“Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world”
Educause and the New Media Consortium recently issued a report suggesting ways they think technology will/should change education and scholarship in the next few years. Most of it is familiar stuff - user-generated content, social networking, virtual worlds. (ArsTechnica’s Nate Anderson points out that first students have to know something before they can join the conversation.)
I was struck by the summing-up language in the report about scholarship.
Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of snc with new forms of scholarship. The trends toward digital expressions of scholarship and more interdisciplinary and collaborative work continue to move away fromthe standards of traditional peer-reviewed paper publication… [T]he academy will grow more out of step with how scholarship is actually conducted until constraints imposed by traditional tenure and promotion processes are eased.
As the report notes, “[t]here is a profound need for leadership at the highest levels of the academy that can see the opportunities in these shifts and carry them forward.”
And here’s a key section - try to ignore the use of “impact” and listen:
At few points in the history of the academy has there been an opportunity to really impact the ways in which learners and scholars interact.. . It will take visionary leadership to see and capitalize on these shifts. At the same time, few leaders are following critical trends.. and fewer still are speaking out on the issues that accompany them.
Maybe you’ve read Bruno Latour’s “Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world,” from 1983. (Article here.) It suggests that scholarly/scientific work is powerfully relevant when it’s translated effectively into the language of its audience. Scientific work can have enormous leverage because of the circumstances and rules under which it is conducted. Scholars have to figure out how to get beyond their usual walls, leaders have to give them credit for non-traditional publishing/explaining efforts, and the social payoff for these experiments may be quite dramatic.
The transition isn’t easy. As the Educause report notes, new forms of scholarship like blogs and video clips are quite common in the real world, “but academia has been slow to recognize and accept them. . . Proponents of these new forms argue that they serve a different purpose than traditional writing and research — a purpose that improves, rather than runs counter to, other kinds of scholarly work.” It’s leadership that seems to be lacking. Unless reward structures change, scholarly habits will continue to drift farther away from the goal of “raising the world.”