Commodification of Academic Research

I suspect that this is a bigger issue in computer science (and computing, broadly) than in other parts of academia, since our work is so easily commoditized.  It’s certainly the case that in my School, creating companies is highly valued and faculty are often encouraged to be entrepreneurs (e.g., see the article our new Dean sent to the whole faculty Saturday.)

Q: Academic research has always cost money to produce, and led to products that made money for others. How is the “commodification” of research different today than in past periods?

A: Commodification means that all kinds of activities and their results are predominantly interpreted and assessed on the basis of economic criteria. In this sense, recent academic research is far more commodified than it was in the past. In general terms, one can say that the relation between “money” and specific academic activity has become much more direct. Consider the following examples: first, the amount of external funding acquired is often used as a measure of individual academic quality; second, specific assessments by individual scientists have a direct impact on departmental budgets; for instance, if I now pass this doctoral dissertation, my department receives a substantial sum of money; if not, it ends up with a budget deficit; third, the growing practice of patenting the results of academic research is explicitly aimed at acquiring commercial monopolies. Related to these financial issues are important and substantial changes of academic culture. Universities are increasingly being run as big corporations. They have a top-down command structure and an academic culture in which individual university scientists are forced to behave like mini-capitalists in order to survive, guided by an entrepreneurial ethos aimed at maximizing the capitalization of their knowledge.

via News: ‘Commodification of Academic Research’ – Inside Higher Ed.

Middle ground: Telepresence Teachers

In the post with Dave Patterson, there was strong interest in creating educational software for teaching computing, rather than trying to ramp up teacher education, because of the difficulties of the latter.  Here’s an interesting middle ground: Telepresence teachers.  Doesn’t require new kinds of software.  Doesn’t save teacher time, but does allow for a limited number of teachers to cover a wider geographic area.  I think that the robot shell may play a role here — lecture and whole-class discussion are economically efficient, and may be less stressful on the teacher than managing on-line discussions.

Thirty-six Engkeys are due to be implemented in 18 elementary schools across the Korean city of Daegu by the end of this year, according to KIST.

The Engkey is linked to and controlled remotely by a human teacher outside the classroom, whose face appears on the screen of the robot. The robot links students to teachers located as far away as Australia.

Besides being popular with children, the telepresence robot also helps address South Korea’s shortage of qualified native-English speaking teachers, Choi said.

via Robot teachers invade South Korean classrooms – CNN.com.