Academic Evolution is a blog dedicated to discussing where the new media is leading higher education, publishing, and teaching as the traditional institutions for producing and communicating knowledge are both enhanced and challenged in the digital age.
Knowledge is evolving in step with communication. What counts as knowledge, who controls it, where it is generated and consumed, how it is revised and developed--all of this is at stake and in question due to democratized media creation, social networking, broadened access, new modes of representing knowledge, new discovery methods, the crossover between entertainment and information, and emerging economic models. What is "the book" or "the press" or even "the university" in the age of Open Access, social knowledge, and the semantic web? These revered institutions no longer monopolize the circulation, creation, or authentication of knowledge.
So much is in flux right now in how we find, develop, communicate, validate, teach, use, and re-use knowledge, and so much is at stake--intellectually, economically, pedagogically, academically. The institutions that we have relied upon to produce, organize and communicate authoritative knowledge (in other words, traditional scholarship, libraries, academic publishing, and classroom teaching) are all competing now with the vibrant and abundant media culture that inundates us. It is a phenomenon that alternately dazzles and threatens us with its splendors and grotesques, and this genie isn't going to go back into his bottle.
Everyone knows something very big is in play. Some have embraced the new media culture with abandon; others dismiss it as digital detritus. Some see the electronic world as a playground; others, as the opening gambit of a technological apocalpyse. Somewhere between the extremes there must be a way to make the best of our electronic evolution, a way to preserve order amid change as well as change amid order (as Whitehead so aptly put it).
And so I launch this blog--a spinoff from my more general personal blog (where I'd begun discussing these issues enough to merit a more focused blog). I'm preparing a wiki to accompany this, a place to organize my own evolving thoughts along with the feedback I hope to receive. Thanks for reading, and please join me in the conversation.
What do you think? Are we in an academic evolution? What are the key issues from your perspective?
To answer your question, yes. I think we are absolutely in an academic revolution. More now than ever before, if a question or idea pops in my head during the coarse of a day, I can can hop onto the internet and find something about it. I'm at a time in my life when attending an academic institution just isn't feasible, but I still have access to a huge library of information. Technology may not provide a complete answer, but it starts me down the road.
The caveat is that we have to discern truth from fiction. Without the controls of academia that you refer to in your other blog entry, it is up to the seeker to sift through all the stuff coming at us and figure out what information is gold and which is garbage.
The other shortcoming I see is inevitably there will be questions I don't know I need to ask. When I realize my knowledge is lacking in a certain area, I can set out to self-educate. The more I study and learn any given topic, the more I find new questions I haven't asked yet. I think traditional academic institutions would greatly speed up that process for me by presenting me with information I didn't even know I needed to look for. That isn't to say I could never have gotten there on my own, but a classroom might have been able to get me there quicker.
The other side of that coin is this. If attending a class at a traditional academic institution, often the class will be covering at least some material the student already knows. Self educators using technology don't have to spend time relearning things they already know, unless they want to do so. Whereas in a classroom, the student is probably stuck attending the redundant lectures just in case the old information is peppered with a little bit of new.
Well this comment ended up a lot longer than I intended, but you got me thinking...
Posted by: Luann Hawker | December 09, 2008 at 07:17 AM