IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

in e-learning continues at significant levels. This is especially true in business
education—but as an addition to, not a replacement for, existing
course activities. Harvard Business School (HBS) has invested millions of
dollars a year in its website since the early 1990s. Larry Bouthillier, head of
IT at HBS during those years (and now an independent consultant), told a
conference I organized at the time that ‘‘simulations, databases, statistical
and industry analyses, are intensively used learning ‘objects’ among Harvard’s
MBA students and researchers.’’ 22 ICT also deepens the learning experience,
according to Bouthillier. Online cases, audiovisual material, and
computer-based exercises are useful extras. ‘‘Online is a microcosm of the
new working environment graduates will encounter when they leave,’’
said Bouthillier; ‘‘our goal is the emergence of Harvard Business School
as an integrated enterprise that organises and connects information, and
people, in a dynamic and continuous way.’’ 23
The ambition to be an open, connected, and integrated enterprise is
shared by many advanced companies throughout the world—but by relatively
few learning institutions. For Charles Hampden-Turner, who works
in both domains, ‘‘there is a more open system of learning in most businesses
than in most universities.’’ It is clear to business, he says, that
knowledge has become too complex to be carried in the heads of itinerant
experts: ‘‘knowledge is necessarily the shared property of extended groups
and networks.’’ 24 These learning networks need to be organized and looked
after. Business schools like Harvard’s are working hard to add value to—not
substitute for—a central function of universities: connectivity among a
community of scholars and peers. Their approach uses the Internet to bring
people together—not the opposite, as with pure distance education. As
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid write in The Social Life of Information,
‘‘Social distance is not overcome by a few strokes of the keyboard. Learning
at all levels relies ultimately on personal interaction and, in particular, on a
range of implicit and peripheral forms of communication that technology
is still very far from being able to handle.’’ 25
Corporate U
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For many companies, sending staff to an Ivy League campus—with or without
a state-of-the-art website—is not an option. So they are going it alone.
So-called corporate universities (CUs) are booming. There are almost two
thousand in the United States alone. Few CUs have interesting curriculums,