Instructors:
Robbie McClintock | rom2@columbia.edu
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In simple terms, education has as its mission the production and distribution of knowledge. Existing educational processes and structures are premised on two methods of distribution -- the classroom and the textbook. The new media, particularly digital technologies, have the potential for affecting fundamental and far reaching changes in the design of such processes and structures, and the institutions that support them.
In many ways it is quite easy to predict what educational structures may look like by the early to mid 21st century:
Students, faculty and researchers will have ubiquitous access to each other and all forms of information sources, faculty lectures and demonstrations, library and research materials and conferencing and tutorials over high-speed networks from anywhere at any time.
What is more difficult and less clear is what interim steps in process and changes in institutional methods are required for formal education to adapt to such potentials; and what, if any, additional proactive steps educators and educational administrators and policy makers could or should take over the coming years to best realize such potentials.
Many of the changes enabled by these new media also raise important questions relating to the values and culture of existing educational institutions -- issues relating to ownership of intellectual work, academic freedom, tenure review, the meaning and place of classroom work, academic versus professional or continuing education, the relationship between formal and informal education, and other issues fundamental to the life and concept of existing formal educational structures.
Furthermore, none of these issues can be addressed in a vacuum. Education exists in a competitive market environment and regardless of what direction educators may choose for themselves, they will be constrained and enabled by the barriers and opportunities that develop in the marketplace and that are presented by these technologies.
The fundamental question is this -- how can educators best take advantage of opportunities enabled by developments in technology to expand and enhance the role of education and cultural value in the coming networked society of the 21st century? It is implicit that the answers to this question not be technologically (nor market) driven but rather that they be technologically (and market) enabled. It is with these issues that this class will concern itself.
last modified 11-Feb-98
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