Graduate School in the Age of Google Drive: The Effects of Open Source and Cloud Computing on our Projects
Posted on November 14, 2013 | posted by:
If you’ve taken classes at a university during the last few years, you can probably picture this familiar scene:
It’s midnight the night before your team project is due. Your teammates are scattered across your city or campus, working from different neighborhoods and buildings. You are all typing up bullet points, creating slides, and even chatting to each other. Your professor updates the assignment sheet the night before the project is due, notifying you of when each group will be presenting the following morning. Nothing about the project is set in stone until the instant you present it.
You are, in essence, creating a project using an open source production method. Steven Weber describes open source as, “a distributed production process,” (Weber, The Success of Open Source) which is similar to the way that most students today manage their group project assignments.
This shift in process is also present beyond the University setting. In the professional workplace, the majority of creative workers are familiar with cloud computing software. We’ve become familiar with the idea of working together on a project via a shared work space, whether its Google Drive, Dropbox, or Adobe Creative Cloud.
But what are the implications of this shift? Just a few years ago, workers and students would gather around one computer and brainstorm together, and then each split up and write out their own separate pieces of the project, bringing them together at least a day or two in advance of the deadline. Professors distributed their class syllabus only once, usually at the beginning of the first class. This syllabus rarely changed, for it was difficult to redistribute new copies. Today syllabi change weekly, since they only exist virtually in a shared folder between the students and the professor. Many graduate students have to adjust to how quickly we are expected to respond to project emails, how often we must check our inbox to stay abreast in changes in class times and assignments. But Weber writes, “during the early stages of economic and social change, analysts often pay more attention to what is going away than what is struggling to be born. To use Schumpeter’s phrasing, it is easier to see precisely the destructive side of creative destruction, than it is to see the creative side…. The new way may not be a functional replacement for institutions that are being destroyed.”
The institutions being destroyed are easy to identify: the first institution that has been destroyed is the institution of “planning ahead,” of having a clear structure for a class syllabus or work project. The second institution is having one clearly defined project leader. If everyone can contribute to a project online, it is less necessary to have one leader delegating all the work.
It is less easy to identify the creative side of what is emerging from these dying institutions. We can collaborate more, iterate more, ask for more feedback, but there is something larger, less tangible as well. The new institution that we are creating is the ability to shape our own graduate school. When we can give professors feedback about their syllabi and ask them to change their course of instruction mid-course, we can alter the course to be more helpful and tailored for our needs. We can change projects to mold around our own work and passions. And in the end, I believe, we can feel more ownership and excitement for the degree we are pursuing.
-Mollie West
Sources: Weber, Steven, The Success of Open Source, Harvard University Press, 2005.