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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, not separate from the material campus, but simultaneously immersed in a different form of the campus, one that offers different constraints and affordances.

You minght ask why I distinguish between a digital and a material campus. The buildings and grounds aren't going away and much information technology already has a home there. Why don't I just study it's uses there without introducing something new, the digital campus? Simplistically, it's because I'm old, born in 1939. In a hurry, I want to imagine an ideal type the potentialities of which for historical experience are emerging slowly in current actualities all around us.

That purpose brings me to the business at hand: not to tell all that I think about the digital campus as an ideal type, but to say a bit about my intellectual life leading up to now so that you might better judge what I might say about it will be worthy of your attention.

Born in New York New York, a child of depression yuppies — dad, investment banking, & mom, dress design, to the age of 3 I was as a minor prince in Gramercy Park. I was then moved, to my delight, to a small farm in eastern Pennsylvania, where I enjoyed a Rousseauian childhood, looslely overseen while my parents commuted to their work. At 8, I began to shuffle between country and city beginning my formal education in elite schools — Buckley, Deerfield, Princeton (BA '61), and Columbia (PhD '68).

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.