Education is reputation

The term disruption is hackneyed in Silicon Valley, yet there are a few massive bureaucracies that do seem dearly in need of it but that are stubbornly resistant to change. The medical-insurance complex is one, but the sheer amount of money involved coupled with massive legal hurdles at least makes its resilience understandable.

Academia less so. While any bureaucracy has significant political power as well as legal and fiscal interests, they would seem less pronounced in academia than in e.g. medicine. I don't quite understand the glue that keeps it together. These experiences of a university math lecturer are a typical refrain of a system creaking under a terrible weight of bureaucracy, with its in-fighting, internal power struggles, and political gambits taking a front seat to intellectualism.

Probably most of the glue is in reputation networks. This implies that new educational ventures should cooperatively leverage established systems.

Lists and implicit prioritization

• One problem
• with lists is that
• something has to be first
• and something has to be 
• last.

This fundamental property of lists is useful for priorization, but problematic when all items should be weighted more-or-less the same or when items can't be organized ordinally. For me, this problem has come up most often when listing authors on academic papers. I've co-written several papers on which each author contributed equally, but nonetheless someone had to be listed first (more than once we resorted to coin flips to figure out author order).

For academic papers there might be a somewhat straightforward solution. Authors usually list their affiliation and contact information just below their name. You could use this same space to list their role with respect to the paper. This could be an indicator of contribution level (primary, secondary, etc.) or explicitly refer to roles (intern, mentor, editor, coordinator, implementor, designer, evaluator, etc.). Obviously you'd want to allow authors to add multiple tags, duplicate tags, or ignore them altogether.

I'm not sure this generalizes to all lists, but it's a start.