What is Coming:
Openness
 | Access to information and learning spaces |
| Interactivity: Broadband synchronicity |
| Choice: Multiple possibilities |
Transparency
| Adjusting to change |
| Using the resources
 | "Information access is among the primary arguments
for constructing a global information infrastructure. Information resources are essential for all manner of human affairs, including
commerce, education, research, participatory democracy, government policy, and leisure activities. Access to information for all these
purposes is at the center of the discontinuity-continuity debates.
Some argue that computer networks, digital libraries, electronic publishing, and similar developments will lead to radically different
models of information access.1" |
|
| Adapting the technology to user's needs: My
Gateway (Blackboard's CourseInfo) |
| Co-presence |
| Telepresence |
| Simply Presence |
"Essentially, a student's university
career in such a system would no longer be through a particular place, time,
or preselected body of academics, but through a network principally of their
own making, yet shaped by a degree granting body and its faculty. A
student could stay home or travel, mix on-line and off-line education, work in
classes or with mentors, and continue their learning long after taking a
degree."2
Changing the Frame: Old dichotomies just don't work anymore.
"The virtual should, properly speaking, be compared not
to the real but the actual. Unlike the possible, which is static and
already constituted, the virtual is a kind of problematic complex, the knot of
tendencies or forces that accompanies a situation, event, object, or entity,
and which invokes a process of resolution: actualization....Actualization
involves more than simply assigning reality to a possible or selecting from
among a predetermined range of choices. It implies the production of new
qualities, a transformation of ideas, a true becoming that feeds the virtual
in turn."3
| Virtual----Real: The issues of actuality and ways of being. |
| Distance Education----Traditional Education: How far away are you? |
| Teacher----Learner: Who knows best?
|
| The University: Bricks and Information. |
"In looking at university change for its
own sake or as an indicator of change more generally, no one should
underestimate the remarkable staying power of these institutions. They
have been around...for more than 1,000 years. In that time, they have
survived many revolutions and may survive more yet, including the digital one."4
Notes:
1. Christine Borgman, 2000. From Gutenbenberg to the Global
Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World, MIT Press:
Cambridge, MA. Chapter 1. (http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.From.Gutenberg.to.th.html)
2. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, 2000. The Social Life of
Information, Harvard Business School Press: Boston. Page 239. (http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.The.Social.Life.of.I.html)
and (http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_4/).
3. Pierre Levy, 1998. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital
Age, translated by Robert Bononno, Plenum Trade: New York. Pages 24-25.
4. Brown and Duguid, 2000. Pages 24-241.
URL: http://www.umsl.edu/~keelr/meanderings/virtual_spaces.htm
Owner: Robert O. Keel
Last Updated: Tuesday, November 20, 2001 03:59 PM
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