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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 multiple informed repsonses and I intend to include my views among them 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 strengthen the agency people have in forming the lives they live. These concerns give me an unusual, highly signficant preparation to address the emergence of the digital campus.

Here, I cannot give a full narrative of that preparation. I'm old and hence my story's long. Instead, I'll mention key aspects of my experience to indicate the scope of my preparation.

• Long ago, I did well in good schools: Buckley (1948-53), Deerfield Academy (1953-57), Princeton (1957-61), Columbia (MA 1963, PhD 1968).
• I had a long professorial career: Johns Hopkins (1965-67), Teachers College, Columbia (assist 1967-71, assoc 1971-81, full 1981-2001, chair 2001-11, and emeritus 2011-on). Key concerns on which I professed: Educators should pay close attention to the work of major past thinkers (e.g. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Dante, Erasmus, Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber); Media and communications as agents of change in education and culture;
• I have been creative and successfull in generating externally funded research and development projects, primarily as the founding director of the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College (1982-2002) and as a senior research scholar in the Office of the Vice-Provost of Columbia University (1994-2001), and secondarily with other groups such as the New Laboratory for Teaching and Learning at the Dalton School and at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
• Over the span of my career, I have expressed my ideas and concerns in diverse texts. In them, I have dealt with many topics, drawing on an extensive intellectual background. As a writer, I aspire to be clear and engaging while respecting the complexity and difficulty of the matters I address. I think we live in a culture in which we vastly over-produce culltural materials and consume them with a serious deficiency of attention. I feel a responsibility to resist those conditions by writing for readers who will pay close attention and find it relevant over an extended period. Here's a selection of work I've written.
  • "Machines and Vitalists: Reflections on the Ideology of Cybernetics," The American Scholar (35:2, Spring 1966, pp. 249-58). My first publicaton, in a special issue on "The Electronic Revolution" with contributions by McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Lynn White, Jr., Jacob Bronowski, Herbert A. Simon, Richard Hoggart, and so on. It stilll makes a point relevant to current concern about AI.
  • Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971, xviii, 649 pp.) A full intellectual biography of the Spanish thinker, José Ortega y Gasset. The book culminated my studies of Ortega from 1960 to 1971 and it was named the "Outstanding Educaton Book of 1971" by School and Society."