Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
Dr. Pekka Himanen Presentation
Dr. Pekka Himanen, Department of Philosophy, Helsinki University, Finland
The NetAcademy Model
I’m involved in the virtual university things in many ways. Last year I wrote the virtual university's paper for the Minister of Education in Finland. And at the end of the last year, the Finnish government decided to partly fund a virtual university as a collaboration of the universities and companies. This approach has a life of its own, but I would say that there is another side to the story about the future of learning, as this is only half, or at most half, of the story in Finland, and this other side consists of self-organized grassroots projects. And the one that I'll talk about is called the NetAcademy, which could be summed up as the Internet era continuation of the original academic model. It shares some of the key Socratic ideas that were behind Plato's academy, the first western university in the wide sense, which he founded in the 4th century B.C. And it was not founded with technological enthusiasm, but on a certain nature of academic thinking and learning which was built to support that model.
One of the key concepts, and the most Socratic metaphor, is that the teacher should be a midwife. According to this idea, the task of the teacher is not to transmit information to learners, but to support the learner's own intellectual thinking, which means fostering three capabilities, which I think are still the core of learning on the Net, too. Because at the most fundamental level we are talking about the essence of academic process and not just about new technology. The first part of the teacher's mission is to incite the learners to set up problems and ask questions themselves. For academic thinking, the ability to raise good questions has always been as important as good answers. In fact, many times the reason for the wrong answer is that the question is not asked in the right way. The teacher as the midwife restores and amplifies the learner's inherent ability to raise questions.
I had an interesting opportunity to observe this original capacity of amazement, or asking questions, when last year I led three groups of child philosophers, groups of people or kids, of 4, 8, and 11 years. And their questions were very powerful, like one of the classic questions when one child asked her mother, "Mom, are we alive or are we on video?" And I think the Net receives its value to the extent that it can support these problematizing and amazing minds. Because setting problems is the first step in the academic process. Secondly, the midwife teacher's task is to help learners to give birth to things from themselves, to develop ideas by themselves. And, thirdly, the teacher's task is to teach to abort unattainable ideas. To be very critical is also really important to the academic process.
And what we have done in the NetAcademy, the approach we have taken, is that we have built an Internet-based environment, which is structured around these three key concepts of the academic life. It supports the learner to problematize, to develop thoughts further, and to criticize what has been presented. In a way, this is now reemerging, this idea of Socratic midwifery in the modern constructive learning theories, where it just has new names. For example, some researchers speak of the instruction now scaffolding, but that to me seems only a more academically accessible expression for midwifery.
The NetAcademy model is also an open source model. And that is the exact sense in which it is an anti-movement to the government of commercial virtual universities that are being founded in Finland. And, of course, the open source movement has an especially strong position in Finland, mainly thanks to Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux Operating System, which has thousands of developers and millions of users worldwide. The point in the open source model is that you start with some problem, and you give your solution openly for others to use, share, develop, and test. And what we are now doing here is we are building the Net Academy as an open process, in which all of its technology base is open source. So if you have a new technical idea, you can develop it further and build on the work of others. But it doesn't apply only to the technical level, but also to the content, because it's an open content process. So the way the learners study in these courses is that they first define problems, and then they use different information sources to find solutions to those problems, to criticize and further develop the ideas of the others. They are not the users of the learning materials, but the creators. So the learners teach the future learners.
In this way, we believe that the open source movement has proved to be very powerful in many areas. You notice only one example; the Internet itself is a second good example. Actually, over half of the running of the Web really depends on open source software. So if that were removed, more than half of the Web would disappear, and the news groups, and mail would stop. This open source movement is an interesting intellectual challenge, and we are now checking to see if it can be applied to the learning field. Can we have a process in which different fields of study, like physics, biology, history, and philosophy, are gradually developed by the learners themselves? Because open, they have a better understanding of the real learning problems of the learners than do the researchers, who are no longer at the same knowledge level.
So it is a self-organizing process which has just started, and only later will we be able to see what will happen. But the basis on which it is founded is the fact that we live in a world which is full of great expertise and ideas, and now we have the means of creating an open process in which, if you have a great idea, you can find other people who think this is a great idea to join you, even if you are not paid for it. I find this quite promising because it means a process based on passion and self-organization of people, rather than plans given from the top, by the governments and companies and universities.
But I'm not only advocating this open source model because it works so well, in the cases of Linux or the Internet; that would be too technical an argument. The real reason for speaking in favor of this process is that actually the open source process is the same as the academic process. The academic model is based on the same ideas, that you present problems and solutions to others openly to apply, share, test, and develop further. And I think that what motivates this open model and this Socratic idea of midwifery in this enterprise is that we too easily tend to think that the real point about science or academic life is its results, like E=MC2. But the real point, I think, of the academic life is the model that produces these results. It's not very much to transmit these results, as facts, to the learners and to build transmitter-receiver kind of models, maybe to create better special effects on the Net, three-dimensional lectures, and so on. Even so, these are only new versions of the transmitter-receiver model, and it is not the academic model itself which is based on this open subjection of thoughts to the further development and criticism by the others. So I think that an open process such as the academic life itself should not be building closed models which are based on receiving facts.
I hope that these thoughts give some idea of the direction this NetAcademy approach is taking. Of course, because it's a self-organizing project, you cannot tell in advance where it will end. But I'm sure there have been fears that virtual ways of learning will destroy all physical forms, but surely I believe that this won’t happen, and I am not speaking of the virtual academic model. Actually, I have many friends who have really rid themselves of this physical reality, so they don’t act in this reality anymore. One of them lives in the same town as I, but we never meet in this physical reality. Whenever he wants to meet with me, he sends an e-mail saying, "Let's meet." And then it automatically means that we meet in some cyber-gate on the Net. But once when he wanted to meet in this old reality, he sent me an e-mail saying, "Let's arrange a flesh meeting." I think that this flesh meeting still needs to be the basis for academic life.
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