翰·斯里·布朗是Xerox PARC的荣誉董事，也是USC的访问学者。他注意到当孩子刚开始学习说话时，她或他完全沉浸在社会背景中，高度投入到学习语言这种令人惊奇不已的复杂新系统中。这让他想起“一旦你开始上学，在某些方式你开始学得更慢，因为别人教你，不再是你学习自己关心的事情时所发生的那样……通常，哪怕只是谈论你真正在乎的一两个话题，就会让你对这个世界更加敬畏……一旦你学会尊重世界的神秘之处，你就好像总是愿意探索各种事情……你可以真正享受发现从前不知道的东西……你总可预期需要不断探索。而这奠定了终身询问的舞台。”
Another fixture of old-style learning is the assumption that students should learn on their own. Sharing notes in an exam hall, or collaborating on some of the essays and homework assignments, was strictly forbidden. Yet the individual learning model is foreign territory for most Net Geners, who have grown up collaborating, sharing, and creating together online. Progressive educators are recognizing this. Students start internalizing what they’ve learned in class only once they start talking to each other, says Seely Brown: “The whole notion of passively sitting and receiving information has almost nothing to do with how you internalize information into something that makes sense to you. Learning starts as you leave the classroom, when you start discussing with people around you what was just said. It is in conversation that you start to internalize what some piece of information meant to you.”
老式学习的另一个问题在于假设学生应该自学。在考试厅里分享笔记或就论文或家庭作业进行合作，都被严格禁止。而对于大多数网络新生代，个人学习模式都是陌生领域，他们的成长伴随着在线合作、分享及共同创造。进步的教育者已经认识到此。只有当学生开始彼此谈论自己在课堂上所学的内容，他们才能将这些东西内在化，斯里·布朗说：“消极坐着接收信息的整个概念几乎和你将信息内在化成为对你有意义的东西完全不相关。当你离开教室，当你开始与周围的人讨论老师讲述的内容时，学习才开始。正是在对话中，你开始将一条信息对你的意义内在化。
The lecture hall is a prime example of mass education. It came along with mass production, mass marketing, and the mass media. Schooling, says Howard Gardner, is a mass-production idea. “You teach the same thing to students in the same way and assess them all in the same way.” Pedagogy is based on the questionable idea that optimal learning experiences can be constructed for groups of learners at the same chronological age. In this view, a curriculum is developed based on predigested information and structured for optimal transmission. If the curriculum is well structured and interesting, then large proportions of students at any given grade level will “tune in” and get engaged with the information. But too often, it doesn’t work out that way.
演讲厅是大规模教育的主要范例。它和大生产、大营销、大众传媒携手并肩。霍华德·加德纳说，在校教育是大规模生产的想法。“你以相同的方式向学生讲授相同的内容，然后以相同的方式评估他们。”对于各组年龄相仿的学习者可以组建最佳学习经验，我们的教学正是以这种令人质疑的想法为基础。以此看来，以预先消化的信息为基础开发课表，然后按照最佳传输来建构。如果课表建构完善，内容引人入胜，那么任何年级的大量学生都会“长守本频率，投入到该信息中。可是更多时候，这样做行不通。
Consider one of the smash hits on YouTube last year, a short video called “A Vision of Students Today”.
想想去年YouTube热播的一个短小视频，“当今学生愿景”。
Created by Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, it is a stinging indictment of the education delivered by standard large-scale American university. Wesch recruited 200 student collaborators to describe their view of the education they’re receiving. Their verdict: Nothing much has changed since the early nineteenth century, when the blackboard was introduced as a brilliant new way to help students visualize information. They painted a grim picture of university life — huge classes, teachers who didn’t know the students’ names, students who didn’t complete the assigned readings, multiple-choice exams that were a waste of intellectual capital.
这是堪萨斯州立大学文化人类学副教授迈克尔·维斯其创建的，辛辣地批评了美国标准大规模大学提供的教育。维斯其招募了200名学生和作者来描述他们对自己所接受的教育的看法。他们的裁决：自19世纪早期引入黑板作为帮助学生将信息可视化的辉煌新方法以来，没有太多变化。他们描绘了一副灰色的大学生活图景——庞大的班级，不知道学生姓名的老师，不完成指定阅读的学生，浪费智力资本的多选题考试。
I know many bright students who feel the same way. The big thing these days is to get an “A” without ever having gone to a lecture. When the crème de la crème of an entire generation is boycotting the formal model of pedagogy in our educational institutions, the writing is on the wall.
我认识很多有同感的聪明学生。如今的大问题是不去上课也能得到“A”。当整整一代人的精英抵制我们教育机构的正式教学模型时，答案就昭然若揭。
A Challenge of the Revenue Model
收入模型的挑战
As the model of pedagogy is challenged it’s inevitable that the revenue model of universities will be too. The arrival of online education raises the question: If all that the big universities have to offer to students are lectures that you can get online for free — from other professors — why pay the tuition fees? If universities want to survive the arrival of free university-level education online, they need to change the way professors and students interact on campus. Some are taking bold steps to reinvent themselves, with help from the Internet. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, is offering free lecture notes, exams and videotaped lectures by MIT professors to the online world.
由于教学模式受到挑战，大学收益模式也不可避免地受到挑战。在线教育的来临提出了这样的问题：如果大学能够为学生提供的全部就是你可以在线免费得到的讲座——从其他教授那里——为什么还要付学费？如果大学想在免费大学在线教育到来之前生存，他们需要改变教授和学生在校园互动的方式。有些在互联网的帮助下，采取了大胆的步骤重新打造自己。比如，麻省理工学院为在线世界提供免费讲座笔记、考试以及录制好的MIT教授讲座。
Anyone in the world can watch the entire series of lectures for some 30 courses, such as Walter Lewin’s ever-popular introductory physics course, which gets viewed by over 40,000 people a month on OpenCourseWear, MIT’s version of intellectual philanthropy. Universities worldwide have joined the movement.
世界上任何一个人都可以观看30多门课程的全部系列讲座，比如沃尔特·列文最受欢迎的物理入门，在OpenCourseWear上一个月就超过40，000次观看。OpenCourseWear是MIT版的知识慈善业。全球各地的大学都已加入该活动。
A Challenge to Credentialing
文凭的挑战
Of course, universities play an important role in the sorting of individuals in society, through the admissions process and the awarding of degrees. One of the most important roles of the university is to screen human capital for future employers, and more broadly stratifying society. Those who get good marks in high school and on their SATs, who are proven to be hard workers and have other talents, get into the best universities. Those who graduate — better still with distinction — have a credential, to get the most desirable jobs or entrance to graduate programs. They have proven they have a degree of discipline and that they’re prepared to play by the rules.
当然，大学在分拣社会上的个人上起到了重要作用，通过录取手续及学位颁发。大学最重要的角色之一是为未来雇主筛选人力资本，或更直白地将社会分层。在高中和SAT得到好分数的学生，证明了是辛勤工作的工人并且有其他才能，读最好的大学。这些毕业了的学生——比从前更好，但仍有各自的特征——获得文凭，得到最让人满意的工作，或者读研。他们已经证明他们有某门课的学位，准备好按规则游戏。
But a credential and even the prestige of a university is rooted in its effectiveness as a learning institution. If these institutions are shown to be inferior learning environments to other alternatives their capacity to credential will surely diminish.
但是，大学的文凭甚至声望深深植根于其作为学习机构的有效性。如果发现与其他机构相比，这些机构是劣质的学习环境，他们颁发文凭的能力肯定大打折扣。
How much longer will, say, a Harvard undergraduate degree, taught in large class sizes by teaching assistants, largely through lectures, be able to compete in status to the small class size liberal arts colleges or superior delivery systems that harness the new models of learning. Surely the proof being in the pudding will change the status for various recipes for learning.
哈佛由助教在大班主要通过讲座讲授的本科生学位还要多久才能和自由文理院校的小班相匹敌，或于采用新型学习模型的高级讲授系统竞争？当然，实践出真知，这也会改变各种学习秘诀的状态。
A Challenge to the Campus
校园的挑战
The university campus has been “a wonderful place for young people to go for four years to get older”, as Princeton sociologist Marvin Dressler told me a decade ago. “While they’re there they’re bound to learn something” he said.
大学校园曾是“年轻人度过四年光阴成长的美好地方”，这是10年前普林斯顿社会学家马文·德莱斯勒告诉我的。“在校期间，他们注定会学点什么”，他说。
But if campuses are seen as places where learning is inferior to other models, or worse places where learning is restricted and stifled, the role of the campus experience will be undermined as well.
但是，如果校园被视为学习次于其他模型或者学习被限制或窒息的最糟糕的地方，校园经历的角色也会大打折扣。
Campuses that embrace the new models become more effective learning environments and more desirable places. Even something as simple as online lectures do not undermine the value of on-campus education, they have enhanced it. The video lectures allow students to absorb the course content online — whenever it’s convenient — and then get together to tinker, invent new things, or discuss the material. The experience has shown MIT that real value of what they offer is not the lecture per se, but rather the whole package — the content tied to the human learning experience on campus, plus the certification. Universities, in other words, cannot survive on lectures alone.
欢迎新模型的校园将变为更有效的学习环境，更令人向往的地方。即使在线讲座这样简单的东西都不会削弱在校教育，相反它们会使之更巩固。视频讲座允许学生在线吸收课程内容——在方便的时候——然后凑在一起修补、发明新东西，或讨论材料。经验已经向MIT表明，他们所提供的东西的真正价值不是讲座本身，而是整个知识包——附加于人类校园学习经验之上的内容外加证书。大学，换言之，无法只靠讲座存活。
Videotaping lectures can free up intellectual capital — on the part of both professors and students — to spend their on-campus time thinking and inquiring and challenging each other, rather than just absorbing information.
录制好的讲座可以释放知识资本——教授和学生都是如此——将他们的校园时间进行思考、发问、彼此提问，而不仅仅吸收信息。
A Challenge to the Relationship of the University to Other Institutions
大学与其他机构关系的挑战
“The time has come for some far reaching changes to the university, our model of pedagogy, how we operate, and our relationship to the rest of the world,” says Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron.
“大学、我们的教学模型、我们如何运作、我们与世界其他部分的关系出现意义深远的变化，势在必行，” 阿克伦大学的校长路易斯·M·普罗恩撒说。
He asks a provocative question: Why should a university student be restricted to learning from the professors at the university he or she is attending. True, students can obviously learn from intellectuals around the world through books, or via the Internet. Yet in a digital world, why shouldn’t a student be able to take a course from a professor at another university? Proenza thinks universities should use the Internet to create a global centre of excellence. In other words, choose the best courses you have and link them with the best at a handful of universities around the world to create an unquestionably best-in-class program for students. Students would get to learn from the world’s greatest minds in their area of interest — either in the physical classroom, or online. This global academy would be also be open to anyone online. This is a beautiful example of the collaboration I described in the book I co-authored, Wikinomics.
他问了一个颇具煽动性的问题：为什么大学生的学习应该被限制在他或她所读大学的教授那里？没错，学生显然可以通过书本或通过互联网从全球各地的知识分子那里学习。可是在数字化世界，为什么学生们不能够从另一所大学的教授那里上课？普罗恩撒认为，大学应该使用互联网创造全球卓越中心。换言之，选择你最优秀的课程，将它们与世界各地的大学相链接，为学生创造毋庸置疑的最佳课程。学生可以学习他们感兴趣领域里最伟大的思想——不论是在实体教室还是在线。全球学院也将在线对任何人开放。这是我在与他人合著的《维基经济学》一书中表述的一个美轮美奂的例子。
So why hasn’t it happened yet? “It’s the legacy of established human and educational infrastructure,” says Proenza. The analogy is not the newspaper business, which has been weakened by the distribution of knowledge on the Internet, he notes. “We’re more like health care. We’re challenged by obstructive, non-market-based business models. We’re also burdened by a sense that doctor knows best, or professor knows best.”
那么，为什么这种情况还没有发生？“这是既定的人类及教育基础设施的遗产，”普罗恩撒说。他指出，这个类比不是被互联网上的知识分布削弱力量的报纸业。“我们更像医疗保健。我们被带来障碍的非市场化商业模式所挑战。我们也被医生知道得最多或教授知道得最清楚这种感觉所负累。”
“There are a lot of sacred cows,” he said. Why, for example, are universities judged by the number of students they exclude, or by how much they spend? Why aren’t they judged by how well they teach, and at what price?
“有很多神圣不可侵犯的东西，”他说，比如，为什么要根据排除的学生人数或他们的花费来评判大学？为什么不根据他们的教育水平或者价格来评判？
The digital world, which has trained young minds to inquire and collaborate, is challenging not only the lecture-driven teaching traditions of the university, but also the very notion of a walled-in institution that excludes large numbers of people. Why not allow a brilliant grade 9 student to take first-year math, without abandoning the social life of his high school? Why not deploy the interactive power of the internet to transform the university into a place of life-long learning, not just a place to grow up?
数字世界训练年轻人提问并合作，它不仅挑战大学由讲座驱动的教育传统，也挑战将大部分人排除在外的带围墙机构的这种概念。为什么不允许聪明的9年级学生上大一的数学课，同时并不放弃他的高中社会生活？为什么不利用互联网的互动能力将大学转变为终身学习的地方，而不止是成长的地方？
Old Paradigms Die Hard
古老的范例苟延残喘
Yet the Industrial Age model of education is hard to change. New paradigms cause dislocation, disruption, confusion, uncertainty. They are nearly always received with coolness or hostility. Vested interests fight change. And leaders of old paradigms are often the last to embrace the new.
然而，工业时代的教育模型难以更改。新的范例引发错位、分裂、混乱、不确定性。它们几乎无一例外会遭到冷遇或敌意。既得利益抵制改变。旧范例的领袖通常都是最后接受新观点的人。
Back in 1997 I presented my views to a group of about 100 University presidents at a dinner hosted by Ameritech in Chicago. After the talk I sat down at my table and asked the smaller group what they thought about my remarks. They responded positively. So I said to them “why is this taking so long?” “The problem is funds,” one president said. “We just don’t have the money to reinvent the model of pedagogy.” Another educator put it this way: “Models of learning that go back decades are hard to change.” Another got a chuckle around the table when he said, “I think the problem is the faculty — their average age is 57 and they’re teaching in a ‘post-Gutenberg’ mode.”
早在1997年，在芝加哥由Ameritech举办的宴会上，我曾对大约100名大学校长陈述了我的观点。谈话完毕，我坐在自己的餐桌旁，问小组里的人，他们对我的演讲做何感想。他们的反应很积极。所以，我对他们说，“那么为什么这个改变需要这么长时间？”“问题在于资金，”有位校长说。“我们没有钱重新创造教学模型。”另一位教育者这么说：“追溯到数十年前的学习模型难以改变。”而还有一位的发言则使全桌子的人都笑了起来“我觉得问题在于老师——他们的平均年龄是57岁，都还在以‘后古腾堡’方式教书。”
A very thoughtful man named Jeffery Bannister, who at the time was president of Butler College, was seated next to me. “Post-Gutenberg?” he said. “I don’t think so! At least not at Butler. Our model of learning is pre-Gutenberg! We’ve got a bunch of professors reading from handwritten notes, writing on blackboards, and the students are writing down what they say. This is a pre-Gutenberg model — the printing press is not even an important part of the learning paradigm.” He added, “Wait till these students who are 14 and have grown up learning on the Net hit the [college] classrooms — sparks are going to fly.”
时任巴特勒学院院长的杰弗瑞·班尼斯特非常深思熟虑，当时，他就坐在我旁边。“后古腾堡？”他说，“不敢苟同！至少在巴特勒并非如此。我们的学习方式可谓前古登堡！我们有很多教授读手写的笔记，在黑板上书写，然后学生记下老师所讲的内容。这是前古腾堡模式——在学习中印刷术甚至都不是重要部分。”他还补充说，“等着现在14岁的学生长大，他们靠在网络学习上成长，等他们冲击[学校]教室时——星星之火，即将燎原。”
Bannister was right. A powerful force to change the university is the students. And sparks are flying today. There is a huge generational clash emerging in these institutions. It turns out that the critique of the university from years ago were ideas in waiting — waiting for the new web and a new generation of digital natives who could effectively challenge the old model.
Bannister说得对。改变大学的强大力量是学生。而这种火花随处可见。在这些机构中，出现了巨大的代间冲突。多年前对大学的批评仍是有待实施的想法——等着新网络和可以有效改变旧模型的新一代数字居民。
Changing the model of pedagogy for this generation is crucial for the survival of the university. If students turn away from a traditional university education, this will erode the value of the credentials universities award, their position as centers of learning and research, and as campuses where young people get a change to “grow up.”
为这一代人改变教育模型对于大学的存活生死攸关。如果学生逃离传统大学教育，这将会腐蚀大学颁发的文凭、它们作为学习和研究中心以及年轻人有机会“成长”的校园的地位。
