What are the digital fundamentals for students and scholars?
This question will frame a series of posts in which I will outline the basic concepts, principles, goals, skills, and literacies now required of students and scholars within the new communication paradigm.
Fundamental #1: Getting the Big Picture
There are two kinds of "big picture" thinking to be done at present in the education and scholarship space: 1) What is the nature of our new world? and 2) What are the goals of teaching, learning, and publishing?
I know these big-picture questions are simplistic to the point of sounding trite, but the tide of technology and its massive cultural forces washes over us constantly, and if we do not revisit these basic questions of environment and purpose we will drown in both novelty and complexity.
Coming to Terms with the Digital World
What is the nature of our new world--the world of knowledge and learning, of teaching and publishing? It is a digital world, of course. This is a commplace, I admit. But our institutions of learning have not yet come to terms with this basic fact as they continue to run their programs of education and publishing as though print publishing was still the baseline for how we know and learn. (See more on the print paradigm handicap here.)
The new world for education, higher learning, and publishing is one in which our knowledge is mostly mediated through electronic means. Another commonplace, yes, but for far too many this simple fact has not yet sunk in. It doesn't sink in until one recognizes that the electronic means for communicating now at hand are not efficiency measures for sustaining the status quo; they are transformative catalysts rewriting the rules for what knowledge is and does.
Teaching, learning, and publishing now reside in a world of media, mobility, and connection. They do not live within the restraints of the print medium, the walls of a classroom, or the prestigious isolation of peer-reviewed journals. Learning has burst the physical restraints of the book, even if we continue to learn from books. Teaching is not restricted to school settings, though we continue to matriculate. And publishing has been so thoroughly democratized that the restricted-access model of publishing that still reigns in academia would be laughable were it not so self-defeating.
The digital world is a world of liberated learning, transcending the structures for sharing knowledge that have dominated us for so long that we find it hard to think the world could be otherwise. How could education not be primarily book-centered? How could education not take place mainly within the social framework of a school? How could the publishing of anything that matters happen outside of the peer-review process or the academic press?
These are not rhetorical questions. Th digital world has begun answering them while compelling us to reconsider the very nature of learning or publishing and the relationship of these to one's career or avocations. The digital world is a liberating world, but in freeing us from many presuppositions about the meaning of schooling or the circulcation of ideas, it presses new and difficult questions upon us about our identity, our professions, and habits of mind.
All the more reason to revisit our fundamental purposes.
The Goals of Teaching, Learning, and Publishing
We are likely to vary in our purposes for education or spreading knowledge. I offer this more as a guiding consideration for individuals and organizations to stay focused on what they believe truly matters most--an especially important activity during times of crisis or rapid change.
It is useful to consider what other functions and purposes an institution (like a school or publishing firm) serves apart from simply generating or transmitting knowledge. For example, a publishing firm usually has a strong financial motive. Or, a college serves vocational, social, and civic functions in addition to general educational instruction. We should also consider the fact that there is a compelling inertia to most institutions, an implicit goal to preserve itself. This is often tied to the way that an educational institution controls privilege both within and outside its walls.
If we truly believe in larger goals such as a general education or the foundation of character, we have to be ready to ask hard questions like whether we are more focused on preserving traditional social, political, or commercial structures or on achieving our central mission. For example, consider a college book store. The market for textbooks is enormous. Some universities depend upon that income. But what if open textbooks or media, or perhaps print-on-demand technology, reduces or eliminates the need to sell students expensive textbooks? Which is the more important goal to reach?
Or consider that many universities have as their central goal to promote "life-long learning." Well, if such a university revokes the library privileges of its graduates, is that university making a good faith effort to promote life-long learning for its alumni? In principle the university would like to offer access to its graduates, but contractual obligations with the database owners usually forbid such ongoing access. Time for that university to invest in Open Access scholarship that does not shut down access to the many graduates to whom it has pledged life-long learning.
Once one keeps a steady eye on the rapidly evolving resources in the digital realm and revisits those reasons-to-be that should be animating every school or press, one finds repeatedly that business as usual is no longer the best way to reach those goals. In fact, I will go so far as to say that any school or press that does not consider how it can better reach its primary goals through the innovations in the digital environment is not worth tuition dollars or other monetary sponsorship. The philanthropic institutions that fund university endowments are not committed to keeping a business model or a set of power relations in place; they are typically committed to those same larger-vision goals that one finds in a university's mission statement.
It bears repeating that the changes to be considered when thinking through one's goals in light of the digital world should be more than seeking for better ways to deliver the standard product. We must be open to the fundamental changes that the new tools of communication and connection provide. But those will be topics of later posts.
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