Reassessing Education

Chris challenges some of the statements I made in my previous post and asks whether mere acknowledgment and openness is enough to move academia forward into a place that embraces not only what technologies are available, but the types of things (in terms of social knowing) that such technologies could make possible. My short answer to this question is “no.” It is not nearly enough, but allow me to elaborate a little on this. Chris’s post brings to our attention the tendency for our text-based (or print-based) culture to continue in the ways it’s always done things, and he suggests that such a mode of operation fails to account for multimodal, multidimensional ways of knowing and communicating. In his discussion of how we “adapt” digital media to old print or text paradigms, he argues for a new identity for what it means to be a scholar, and he asks whether the point of academics is to produce and participate in knowledge creation or to demonstrate mastery and expertise?

Chris’s question, I think, gets to the heart of what is going on in academia, and not only in the realm of Web 2.0 and social media. It is a question that represents well the push and pull between more traditional institutional frameworks in which tenure, advancement, occupational success, credibility, and some would argue, fulfillment are predicated on publishing in the text-based, traditional mode and in a manner that clearly invokes the expert paradigm. But some academics are also pulled towards a more idealistic existence, one in which one might consider what it truly means to create social knowledge, socially. This idealism is not rewarded enough in traditional institutional structures, because such idealism—as idealism often will—threatens the status quo and the old way of knowing. When such structures are threatened, so, too, are the participants who benefit from the existing structure. I, personally, don’t believe that most academic institutions are where they should be in terms of embracing not only Web 2.0, but what is possible when students and educators join in a true demonstration of social knowledge creation. Individuals have shown themselves willing to embrace such measures, but these individual motives have not yet aggregated to the point of being able to change the existing structures. People are instead finding ways in which to bring to fruition these new motives in the networked environment.

Christine talks about the ways in which credibility is constructed in this new, networked space and how such credibility is a function of audience feedback. Educators are often immersed in two communities—the traditional institutional community and the digital community. These two communities are at times at odds with one another. Institutions are more often than not built on a top-down model, while networked environments are far more egalitarian. Where the education model has been predicated on a strict top-down model, there is less room for the introduction of egalitarian motives. This tension between communities also creates a demand on academic’s identities, which are in part constructed by those with whom they interact, collaborate, network, and communicate.

So perhaps the full measure, the fully realized benefits of social media and social knowing must occur apart from traditionally modeled academia. I do believe that academia will change, but perhaps not as quickly as Chris, myself, and others would like. This causes me to consider the viability of earlier experiments with this same type of alternative educational environment. Perhaps we need something like a Black Mountain College. Black Mountain College was a fully experimental, fully interdisciplinary college with a philosophy that was heavily based on the work of John Dewey. Even though its existence was brief, it produced scholars and artists who would later become highly influential. “Black Mountain College inculcated an informal and collaborative spirit” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mountain_College), and aren’t these exactly the types of adjectives we’ve used to define our new peer-produced rhetorical space?
Submitted by Monica Wesley

Advertisement