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On the digital campus

Hello,

I'm Robbie McClintock, a retired professor working to further the digital campus, an important emergent transformation in higher education. By digital campus, I'm not referring to the uses of computers and the like in a physical place, the campus. I'm interested in emergent places in cyberspace, digital campuses, where people engage in the full range of activities characteristic of higher education. If the campus situates the life and work of alma mater, she increasingly does so in two forms, the material bricks and morter of the campus old-style, and the digital packets interacting through the campus new style.

You minght ask why I distinguish between and new and an old study. The material campus isn't going to go away no matter how many computers we stuff onto it or how much distance learning we introduce. Why don't we just study the uses of information lechnologies on the familiar campuses of the high learning? Simplistically, it's because I'm old, born in 1939, and I can't just hang around to see how things work out. But who can? Emergent changes work out slowly, and none of us will be around to witness their fulfillment. In the meantime, it's a part of wisdom to inform our choices by anticipating, not predicting, the range of possibilities.

Which brings me to the business at hand. I'm not going to tell further what I think about the digital campus. Instead, I'll talk about my intellectual life so that you might expect what I will have to say on that and other matters will be worthy of your attention. Perceiving dispersed parts of it, we form many partial views, diffusing its importance and novelty. Let's seek clarity about what the digital campus does, how it works, who it serves, where it flourishes, and why it is important.

To begin, consider place. A place interests us because it situates human experience, because of what happens, what takes place there. Place enables living interaction.

At the fringe, there are exceptions, but it is fair to say that each college and university, and other educational institutions, has a campus, a physical place, buildings and grounds, which situates each institution and the people and activities that constitute it in space and time. Each particular campus differs from all the others, but they have common features and uses. If we have studied or worked at one campus, we will understand a good deal about how any one of the other ones function.

Physical arrangements enabling academic life to take place took elemental form in medevil cities 6 centuries ago, continuously developing since then.