Tapscott – The Impending Demise of the University
“Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.”
“The Detroit of higher learning.”
Eisenwalzwerk (Moderne Cyklopen) - Adolf Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel
In a NY Times editorial, Columbia professor Mark Taylor said that universities are becoming obsolete because they:
- produce a product for which there is no market (teaching positions)
- develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields /publication in journals)
- rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)
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In a Wired article this spring Scott Brown wrote:
We’ve heard a lot about how Google is making us dumber and more distracted and lazier. We’ve heard less about how it’s making us—maybe even forcing us to be—funnier. For today, thanks to the digital hive mind, comedy is colloquy, everything is “material,” and life is one big writer’s room, a massive clusterchuckle of witty one- upsmanship—on blogs, on social-networking sites, in tweets, in funny video shorts, in Lolcats and talkbacks. Humor saturates the infosphere, for at least two reasons: First, a successful joke implies insight, and insight, especially if it’s pithy and self-explanatory, is the basic currency of a high-speed information economy. Second, the fundamental tools and techniques of that economy—memory, annotation, contrast, collage—are also the fundamental tools of comedy.
At first I was completely on board with his idea, then I started thinking more critically about the kind of claim he is making – that a particular media environment can not only engender, but enforce a certain style of discourse…
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The social networking site Neighbors for Neighbors provides individual networks for each neighborhood in Boston. The idea is to improve civic engagement in each community as well as increase visibility of social service resources. In my research, I will focus on two of the neighborhoods, look at how the sites are being used, and ask some of the users about their experience on the site. From there I will explore the concept of community based social networking through the lens of community informatics to learn more about the benchmarks for a successful network. I will also use the field of community informatics as a point of departure for learning about other such networks and their successes and challenges.
From this research I hope to get an idea of the what design and implementation methods have led to improved civic engagement and visibility of resources. I would also like to get an idea of how people see these networks as supplementing local government services.
