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<h3>On the digital campus</h3> | |||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in" | <p style="text-indent: 0.25in">Hello. I'm Robbie McClintock, a retired professor, born in 1939 in New York City. I've worked hard since my late teens, with little resonance, but still believe that by keeping at it someone sometime somewhere may find my work worthy of attention. For you I say my peace.</p> | ||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >A <i>campus</i> situates the activities of academic life, and by <i>digital campus</i>, I have in mind the many academic places on the internet where increasingly higher education finds a place. Alma Mater has her URL, a “<i>uniform resource locator</i>,” the gate to her domain, her website, her digital campus where much academic life takes place. </p> | |||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >Her websites may seem static; they represent the distinctive structure and established constituencies of academic life. Before the late 1980s, colleges and universities had no websites. Through the 1990’s, an online presence was springing up everywhere with nascent capacities offering visitors copies or recapitulations of printed catalogs, schedules, news releases, and public documents. Text was plentiful, pictures scarce, and interaction nearly non-existent. To get things done, people went in person to where they had always done them. </p> | <p>But it's hard. This year, 2025, things have become more contingent. What I'm doing has become less clear to me. I've lived continually aware that intentions, mine and those of others, always fall short of fulfillment, forcing assessments, redirection, moving on, swimming towards a distant shore in a medium in which I could move myself with purposeful direction. New waves make it harder to keep the shore insight and it's taking grfeater effort to simply keep afloat.</p> | ||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >Within the stable structure and function of academic life, digital capacities quietly grew, but their expanding powers were not widely perceived or understood. Cultural lag hid the digital campus until Covid closed physical campuses, chaotically sucking online capacities into full historical view, revealing big differences from one place to the next. Examined closely, academic websites vary in their ability to use ongoing infrastructural developments to support academic life. Much work must be done to bring academe up to the state of its art, and a line from the least to the most developed points to further possibilities to which all can aspire.</p> | |||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >Should we ask whether academic life is beginning to experience a change of phase? Are the promotional websites of the dot-edus becoming digital places where faculty, students, staff, alumni, parents, and the general public can actually do most activities they believe Alma Mater is the place for doing? How can and should the constraints and affordances for engaging in the academic life change by adding the digital campus to the material campus traditional in higher education? What synergies and dysfunctions might arise? What pedagogical, political, social, economic, and cultural choices would confront those affected by these emerging actualities?</p> | |||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >These are large questions that merit multiple informed responses, and I intend to include my views among them in the form of a book, <i>The Digital Campus: What it does, How it works, Who it serves, Where it flourishes, and Why it is important</i>. I have worked throughout a long career as a student of educational and cultural history and as an innovator with digital technologies seeking to strengthen the agency people have in forming the lives they live. All this work and the concerns that have motivated it prepare me well to address the emergence of the digital campus.</p> | <!-- | ||
<p class="s2" style="text-align: right;">[https://rmcc4.com/pdf/Robbie_TDC_Bio.pdf Printable version]</p> | |||
<h3 style="margin-top: -2em;">On the digital campus</h3> | |||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in">I'm Robbie McClintock, a retired professor working to further <i>the digital campus</i>, an important emergent transformation in higher education.</p> | |||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; margin-top: -0.5em;">A <i>campus</i> situates the activities of academic life, and by <i>digital campus</i>, I have in mind the many academic places on the internet where increasingly higher education finds a place. Alma Mater has her URL, a “<i>uniform resource locator</i>,” the gate to her domain, her website, her digital campus where much academic life takes place. </p> | |||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; margin-top: -0.5em;">Her websites may seem static; they represent the distinctive structure and established constituencies of academic life. Before the late 1980s, colleges and universities had no websites. Through the 1990’s, an online presence was springing up everywhere with nascent capacities offering visitors copies or recapitulations of printed catalogs, schedules, news releases, and public documents. Text was plentiful, pictures scarce, and interaction nearly non-existent. To get things done, people went in person to where they had always done them. </p> | |||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; margin-top: -0.5em;">Within the stable structure and function of academic life, digital capacities quietly grew, but their expanding powers were not widely perceived or understood. Cultural lag hid the digital campus until Covid closed physical campuses, chaotically sucking online capacities into full historical view, revealing big differences from one place to the next. Examined closely, academic websites vary in their ability to use ongoing infrastructural developments to support academic life. Much work must be done to bring academe up to the state of its art, and a line from the least to the most developed points to further possibilities to which all can aspire.</p> | |||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; margin-top: -0.5em;">Should we ask whether academic life is beginning to experience a change of phase? Are the promotional websites of the dot-edus becoming digital places where faculty, students, staff, alumni, parents, and the general public can actually do most activities they believe Alma Mater is the place for doing? How can and should the constraints and affordances for engaging in the academic life change by adding the digital campus to the material campus traditional in higher education? What synergies and dysfunctions might arise? What pedagogical, political, social, economic, and cultural choices would confront those affected by these emerging actualities?</p> | |||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; margin-top: -0.5em;">These are large questions that merit multiple informed responses, and I intend to include my views among them in the form of a book, <i>The Digital Campus: What it does, How it works, Who it serves, Where it flourishes, and Why it is important</i>. I have worked throughout a long career as a student of educational and cultural history and as an innovator with digital technologies seeking to strengthen the agency people have in forming the lives they live. All this work and the concerns that have motivated it prepare me well to address the emergence of the digital campus.</p> | |||
<h3>Biographical highlights</h3> | <h3>Biographical highlights</h3> | ||
<ul><li>Born in 1939 in New York City, I did well in good schools—Buckley (1948-53), Deerfield Academy (1953-57), Princeton (1957-61), Columbia (MA 1963, PhD 1968) — forming an interest in cultural history in relation to educational theory and practice.</li> | <ul><li>Born in 1939 in New York City, I did well in good schools—Buckley (1948-53), Deerfield Academy (1953-57), Princeton (1957-61), Columbia (MA 1963, PhD 1968) — forming an interest in cultural history in relation to educational theory and practice.</li> | ||
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<li>A private donor funded a part of the IBM proposal as the Dalton Technology Plan ($3.4 million, 1991-94. [https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1992-Risk-and-Renewal-McClintock-et-al.pdf Link]), that drew considerable public attention.</li> | <li>A private donor funded a part of the IBM proposal as the Dalton Technology Plan ($3.4 million, 1991-94. [https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1992-Risk-and-Renewal-McClintock-et-al.pdf Link]), that drew considerable public attention.</li> | ||
<li>In turn, that work became the springboard for <i>The Eiffel Project: New York City's Small Schools Partnership Technology Learning Challenge</i> ([https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1996-The-Eiffel-Project.pdf Link]), which won a national Challenge Grant for a 5-year, $7.1 million project, plus $11 million in matching effort. Work through it established sophisticated local area networks in and among selected schools throughout NYC (1996-2000).</li> | <li>In turn, that work became the springboard for <i>The Eiffel Project: New York City's Small Schools Partnership Technology Learning Challenge</i> ([https://rmcc4.com/pdf/1996-The-Eiffel-Project.pdf Link]), which won a national Challenge Grant for a 5-year, $7.1 million project, plus $11 million in matching effort. Work through it established sophisticated local area networks in and among selected schools throughout NYC (1996-2000).</li> | ||
<li>Finally (1998-2001), the NYC Board of | <li>Finally (1998-2001), the NYC Board of Education’s Taskforce on Teaching and Learning in Cyberspace advanced a huge project (circa $11 <i>billion</i>) to create a city-wide network and equip all NYC students and teachers, grades 4-12, with specially designed laptops for use at home and school. I wrote the pedagogical rationale for it, <i>Smart Cities, New York: Electronic Education for the New Millennium</i> (ILT, [https://rmcc4.com/pdf/2000_smart_cities_new_york_full.pdf Link]). The Board issued an RFP and two coalitions of major computer, publishing, and consulting companies formed and swiftly vanished among the financial expectations destroyed by the dotcom crisis.</li></ul> | ||
<p><i>Smart Cities </i>was wildly ahead of its time. Sobered, I stopped writing proposals and turned back to reflective themes of pedagogical thought and practice.</p> | <p><i>Smart Cities </i>was wildly ahead of its time. Sobered, I stopped writing proposals and turned back to reflective themes of pedagogical thought and practice.</p> | ||
<ul><li><i>Homeless in the House of Intellect: Formative Justice and Education as an Academic Study</i> (New York: Laboratory for Liberal Learning, 2005, 111 pp. [https://rmcc4.com/pdf/2005_homeless_intellect.pdf Link]). How might the study of education, if situated among the arts and sciences, differ from its study in professional schools?</li> | <ul><li><i>Homeless in the House of Intellect: Formative Justice and Education as an Academic Study</i> (New York: Laboratory for Liberal Learning, 2005, 111 pp. [https://rmcc4.com/pdf/2005_homeless_intellect.pdf Link]). How might the study of education, if situated among the arts and sciences, differ from its study in professional schools?</li> | ||
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<li>“Dewey in His Skivvies: The Trouble with Reconstruction” (<i>Educational Theory</i>, 67:5, 2017, pp. 545-575. [https://rmcc4.com/pdf/2017_dewey_in_his_skivvies.pdf Link])</a>. This essay served as the stimulus for six further contributions assessing how John Dewey’s thinking should influence current educational philosophy.</li> | <li>“Dewey in His Skivvies: The Trouble with Reconstruction” (<i>Educational Theory</i>, 67:5, 2017, pp. 545-575. [https://rmcc4.com/pdf/2017_dewey_in_his_skivvies.pdf Link])</a>. This essay served as the stimulus for six further contributions assessing how John Dewey’s thinking should influence current educational philosophy.</li> | ||
<li><i>Formative Justice</i> (New York: The Reflective Commons, 2019, 138 pp. [https://rmcc4.com/pdf/2017_formative_justice_with_annotations.pdf Link]) What do people seek in trying to form and educate themselves?</li></ul> | <li><i>Formative Justice</i> (New York: The Reflective Commons, 2019, 138 pp. [https://rmcc4.com/pdf/2017_formative_justice_with_annotations.pdf Link]) What do people seek in trying to form and educate themselves?</li></ul> | ||
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in;">Now at 85, unexpectedly hale with life, energy, and intellect, I feel called to look again at how digital technologies may affect the spectrum of possible experience. According to Moore’s Law, digital capacities have been doubling in 1-to-2-year intervals. This suggests the digital infrastructure has altered greatly since I left off 25 years ago. Are old pipe dreams becoming possible objectives of intentional action? That’s the question I plan to address in <i>The Digital Campus</i>.</p> | <p style="text-indent: 0.25in;">Now at 85, unexpectedly hale with life, energy, and intellect, I feel called to look again at how digital technologies may affect the spectrum of possible experience. According to Moore’s Law, digital capacities have been doubling in 1-to-2-year intervals. This suggests the digital infrastructure has altered greatly since I left off 25 years ago. Are old pipe dreams becoming possible objectives of intentional action? That’s the question I plan to address in <i>The Digital Campus</i>.</p> --> | ||
<hr/> | <hr/> | ||
;Robbie McClintock<br> | ;Robbie McClintock<br> | ||
Latest revision as of 15:47, 19 June 2025
Hello. I'm Robbie McClintock, a retired professor, born in 1939 in New York City. I've worked hard since my late teens, with little resonance, but still believe that by keeping at it someone sometime somewhere may find my work worthy of attention. For you I say my peace.
But it's hard. This year, 2025, things have become more contingent. What I'm doing has become less clear to me. I've lived continually aware that intentions, mine and those of others, always fall short of fulfillment, forcing assessments, redirection, moving on, swimming towards a distant shore in a medium in which I could move myself with purposeful direction. New waves make it harder to keep the shore insight and it's taking grfeater effort to simply keep afloat.
- Robbie McClintock
- 4 Green Leaf Court
- Princeton, NJ, 08540-5046
- (646) 464-4531 (phone & text)
- rom2@tc.columbia.edu (email)