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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 intend to include my views in response in the form of a book, The Digital Campus: What it does, want to contribute to such responses and my past experience prepares me well to do so.

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.