The Academic Identity Crisis Deepens
As the latest turn (social justice!) in the tenure termination debate twists on, ivory tower-watchers wax prophetic on the reinvention of the academy:
In a session called “The University as an Agile Organization,” David J. Staley laid out the findings of a focus group he conducted asking educators what a college would look like if it ran like Wikipedia.
[...] Universities “seem to be becoming more top-down and hierarchical at a time when more and more organizations are looking more like networks,” said Mr. Staley, who expanded on the Wikipedia theme last year in Educause Review.
Oh no! Top-down hierarchies! It's almost as if...there's a special, peculiar way of transmitting knowledge that you can't get through horizontally arrayed networks! But, of course, the institution of the university was replaced by the higher-education industry before anything on campus ever had a little i before it. The only way to 'save college', sure enough, is by making it more top-down and hierarchical -- but not in the manner of our institutions of higher learning, where administrative bureaucracies stretch ever further away from the core purpose of the university and disrupt that purpose with social and political projects that penetrate ever deeper into it. Listen, o Assistant Deans:
The Wikipedia analogy struck one observer as silly. Universities are nothing like an encyclopedia, and Wikipedia is nothing like a university, argued Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia.
“At least he is pushing universities to be more like a not-for-profit,” Mr. Vaidhyanathan said in an e-mail. “Most shallow thinking about universities yield prescriptions to be like businesses.”
Lest anyone break out in hives, I should be clear: educational entrepreneurship is brilliant, even on the internet. And the wonderful ability to see a panda on the internet -- try to see the seriousness and equanimity behind this rhetorical use of humor -- is no reason to kill off the world's pandas. And the wonderful ability to use technology in a university setting, I might add, is no reason to seek the academy's salvation in fashionable tech investments.
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Comments :
Jul '10
Re: The Academic Identity Crisis Deepens
Great post James. I particularly liked this quote in Staley's piece:
“There is the theme-park approach and the sandbox approach. . . . Most games are like Disneyland . . . which is a carefully constructed experience where you stand in line to be entertained. We focus on the sandbox approach where people can decide what they want to do in that particular sandbox, and we very much emphasize and support that kind of emergent behavior.”
This would supposedly lead to "associations (which) would be, in theory, more responsive to students’ needs and teachers’ interests."
Which seems to me exactly backwards. Wouldn't teachers instead need to pitch learning exclusively to students' interests?
First the wikiversity, next up the wikifamily. I imagine the budgeting process will be similar to that in Congress.
Oct '10
Re: The Academic Identity Crisis Deepens
Hate to bust the "silly" observer's bubble, but the Wiki likeness has some merit. Pre-internet, this is what publishing scholarly papers and conferences were all about. Slower process, same effect.
Aug '10
Re: The Academic Identity Crisis Deepens
I'm going to have to disagree with Jeremias, because the core tenant of Wiki culture is that anyone can weigh in at any time, not just "the industry" or "recognized peers". More importantly, the state of articles are forced into constant flux; taking a snapshot does not make sense.
Even on internal corporate wiki sites, contributions aren't weighted and there's no final delivery mechanism. There is never a time you can point at a wiki and say, "the state of the site knowledge is X, with Y% certainty".
Contrast that with the publishing process (of which conferences are a side effect; half refining process, half networking junket). It's a top-down gatekeeper hierarchy; editorial boards of centralized subject matter expert journals determine what gets added to the knowledge base. Credentialed peer review imposes minimum quality standards as a barrier to entry, plus a quasi-licensing system. The "content" might be delivered bottom up, but the curated presentation is all top-down.
It's true that scholarship has traditionally developed through collaborative process. It's not true that said process resembles the open-ended chaos of contributive wiki culture. And the outcomes are different beyond comparison.