Knowledge as Process and as Distribution
In the late 1990s, Ronald Deibert’s Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia was published. As a political scientist and media ecologist, Deibert was interested in the ways that new digital technologies would alter power relationships throughout the world by shifting the ways people thought and processed information, as well as the ways information and political power would be distributed. Deibert argued that while old media favored nation states and top down knowledge, digital media favored non territorialization via fragmented global institutions and communities and co-created knowledge.
In my position at Vanderbilt, I’ve been thinking about Deibert a good deal these days. It’s not that my role deals with global politics, or politics at all in any traditional manner, it’s more that Vanderbilt—as an institution with an educational mission—needs to think about the ways that digital educational technologies have a transformative effect both on the ways people (students, faculty) think and on how knowledge is distributed—both inside and outside the institution. In my mind, the more that I reflect on what “we” need to be doing, the more I think these twin transformations are a healthy way for us to think through our use of digital technology.
On the first front—that of changes in how students and faculty think, how they produce and consume knowledge—I am hoping to think about ways the university can focus more specifically on providing tools, courses, and less formal means of dealing with changes in our means of communication. By providing students with the skills for production and the skills for critical consumption, we provide more training for their eventual move into the workforce or higher education. To point: I am working currently with a “Digital Literacy” committee who has been tasked with defining “digital literacy” for Vanderbilt and then thinking about both curricular and non-curricular ways to advance digital literacy. While working with peer institutions’ definitions of digital literacy as a starting point, I’m hoping to have us think creatively about the ways that we can alter the way students and faculty produce and consume information through both curricular and non-curricular means. In terms of the curriculum, I can envision the creation of a digital literacy designation and the development of more classes with such a designation, or the development of a curricular model in which students attend a certain number of classes, workshops, or short modules on campus as one way of signifying digital competence. On the non-curricular side, I can picture a larger site license for digital software, an increase in the number of help stations, and a growth in support staff at locations like the Center for Teaching (CFT). These are just ideas, and the committee and the faculty at large will help shape and transform these ideas into workable solutions for our faculty and students, but it’s a positive to be thinking in this direction.
On the second front, that of the distribution of knowledge, we at VU are working hard at developing ideas both in our normal classrooms and outside the university to how we distribute information and how we have conversations about information outside of class. While this of course has meant the establishment of MOOCs, flipped classrooms and virtual classrooms, it also is exemplified, for example, in Peabody’s decision to offer two of their degree programs online, in our upcoming experiments with an online summer course for our residential students, for potential non-degree programs or programs developed for, and offered specifically to, our alumni. I certainly see the “Tiny Languages” program working to focus on changing ways of distributing knowledge.
In short, it is clear that digital technology has altered the landscape for education and for knowledge itself. It is up to us to constantly think about how we are prepared for these changes and how we prepare our faculty and students for them.