Main Page

• Digital campuses to visit
• PUP Draft Book Proposal
• My user page
• Notes to myself
• Current writing
• My lingo 2025
• Forms for page setup

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, How it works, Who it serves, Where it flourishes, and Why it is important. I have worked through a long career as a student of educatonal and cultural history and as a practioner seeking to influence how media of on two major concerns that give me an unusual, highly signficant preparation to address the the emergence of the digital campus.

• I developed one concern through a stream of texts, many of them unpublished or obscurely published, based on a wide-ranging grounding in educational thought and practice contextualized within a broad understanding of modern cultural development.
• I worked the second concern out through reflective practice, engaged in a variety of settings with media, especially digital technologies, trying to effect constructive transformation of systemic educatonal activity.

I'm old, born in 1939, and a full narrative of relevant experience, which would stretch back into my childhood, cannot be given here and I will tick down a chronological list of selective examples to give a sense of my actvity in the two areas.