Clay Shirky, who lit us all up a few years ago with his "Ontology Is Overrated" talks/post (and pissed off a few librarians . . .)  has come out with a new work, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizing (Penguin Press 2008). We might want to consider giving it to our college/university presidents.

Having said that, I will quickly add that, in this book, Shirky offers no new research, never mentions education, college, nor even topics that clearly apply in any generic fashion to the administrative, fund raising, recruiting, etc. tasks of running a college or university. What he does do is provide a snapshot of this moment in our culture’s process of technology-fueled transition. And he does this in an accessible and jargon-free way. By making use of a series of vignettes and anecdotes he focuses our attention on the ways new technologies have removed the barriers to group formation and action as well as altered information gathering and dissemination.

Possibly the most important take away from Here Comes Everybody for those working in higher education is Shirky's observation that a power law distribution, rather than the more socially palatable bell curve, seems to define much of the culture taking shape. Our bell-curve inflected, one-size-fits-all education culture, class-based pedagogy, and sense of purpose has become confused in a Lake-Wobegon kind of way (can all students really be above average?). While "No-Child-Left-Behind" was always political freelancing, grade inflation is our fault and has been even more insidious. After reading Shirky one is left wondering if we ought to reconceive college-level instruction as a power-law environment supporting excellence rather than, well, a lecture to the bored? This is not paean to Ayn Rand, as we now have immersive games, sophisticated databases, collaborative filtering techniques, and hundreds of other tools which allow us simultaneously to help students learn at all levels and foster excellence, though we must appreciate that each student will arrive at a different place. Do we have the will?