There is a university that most of us have never heard of, unless you have reason to, or come from a place near by; it is called the University of Moratuwa. At one point in time it was known as the Ceylon College of Technology. If from Sri Lanka, certainly if from Sri Lanka, you will know of the many prizes students from this university have won in international competitions organised by the likes of Google and Microsoft. And one reason for it is Arthur C Clarke, who was the Chancellor of the University of Moratuwa from 1979 until 2002.
At his inaugural address in 1979, Sir Arthur Charles Clarke said things about the coming of globalised education – things that people familiar with Clarke’s writings instantly recognised as vintage. His is an imagination of the rare kind, combined with solid insights into a range of technology fields.
Sunday morning second-hand reading
And here are some reflections on it — for lack of something better to do this morning I grabbed a book serendipitously out of my book shelf, walking down to a cup of Sunday morning coffee. I’d read this before, of course. But a long time ago. Like the many other worthwhile reads from AC Clarke: Space Odyssey – read all those a hundred times. The Rama series — that one, too. Many times. Not to mention The City and the Stars, which is AC Clarke’s famous fable on Virtual Reality, written in 1955.
This particular version of his inaugural address is printed in a book I bought second hand at one of the Pegasus Book Stores in Berkeley, California. For $1.99.
Really cheap insights.
The greatest of innovations in the history of education and technology is either the book or the library. One can argue that fact or the order of things, although many “EdTech” people somehow seem to think that “technology” in education began with the computer. But just think about it: What enormous societal change from the invention of the book and the spreading world-wide of this vast trove of information, like only a cheap and mass-produced book could generate.
Thank God for Johannes Gutenberg, around the year 1450, and the other “who dunnits”. For Gutenberg was of course not alone in the invention of mass printed books.
Then think about the significance of the architecture — the places we call libraries and all that goes on within them. Anyone who ever went to school and cherished those times, will know. A lot of others, never will.
Calculating the future
In 1979 society had yet to understand the revolutions that were to come, in rapid order, the next 30 years. This is why it is at once both surprising and telling to read how Sir AC Clarke reflects on the one invention that truly changed his career path: The pocket calculator. Born and raised with the “slide ruler”, the coming of the calculator changed a lot of things, including the speed and accuracy of applied calculus. Not only did the calculator change the speed and accuracy of doing math. It became a whole lot cheaper to buy a calculator than a slide ruler.
Efficiency and lowered costs, in other words, is what he talked about in his inaugural address. As the University of Moratuwa was being launched, no one knew better than AC Clarke the competition, the nature of world class institutions like Harvard, Yale and Oxford. He had already spent a good many years there.
But his conviction was that a University in Sri Lanka would join the ranks of world universities, and fulfil a function in the development of knowledge in Sri Lanka. 40-50 years later everyone knows: India and neighboring Sri Lanka are home to a vast and growing Education network powered by an impressive line-up of world class technology achievements.
So about the Calculator
It will never replace teachers, although teachers who are “replaceable by technology probably ought to be replaced”, according to Clarke. There is no substitute for the social environment of personal contact, the trust conditions that come with being in a student-tutor relation, or the social frameworks of peers and friends also studying. Good universities will always be there. Good schools will be. Bad ones will not. And not as many will survive as one once thought — the reason being the enormous output of knowledge on what we now call the “internet” – back then, in 1979, a still not very well understood element of the near future.
What happens now is what happened with the book: Everything changed, but a lot of it in ways that society later came to take for granted. It was not seen in its own day. It was not seen later. Unless you looked.
The coming of the electronic class room
In 1979 he saw the coming of the electronic class room. It is fascinating reading. What has always fascinated me with Clarke is his precision in future predictions. Not only was he a good science fiction writer — one of the best of all time. Not only was he a solid scientist. He was a futurist, and a gifted one.
It was the time of the video recorder and the Educational TV of BBC, among other things. It was before the launch of the “personal computer” or PC, as they came to be known. “Electronic brains” filled entire rooms, yet Clarke foresaw that within a few decades they would fit on a micro chip costing about 10 dollars.
More fascinatingly, in that inaugural address AC Clarke elaborates on “solid state memory capacity”, imagining things that are becoming reality in 2015. With the coming of ultra fast and cheap memory capacity, the future of education takes yet another giant leap. Or?
Think Immersion, think Game, think Network. And you are getting close.
Education, technology, and the future
Technology will not replace educators and instructors. It will make them more accessible, to more people, across the world. It will allow people access to learning that have not had that sort of access. And because technology will allow for a more in-depth immersive way of learning, some key distinctions between Education and Games will cease to be distinctive. Education will acquire gaming elements, because education and learning will become more like a game — an exploration.
Great universities will remain, like Harvard. Anyone who has gone there will know. That university tradition has an intangible dimension, one that education technology can not replace.
What’s going to change is pretty much everything else. This includes our own universities, in Norway — and like-minded universities elsewhere that do not pay attention to cultivation of a university atmosphere, social space, and “tribal pride” — if I might call it that. I have spent enough time at Stanford University to realise how consciously that institution cultivates its branding story. But it is also a real story. You sense it.
New global networks will emerge, and gradually education will transform developing societies. They will also transform a wide range of international knowledge institutions, bringing absolutely all Nordic universities within that fold — the winners will be the ones who look carefully at the new reality of networking.
Clarke pretty much said this in 1979, and then went on to spend a lifetime as chancellor basing his work on that conviction. Hence the importance of the University of Moratuwa story.
Short epilogue
A couple of years back I head the President of the University of Oslo give a speech about Education, Technology and the Future. And I must say that the one coming from Colombo, Sri Lanka, a life time earlier, was quite a lot more convincing and accurate.
Here is the reference: A.C. Clarke (1984): “Electronics and Education”, 1984:Spring. A Choice of Futures, London: Ballantine Books.