User:Robbie/narrative bio DC

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 institution's URL, its uniform resource locator. Looked at in the 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. Over the course of a quarter century since their inception, the technical infrastructure's capabilities and complexity have significantly expanded. 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 responses, 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 throughout a long career as a student of educational and cultural history and as a practitioner seeking to strengthen the agency people have in forming the lives they live. These concerns give me an unusual, highly significant preparation to address the emergence of the digital campus.

Here, I cannot give a full narrative of that preparation for 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.

• At the start, 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 successful 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 overproduce cultural 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 publication, 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 still makes a point relevant to the 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 Education Book of 1971" by School and Society."
  • "Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction," Teachers College Record (73:2, December 1971, pp. 161-205). This historical essay developed my concern that educators pay too little attention to self-motivated study as the energizing impetus for a person's educational development. It is still widely cited in discussions of the importance of the study by educational theorists.
  • "Enkyklios Paideia: The Fifteenth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica" Proceedings of the National Academy of Education, 1976, pp. 179–216. A critique of pedagogical strategies embodied in the Britannica 15.
  • "The Dynamics of Decline: Why Education Can No Longer Be Liberal" Phi Delta Kappan (60:9, May 1979, pp. 636–640). My version is a widely held concern about the decline of liberal education.
  • "Into the Starting Gate: On Computing and the Curriculum." Teachers College Record (88:2, Winter 1986, pp. 191–215; translation also published in Spain, 1988). I introduced a basic concern about whether and how, where, when, and why interacting with cultural resources in digital form will have different constraints and affordances than interacting with material resources. The Digital Campus will essentially revisit this concern 40 years later.
  • The Cumulative Curriculum: Multi-Media and the Making of a New Educational System. Final submission of a proposal requesting $5.4 million plus equipment over 5 years submitted to the IBM Corporation, Spring 1991. 213 pp. IBM vetted this proposal favorably and, owing to its scale, docketed it for action by the IBM Board. Unfortunately, at that meeting, the CEO announced the company's first serious deficit was impending, and the Board stopped external commitments. All was not lost, however. A private donor funded the Dalton Technology Plan ($3.4 million) for 1991-94, and that became the springboard for The Eiffel Project: New York City's Small Schools Partnership Technology Learning Challenge, winning a U.S. Department of Education funding for a 5-year, $7.1 million grant, plus around $11 million in matching effort.
  • Smart Cities: New York. Electronic Education for the New Millennium An educational framework prepared for the New York City Board of Education and its Taskforce on Teaching and Learning in Cyberspace, December 2000. This presented the pedagogical rationale for a huge project to build a home and school network and equip all students and teachers, 4th grade through high school, with specially designed laptops for use at home and school. in the NYC public school system. It convinced the Board to issue an RFP for the project, with Accenture working with the Board to manage it. Two large coalitions formed to compete for it, immediately tumbling over the precipice in the dotcom bust and disappeared. The project and my rationale for it were wildly ahead of their time, an interesting speculation, nevertheless. My involvement in large-scale proposal writing ended there.
  • Three recent books, each self-published and in print, merit mention:
    Homeless in the House of Intellect: Formative Justice and Education as an Academic Study (New York: Laboratory for Liberal Learning, 2005, 111 pp.) How might the study of education in the arts and sciences differ from the study of it in professional schools?
    Enough: A Pedagogical Speculation (New York: Collaboratory for Liberal Learning, 2012, 284 pp., Portuguese translation, 2020.) A wish fulfillment about how my views might appear to a friendly critic in 2162.
    Formative Justice (New York: The Reflective Commons, 2019, 138 pp.) What do people seek in trying to form and educate themselves?

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