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<h4>Hello,</h4> | <h4>Hello,</h4> | ||
<p>I'm Robbie McClintock, a retired professor working to further <i>the digital campus</i>, an important emergent transformation in higher education. By <i>digital campus</i>, I'm referring to a place in cyberspace co-existing with the physical campus familiar in higher education. | <p>I'm Robbie McClintock, a retired professor working to further <i>the digital campus</i>, an important emergent transformation in higher education. By <i>digital campus</i>, I'm not referring to distance learning or how on campus courses use innformation technologies. It's a place in cyberspace co-existing with the physical campus familiar in higher education. It's not computersactivities characteristic of higher education and academic life.</p> | ||
<p>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 me to become interested in it. I'm old, 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).</p> | <p>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 me to become interested in it. I'm old, 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).</p> |
Revision as of 09:52, 2 February 2025
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 distance learning or how on campus courses use innformation technologies. It's a place in cyberspace co-existing with the physical campus familiar in higher education. It's not computersactivities characteristic of higher education and academic life.
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 me to become interested in it. I'm old, 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).
In retrospect, all that went quickly. As an only child of older parents, I spent much time alone among adults, acquiring an ease inspeaking with them, observant of both insights and imitations, forming my own views in a thoughtful reserve. I was cognizant of my own ignorance, and that of others, and without much alienation, I would fit in in many situations while rarely feeling a sense of belonging.
In school, I preferred sports to academics, doing just well enough on the scholastic escalator to keep advancing on the path I believed to be my choice. I had a strong sense of my own ignorances and was relatively adept at covering them up and I advanced on grounds of achieved excellence but thanks to generally perceived promise. I didn't hold mastery of conventional learning in much esteem, wanting instead to tackle the actual, intractable problems. As I matured, it came together in a knack for thinking out of the box while finding a good place within the box.
Hence, through my formal education, I was poor at assigned learning, but ardent in independent study, in the classical sense — striving after, concentrating on, favoring, applying oneself, giving attention to, being eager, zealous, taking pains, diligent, devoted to. With the bookstore as my curriculum, I studied my way through Princeton, sparked by avid reading in the work of the Spanish thinker, José Ortega y Gasset. At first, my grades were awful, and then not good, until in my senior year I aced comprehensives and wrote an excellent senior thesis, graduating with high honors and a prize for most improvement from the Woodrow Wilson School, my major.
My senior thesis drew from a wide range of my reading as an undergraduate and from my experience during several summers working in a program called Swiss Holiday, run by the American School in Switzerland, then a small American-style boarding school starting up in Locarno, at the head of Logo Maggiore. My "work" had two sides, one teaching waterskiing, and the other, in tandem with another "adult" circa 18 to 20 or so, conducting 9 or 10 twelve-to-fourteen-year-olds on four 8-day long road trips, around Switzerland, Austria, northern Italy, and southern France in search of culture, adventure, and amusement.
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.