So, finished up "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" this weekend. First, it is free in audio, if your like me and increasing addicted to your iPod for learning, try it out. The book was published in 2009 by Hyperion, and Chris Anderson (the editor of Wired Magazine) is the author.
So many thoughts coming out of this one. To save the suspense, I'll go ahead and rate it 4.8 out of 5. The minor deduction was for the early chapters, which I felt were a bit dry and didn't really hook me in. But, after it got rolling, it really was fabulous and certainly, certainly worth your time.
Now, like after I finish any book, a plethora of ideas are floating around in my head, so let me try to get a few of them down on ... well, in bits anyway.
1. Free as a business model: It only works if there is something else with which to make money. But, if there is something else with which to make money, free as a business model almost certainly must be included in any planning. Something these days, should always be free.
2. Understanding Atoms, Bits, Information, Knowledge and Neurons. There are some critical points in this book related to these topics. Atoms are physical things. Bits are not, mostly. To make an atom there is a cost involved. To make a bit (like this blog post), there really isn't one worth measuring. Information mostly does not need atoms, especially when you take away the paper. In this way, the information contained in bits on the Internet is not all that different than information contained in electrical impulses in neurons. What is different between those two is typically how that information is put together in a way which we may call knowledge.
The instinctual price of information is zero, or free. Thus, as bits continue to make the production and storage of information easier, the price will continue to fall until it is to small to measure, which we'll consider free. The instinctual price of knowledge, though, might be different or it might not. And, that has some pretty important ramifications when you are in a knowledge industry.
3. Higher education's business model is wrong. As those of you in Kentucky know, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the higher education, specifically the college of education, business model lately as we build the Kentucky P20 Innovation Lab. Anyway, even before reading this book I was convinced the business model was wrong, but now I am more certain of why it is wrong. Higher education is pricing what it should be giving away for free: undergraduate education. Higher education's business model is to maintain relationships with some number of students for about 4-6 years. During that time, the University extracts the highest tuition possible and then pats the student on the butt and gives them their piece of paper. Relationship = over (besides maybe rooting for the basketball team). This is a bad business model. Universities would profit much more if they found a way to maintain the relationship with the student throughout their life, building in a pricing structure for the continuous information exchange the University offers. If this were the pricing model, undergraduate education should be free. It is the entry point at which you start the relationship, thus you want the highest number and best quality of relationships possible - free accomplishes that task, especially when everyone else is raising tuition. This initially free pricing structure works better from a number of angles, not the least of which is that the student pays when they have ability to pay, reducing the initial debt load on students and permitting universities to charge higher prices over time. Anyway, there are more points to it, but stop and think about it (let me know your disagreements, if you would please).
4. Universities are the most well positioned entity to thrive in this economy: As if the previous point didn't cause you to question my sanity, this one will push you even further. I am not going to belabor this explaining all of the details of my thoughts here (this is again something better served in an article when and if I get time), but again this book reinforced an idea I was already quite set on. Universities are unique in that they are governmental, but also entrepreneurial. They can make, and hold, money. They can hold billion dollar endowments and make interest off of them. They can set up corporations. They can run hospitals. They can run golf courses and they can run basketball teams. And sell merchandise for all of it (and even do some advertising within it). All that, though, is just icing. The main point is that they are in the information business and, in a lot of ways, are the world's greatest content producers (yes, even greater than Hollywood and Newspapers now-a-days). Being a respected content producer (like most Research I Universities are) puts them in a very valuable position in an information economy. Also, although Universities are beholden the almighty dollar, they are less so than business. I get paid less than my peers in the legal world, because I value the return on reputation more. Increase my reputation, and you will increase my satisfaction in my position, with or without a raise. In that way, we are not so closely tied to money directly, as I don't value my work by the number on my monthly checks. In an information economy, though, while money may be scarce, reputation is abundant. This blog increases my reputation in both the law and education fields, and thus I publish it for free (even taking a not insubstantial loss on my part in hosting and software fees). This type of transaction, multiplied millions and millions of times, puts universities in a prime position to capitalize - that is, if they can muster a sufficient business model (see previous point).
5. The future of schools may lie in Universities' ability to understand free: Because of their content production nature, their ability to pay global experts affordable salaries, their ability to be entrepreneurial, their ability to subvert some regulations, their ability to partner with K-12 and other capabilities inherent to both government and business, the future of our schools may be dependent on the University's ability to participate in a meaningful, but cost efficient way. Cost efficient may mean free, or it may mean cheap, but either way it must mean less than what business would charge if given the same task. Undercutting private business is not something that Universities have historically done well, but it is something they have every natural advantage to do if they get out of the industrial model of higher education, and into something a little bit more suitable for the information age. If and when they do, they will be juggernauts because they will control a lot of very high quality content. How they manage to release that content will be key. They need to be able to release it for nearly free, but they also need to find a side business that is profitable. Perhaps a freemium model of some sort. But, if they do figure it out, they can push an enormous amount of high quality content to our K12 students for little cost, this can both strengthen the transitions between high school and college, but more importantly it can free up a lot of teacher time that can be reallocated to personalized learning and activities in local classrooms.
Anyway, those are just some initial thoughts, but ones I wanted to share. It was a great book. I listened to much of it twice and I can't wait to listen to it again (why not, it's free).
Justin Bathon on ;)
