(((I hope you weren't imagining that academia was a safe, ivied harbor
from the general holocaust in media, politics, finance, warfare, etc etc.
Hello, "virtual intellectuals." One may hope you lot are not as haplessly
scatterbrained as you seem to be on your multilinked websites.)))
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge288.html#tapscott
(...)
"The Many Challenges to the University
"Most resources of large universities are directed towards research, not learning. The universities are not primarily institutes of higher learning, but institutes for science and research. In his book Rethinking Science, Michael Gibbons developed a scathing critique of the current model science as conducted in the university.
"Recently the questioning has heated up on other fronts. In the New York Times last month, Mark Taylor, chairman of Columbia University's religion department, whipped up a storm of academic controversy with a provocative OpEd page article called "The End of University as We Know It". (((Too bad the New York Times is so close to vanishing, or we might have enjoyed a logical, linear debate here.)))
"Graduate education," he began, "is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)."
The key problem, he noted, began with Kant in his 1798 work, "The Conflict of the Faculties." Kant argued that universities should "handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee." (((Yeah man, I blame Kant. Kant also destroyed the Detroit auto industry – not many people lacking a PhD would know that.)))
"Taylor argued that graduate education must be restructured at a fundamental level to move away from the ultra-narrow scholarship. Among other things, he called for more cross-disciplinary inquiry, the creation of problem-focused programs, with a sunset clause, (((how about "a civilization with a sunset clause," oh wait, we already got one))) as well as more collaboration between all educational institutions, and the abolition of tenure. (((It strikes me that a lot of our worst crises right now could be solved by an annual income. "No tenure? Can't study ancient molluscology any more? No problem: feed me the oatmeal and get me a tin roof, and I'll just run the damn wiki on the subject." Would that be so bad?)))
"One week later, the outcry from fellow academics filled the entire letters page on the Sunday New York Times. One of his own colleagues at Columbia said it was "alarming and embarrassing" to hear "crass anti-intellectualism" emerge from his own institution. Another academic accused Taylor of "poisoning the waters of higher education."
"The Model of Pedagogy
"Whatever the merits of Taylor's call to restructure higher education, I think he is right to call for a deep debate on how universities function in a networked society. (((Great idea. The "networked society" will itself be defunct well before this debate can be summarized. Remember when they wanted to teach kids BASIC programming in first grade?))) Yet I think he misses the most fundamental challenge to the university as we know it. The basic model of pedagogy is broken. (((I'm hip. Now find me an "unbroken model." 900-year-old Universities don't have one? What's left? The unbroken model of Islamic fundamentalism, maybe?))) "Broadcast learning" as I've called it is no longer appropriate for the digital age and for a new generation of students who represent the future of learning.
"In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student you're an empty vassal and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."
"The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.
"As someone who gives many lectures a year, I appreciate the irony of this view. (((So do I, especially the idea that talking to a crowd of people who listen is somehow "industrial."))) But I understand that my lectures are not a good way of learning. They play a limited role of interesting an audience, changing their view or possibly motivating them to do something different. But I dare say that 90 percent of what I've said is lost. (((Maybe he should try hiring them. Or better yet, drafting them. Then he could make 'em learn and do whatever he wants!)))
"True, this broadcast model is enhanced in some disciplines through essays, labs and even seminar discussions. And of course many professors are working hard to move beyond this model. However, it remains dominant overall.
"Technology and the web provide an important element of a new model, but so far few have adopted it. If someone frozen 300 years ago miraculously came alive today and looked at the professions — a physician in an operating theater, a pilot in a jumbo cockpit, a engineer designing an automobile in a CAD system — they would surely marvel at how technologies had transformed the knowledge work. But if they walked into a university lecture hall, they would no doubt be comforted that some things have not changed. (((For instance: why not have the pilot leave the jumbo cockpit, and have the passengers run the plane through a collaborative wiki? And I got 32 gigabytes on brain surgery in my thumbdrive right here. Gimme the bonesaw and lemme at it, this brain hack is a shoe-in for Maker Faire.)))
"The New Generation of Students
"The broadcast model might have been perfectly adequate for the baby-boomers, who grew up in broadcast mode, watching 24 hours a week of television (not to mention being broadcast to as children by parents, as students by teachers, as citizens by politicians, and when then entered the workforce as employees by bosses). (((Then there was all that LSD they ate in college when not choking on tear gas, but... never mind, those Boomers were conformist little TV robots, I can promise you))) But young people who have grown up digital are abandoning one-way TV for the higher stimulus of interactive communication they find on the Internet. In fact television viewing is dropping and TV has become nothing more than ambient media for youth — akin to Muzak. Sitting mutely in front of a TV set — or a professor — doesn't appeal to or work for this generation. They learn differently best through non-sequential, interactive, asynchronous, multi-tasked and collaborative (((this essay hasn't been proofread very well, but I can't say I'm entirely surprised to see that development.)))
"Young Americans under 30 are the first to have grown up digital. Growing up at a time when cell phones, the Internet, texting and Facebook are as normal as the refrigerator. (((Refrigerators being notorious greenhouse-gas emitters))) This interactive media immersion at a formative stage of life has affected their brain development and consequently the way they think and learn. (((My own brain development was hopeless warped by sci-fi and underground comic books, so I can certainly sympathize. In fact, when I myself teach, I commonly cook up some method to get my eager Millennial students to do all the work.)))
"Some writers, of course, think that Google makes you stupid; it's so hard to concentrate and think deeply amid the overwhelming amounts of bits of information online, they contend. Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, even calls them the "dumbest generation" in his recent book on the topic. (((Huh? What? Sorry, I was checking Twitter.)))
"My research suggests these critics are wrong. Growing up digital has changed the way their minds work..." (((Okay, but let me ask this in all seriousness. Who expects "digital culture"
to last? "Digital culture" is breeding its own obsolescence even as we sit here typing on our outmoded interfaces.)))
