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IV. Conclusion
I really enjoyed reading this draft. I especially thought this question was interesting:
“Do the academic professions police those (Cummings, 2005) who would innovate outside of normal structures? If so, what can activist scholar/educators do to provide support for adventurous young pioneers of new learning methods and fields?”
It got me thinking about Bertrand Russell. He spoke of pedagocial challenges well in his book titled Unpopular Essays especially the chapter titled The Functions of a Teacher. The following are a couple quotes that especially ring true for me:
“Teaching, more even that most other professions, has been transformed during the last hundred years from a small, highly skilled profession concerned with a minority of the population, to a large and important branch of the public service. The profession has a great and honourable tradition extending from the dawn of history until recent times, but any teacher in the modern world who allows himself to be inspired by the ideals of his predecessors is likely to be made sharply aware that it is not his function to teach what he thinks, but to instill such beliefs and prejudices as are thought useful by his employers. In former days a teacher was expected to be a man of exceptional knowledge or wisdom, to whose words men would do well to attend.”
“Institutions such as universities largely remained in the grip of the dogmatists, with the result that most of the best intellectual work was done by independent men on learning.”
“The function of the teacher, however, is not merely to mitigate the heat of current controversies. He has more positive tasks to perform, and he cannot be a great teacher unless he is inspired by a wish to perform these tasks. Teachers are more than any other class the guardians of civilisation….Nations have been brought to ruin much more often by insistence upon a narrow-minded doctrinal uniformity than by free discussion and the toleration of divergent opinions.”
Hmmm…yes, I do believe that very often academic professions police innovation, for, it threatens the very structure the institutions were build upon. Regarding support for innovators, I believe that virtual communities hold much promise.
Mechelle
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The Future of Learning Institutions focuses on the change in communication, media and interpersonal relations. It does not seem to be concerned that the digital age will see a fundamental change in the institution itself, its structure, purpose, direction and position within society, particularly at what, today, is the undergraduate level in post secondary systems. How this might affect, globally, the preK-12 system is also of significant interest, particularly given MIT’s “One Laptop Per Child project and the ubiquitousness of cell phones and other networking technologies.
The change, institutionally, will also be affected by the much promoted web 2.0, open access and open source movements and efforts such as MIT’s publishing its courses on the Internet.
With the above, the idea that the library is the heart of a university changes significantly and with linkages in brick and click space for courses and knowledge exchange, the core purpose of the university defaults to “certification”.
One can not assume that the venerable Ivory Tower’s walls will remain unbreached and that the institution will be a sinecure, except, perhaps at the graduate or research levels.
The Learning Institution as an “institution, academic journals and communications vehicles and function of all who enter the walls will find that the past that never was is not here, nor is the extrapolated future just enhanced by technology.
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the comments page (which doesn’t allow comments – thus, i’m commenting here) says: “This page contains a running transcript of all conversations taking place inside the Iraq Study Group Report.” yikes!
I believe this glitch is now fixed. Another important project sponsored by the Institute for the Future of the Book using this tool is a posting of the Iraq Study Group Report that allows the public to comment upon, correct, and translate that report into common language, away from political jargon and obfuscation. They were posted first, and I believe we were the second project to be posted on this site using this great new tool. Sorry for the confusion, and thanks for pointing out the glitch.
Benkler spends a good deal of time thinking about open source and user generated content. One good question to ask yourself is: can you actually organize emergent behaviors? What motivates people to contribute to these sorts of projects? What does the reward structure for contributing look like? (It should be noted that one of the main reasons for Linux achieving its remarkable success is that IBM dedicated serious resources to transforming it into production-level code as a means of avoiding having to pay license fees for its servers. )