Instructor:
Robbie McClintock | rom2@columbia.edu
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Certain assumptions about the long-term process of change associated with the emergence of computer-mediated communication inform the inquiry to be sustained through this course:
When changes in information and communications technologies transform the ways people create, disseminate, and apply knowledge, deep changes in educational practices occur.
Educational institutions, including schools of education, will undergo prolonged change and significant transformation, occasioned by changes in the media of intellectual production.
With digital information and communications technologies, the separation of schools and higher education into two, largely distinct, educational cultures will markedly diminish.
With the emerging intellectual conditions, activities contributing to the creation of knowledge will increase in relative value and those devoted solely to its dissemination will decrease.
Campuses will remain important foci of intellectual activity while participation in them will become more flexible via networks supporting asynchronous, distributed involvement.
Specialists in education will need to work closely with scholars, scientists, and professionals to embed powerful learning experiences in the digital means for advancing knowledge.
Increasingly, educators will de-emphasize imparting a static stock of information and ideas and will instead seek to enable all people to contribute to the advancement of knowledge.
Demand for highly skilled educators will increase and preparing them will largely be a field-based engagement in situations where students interact with new knowledge resources.
Schools and other educational institutions will increase in public importance and the educating professions will increasingly become high-tech and high-prestige professions.
Changes in information and communications technologies will resuscitate the progressive movement in education, enabling it to be both broadly egalitarian and intellectually rigorous.
These assumptions are stated here without elaboration or justification. They are, of course, subject to significant debate, leading to their substantial revision. They provide a starting context of inquiry.
Participants in the course will engage individually and as a group in two entwined lines of inquiry -- one concentrating on different domains of intellectual investigation, professional practice, and educational work; the other on the variety of emerging ways in which computers mediate communication. Consider the latter first.
Computer-mediated communication is still very much a protean technological development of immense complexity and scope, one that will continue for several decades to disclose significant emerging characteristics. Part of our task is to understand those characteristics and to gauge, as best we can, their implications for the work of culture and education. Towards this end, participants will create a timeline, centered on the present, and stretching towards both past and future, charting how key features of computer-mediated communications have emerged. This timeline and the resources it points to should help us analyze and anticipate the educational effects of technical innovations through the course. For this purpose, each participant will serve as the expert for the group on one or more components of CMC, describing its technological development and helping to anticipate how we should expect it to integrate into the over-all digital communications system.
Communications technologies by themselves are empty and meaningless, however. Hence the second part of our task is to understand how developments in computer-mediated communication interact with human potentialities and condition achievements in important domains of scholarship, science, professional practice, and education. Computer-mediated communications do not exercise a technological determinism in our lives. Quite the opposite: digital communications systems alter the possibilities, the range of what might be feasible in many fields, which opens the way for innovators to try diverse new departures. These may or may not work and their consequences may or may not improve the human lot. Participants will chart and interpret important human uses of computer-mediated communication as a further component of our timeline, indicating when and how they have been associated with significant new developments in academic disciplines, important sectors of human activity, and changing practices of education.
Much of the work by participants will take place through on-line investigations undertaken with the goal of building up a record of findings about computer-mediated communication and presenting it on the course web site. As a supplement, participants will work from a reading list of books and articles dealing with the ways digital communications are affecting scholarship and education. This list will include works such as
Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives
Stephen S. Hall, Mapping the Next Millennium
Teresa M. Harrison & Timothy Stephen, eds., Computer Networking and Scholarly Communication in the 21st-Century University
Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
Steven G. Jones, CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community
William T. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn
Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book
Robin W. Peek & Gregory B. Newby, Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier
David Porter, ed., Internet Culture
Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.
Each participant will contribute at least three reviews of such materials to the course web site. Through the work of the course we will aim to assess the degree to which computer-mediated communication is a sufficient medium for studying and interpreting the main developments in it.
This seminar is not for students seeking an initial introduction to using the Internet or other digital communications technologies. It presumes the ability to use such technologies. It aims to document and understand the cultural and educational implications of their spreading use. The course will work best for participants who feel comfortable in independent inquiry on open-ended problems, sometimes working alone and sometimes in small groups.
last modified 12-Mar-97
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