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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 have in mind an academic form that currently has many instances on the internet, each actually in a nascent condition. The digital campus is the domain on the internet addressed through the instituion's URL, its uniform resource locator. Looked at in the static present, all those websites appear rather static, primarily informational and promotional, a variety of efforts to represent in cyberspace what takes place on the material campus to which each connects.

These nascent digital campuses do not exist in a static present, however. The internet is very young relative to the campuses represented on it. In the quarter century since their birth, the affordances of the technical infrastructure available for them has by several orders of magnitude and complexity. Looked at closely, one can see immense differences in the degree to which current academic websites make effective use of ongoing infrastructural developments. Hmmm.

Is it time to ask whether a kind of academic change of phase is beginning to occur? Are the promotional websites of the dot-edus becoming digital places where faculty, students, staff, alumni, parents, and the general public can do all the activities they want and need to do through alma mater? How would the constraints and affordances of the digital campus differ from those of the material campus? What synergies and dysfunctions might arise? What pedagogical, political, social, economic, and cultural choices would confront those affected by such changes?

These are large questions that merit many different informed repsonses and I want to provoke such responses by addressing the questions as fully as I can. with my remaining energies, and since I am both old and obscure, and include address with my remaining energies, and since I am too old and relatively obscure, to be an active player, I should say something about my experience more than distance learning or the use information technologies in campus courses. An institution's URL, alma mater.edu, situates its digital campus, an emerging place in cyberspace, co-existing with the physical campus. Increasingly, the digital campus is becoming a place where faculty, students, staff, alumni, parents, and the general public can do all the activities they want and need to do through alma mater.

I'm working to advance that development because I believe it can become a transformative one for the betterment of all, and that purpose brings me to the business at hand: not to tell all that I think about the digital campus, but to say a bit about my experience that has led to my interest in it.

My career, a long one from 1957 to 2024 from college to the present, has spanned significant engagement and achievement in both these realms. Now, late in a long life, I'm drawn to setting forth what I think the digital campus can and should become because I see it as a telos of emerging developments arising with the use of information technologies in higher education and believe that fully developed it will exert a powerful counter influence to the progressive depersonalization and reduction of autonomous agency making contemporary life less and less fulfilling for most persons.

Two kinds of experience and knowledge have helped me see what might be at stake with the emergence of the digital campus.

• One comprises an extensive, wide-ranging grounding in educational thought and practice set within a broad understanding of modern cultural development.
• Another consists in reflective practice, working in many settings for sustained periods with digital technologies to effect constructive transformation of systemic educatonal systems.