On the Horizon (Volume 16 Number 1 2008)

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ISSN 1074-8121

Volume 16 Number 1 2008

On the Horizon The library and the internet Guest Editor: Dr Boria Sax

www.emeraldinsight.com

Table of contents The library and the internet Dr Boria Sax Volume 16 Number 1 2008

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Feature articles

Editorial Shift happens

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Constructing the cafe´ university: teaching and learning on the digital frontier

Tom P. Abeles

Guest editorial The library and the internet: introduction to the special issue Boria Sax

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Cornel J. Reinhart

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Can we talk? Course management software and the construction of knowledge

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Carla R. Payne and Cornel J. Reinhart

Adaptive individualization: the next generation of online education

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Nish Sonwalkar

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Editorial Shift happens Tom P. Abeles

Tom P. Abeles is President of Sagacity, Inc., Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this editorial is to ask the question as to whether the current ‘‘cohort’’ model of education, particularly in the USA, can survive in an internet connected world. It also questions, with the development of increasingly porous political borders, particularly with respect to knowledge, whether the current education system can play the heroic role of maintaining US economic hegemony in the world. Design/methodology/approach – This essay looks at the increasing alternatives individuals have for obtaining both knowledge, and academic certification and the ease with which that knowledge can move across borders virtually or through population movements. It suggests that this growing international movement of knowledge may render political boundaries as vulnerable as medieval armor with the rise of gunpowder. Findings – The increasing access to knowledge starts to make international borders look more like boundaries between states or other political divisions within current nations. The current attempt to maintain or incrementally improving existing models of education can neither meet the increasing demands of individuals for knowledge or maintain the current economic hegemony of the USA. Originality/value – The essay questions current efforts of the educational community in general and the science/technology sector, in particular, to argue for increasing funds as the front-line of defense in a world where political power is maintained by economics rather than military superiority. It argues for a paradigmatic change in response to the idea that knowledge wishes to be free. Keywords Education, Knowledge management, United States of America Paper type Viewpoint

All education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth (Alvin Toffler).

helly’s ‘‘Ozymandias’’ is a reminder that ‘‘empire’’ is ephemeral. Archeologists have uncovered the seven cities that were once Troy and routinely find ruins of civilizations that have been buried by the blowing sands of time, often leaving few records of their rise and fall. Today, there is concern that the USA, as the sole military super power and whose currency serves as the principle base for world trade and financial transactions, is in danger of loosing its position to what, until now, has been seen as a developing nation, India and/or China.

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The title is taken from two videos on youtube.com, Shift Happens, http://youtube.com/ watch?v ¼ ljbI-363A2Q, and Shift Happens 2.0, http:// youtube.com/watch?v ¼ pMcfrLYDm2U. View both to understand the efforts of some folk to point out that the education system in the USA, as well as the world position of the USA is potentially on the wane, particularly as India and China start to transcend the USA in the number of college graduates.

DOI 10.1108/10748120810853309

While most empires of the past have ultimately succumbed to a stronger military foe, there seems to be a fear that the USA’s fate may be sealed by being overwhelmed by an educated juggernaut, larger populations with more graduates from universities. It is argued that they will capture the technological edge by both shear numbers and increasing quality of graduates, particularly in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics or STEM subjects. Yet, the country remains almost schizophrenic at the national level, unable to see, clearly, how to maintain its position and whether or not education can provide the pathway.

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The implicit story is not that the USA will succumb, like the Roman Empire or collapse like the former Soviet Union, but that the sun will set as with the British Empire and the USA’s voice will be one amongst the many equals, unlike the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm. In addition, there is also a growing concern, amongst segments of the population that the influx of recent immigrants are less than enthusiastic about assimilation, but rather see the country primarily as a free and open economy. This becomes, almost, a reverse colonialization by the economically disenfranchised filling a niche, the mirror image of the Europeans when they explored/exploited the new worlds. Since the USA has placed its bets in becoming a knowledge economy, the potential of that knowledge being exported through the educational system becomes a significant issue. What does this portend for the education system, preK- . 20 in particular? As Toffler states in the quote, above, that depends on the vision of the future held by society. At the present time, there is little ‘‘future vision’’ other than a strong attempt to try to maintain the image of the USA as a hegemonic nation and a beacon for a particular political ideology. Yet, given the fact that the birth rate in India is five times that of the USA and their college graduates, all English speaking, are three times that of the USA, with China running parallel in the post secondary graduate numbers, it is hard to understand how the USA can expect to maintain its position under the current scenario, no matter what educational model is developed. Similarly, with the ever-increasing bandwidth of the internet and access via the worldwide web, the best that could be is a futile attempt, to selectively filter knowledge moving freely across political boundaries. In fact, the efforts in the USA to create ‘‘one laptop per child’’ for every child in the world can but accelerate the concept that knowledge wants to be free, an issue that is continually being challenged by antiquated laws protecting intellectual property. As the You Tube video, Shift Happens 2.0, points out, students are already connecting across all borders, both as students and as future citizens. One must point out that the problems with immigration and knowledge movement are not the USA’s alone. Europe is seeing similar scenarios develop across the European Union (EU). Many have argued that if financial instruments move freely across borders, then labor should also move freely. Without such movements, jobs will move to the people rather than people to jobs which is the burden faced by the US economy. Immigration issues become a significant burden when one tries to solve the problem by trying to build selective dikes and plug the holes. Thus one has the diverting of resources from constructive endeavors. The issue becomes very complex, very fast, and that is where education needs to enter into the picture, globally. The internet and worldwide web, now with the development of web 3.0 and virtual worlds points out that the core method of integrating future citizens, the education system, is seriously in need of a critical change. The movement of students through the system in age related cohorts was, at one time, the most expedient method given resource limitations. In the USA we have two changes, post secondary education has become almost mandatory and more students are finding that their personal circumstances prevent the cohort model to be maintained. The latter is due to many factors, including: B

the existence of cross ‘‘credit’’ programs between secondary and post secondary institutions which allow students to accelerate their programs for graduation;

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the need for many students to work which reduces their ability to maintain full academic loads; and

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the segmenting of students into a variety of post secondary alternatives including community colleges, trade/vocational schools and training in trades or on the job.

As the cohort model weakens at the post secondary level, the impact starts to be felt in the secondary system. The rise of web 3.0 and virtual environments start to become important as the system finds that it needs to maintain its curriculum or respond to unmet academic demands; and budgets preclude supporting such programs in brick space. This is where student informal learning outside of the system starts to pressure changes within the system and the protected borders become porous by default and open up opportunities across local, regional and national borders.

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Interestingly, more post secondary institutions are requiring their students to have an international ‘‘experience’’ as part of their program. Moving across brick space can become cost prohibitive but moving into virtual environments, both as laboratory and as ‘‘another culture’’ experience starts to open up new models for educating students and again, points to the need to change the model of education and attack the calcified system at its critical point, the embedded certification empire which, at one time, was the only vehicle for validating that learning had generated a level of competency within an individual. It also, defacto, became a control point with regards to cross border movement of students and professionals who might wish to practice in the USA. Recent problems with the exportation of goods from China to the USA emphasize that there is need for standards. But more importantly, it points out the increasing difficulty of such monitoring with increased movement. The inability to interdict the movement of controlled substances also points to similar issues, as does the increasing number of invasive plant and animal species that are able to migrate across borders regardless of regulations in place. And, with the concern for climate change, it is clear that pollutants both in the air and water know no boundaries. The recent example of Apple Computer’s iPhone being ‘‘unlocked’’ over night so that it can be used everywhere, and the rise of the open access movements points out that knowledge itself moves across borders. The question remains as to how long a certification-controlled cohort driven education system can be maintained in its current form. All of this probably points to the fact that certification defaulted to a third-party may have lost its cachet and that new methods need to come forward. Unfortunately the bureaucracy of certification is now layered well beyond the faculty member in the classroom and even the institution and certification or certificates, be they for a program or a PhD, are the measure of achievement regardless of the knowledge. The idea of a learning community has been dispelled, particularly with the advent of web 3.0. Think of chicken pox. Once one sees the symptoms on the skin, it is too late. You are infected. The USA is seeing knowledge move abroad in the form of chips and cell phones in China, immigrants being educated even when they may be deported, and computers being placed in the hands of the poorest of the poor. Informal knowledge exchange is occurring across the multiple virtual social networks and corporations are finding knowledge where it exists, locked in human biocomputers regardless of the certification system that builds upon a flawed base. In many ways the education system may be as functional as a caboose when trains now come equipped with roller bearings but run on tracks with severe limitations. Edgar Allen Poe wrote a story, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, which tells the tale of a consumptive person kept alive via a hypnotic trance but whose corpus collapsed upon removal of the trance. The US education system is in this critical state. What will it take as an equivalent of the snap of the fingers to break the trance? On the other hand, countries like the UK have found that there is life after hegemony. What is that possible vision and what does it mean for education?

Corresponding author Tom P. Abeles can be contacted at: [email protected]

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected] Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints

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Guest editorial The library and the internet: introduction to the special issue Boria Sax

Boria Sax is an independent scholar at White Plains, New York, USA.

Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue of On the Horizon, which is devoted to the next wave of innovation in online education; analyzes the traditional tension between the realm of books and reality, and to examine ways it which this may be influenced by digital technologies; and reviews possible alternatives to the structure of the traditional classroom for online education. Design/methodology/approach – Building on the work of Hans Blumenberg, this article begins with analysis of the malaise that pervaded literary culture on the threshold of the digital age. It evaluates various educational structures and technologies as attempts to respond to this challenge. Findings – Books not only contain but also structure learning, in fact they condition our expectations of what ‘‘knowledge’’ would be. The world of books has traditionally been opposed to that of ‘‘experience,’’ but digital technologies now provide new means of storing knowledge that transcend this dichotomy. This is a major change in the structure of knowledge, which will eventually transform our institutions of higher education. Originality/value – This article shows how the development of digital media was not simply driven by technology but was a response to the exhaustion of literary traditions, as thinkers began to doubt whether there was anything more worth putting in print. This perspective enables the article to go beyond the technological determinism that pervades much futuristic writing, and suggest how we may innovate, particularly in education, while retaining continuity with the past. Keywords Libraries, Internet, Innovation, Education Paper type Conceptual paper

ew people have ever lived what used to be called ‘‘the life of the mind’’ – actually, a life devoted to books – as completely as the eminent German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, who died in 1996. He knew very well indeed the special joys, frustrations, seductions, vanities, and triumphs that such a life entails, and, unlike many other academic mandarins, he was not inclined to either conceal or romanticize them.

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After an introductory chapter, his book Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (The Intelligibility of the World), begins with a meditation on the library: There is an old enmity between books and reality. What is written usurps the place of reality, to finally render it anachronistic and superfluous. The tradition of writing and finally printing constantly leads to a reduction in the authenticity of experience. Books acquire a an arrogance through their sheer accumulation, that at a point in the development of culture evoked the impression that libraries must contain everything, that it must be pointless in the course of our brief lives to look again at things that have already been taken to account. The power of this impression is shown by the intensity with which people have reacted against it. Suddenly, the dust that covers the books becomes visible. They are old, mildewed, and reek of mold . . . The air in the library is oppressive; to breathe it is a sacrifice, and to pass an entire life there is intolerable . . . (Blumenberg, 1993, trans. Boria Sax).

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DOI 10.1108/10748120810853318

Blumenberg goes on to write of how constant youth movements have been directed with growing vehemence and frequency against the artificiality of the world of books, but ending as their work was absorbed into it. An example, not cited by Blumenberg, is a poem by W.B. Yeats, another master of the written word, entitled The Scholars: Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love’s despair To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear. All shuffle there; all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with their shoes; All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way? (Yeats, 1919/1983).

Most defenders of literary culture have not gotten far beyond haughty dismissals of their critics as unworthy of serious attention and jealous of superior talent. The words of Blumenberg are, of course, analytical, while those of Yeats are polemical, but coming from such accomplished wordsmiths, they are not so easily dismissed as ‘‘puerile’’ or ‘‘anti-intellectual.’’ One especially vehement defender of the world of books his Harold Bloom, who is best-known for The Anxiety of Influence, first published in 1973. According to Bloom, the great writers of the past are far from dead but live on through their works. They continue to struggle with their colleagues and, most especially, with their predecessors and successors for the prize of immortality. Shakespeare, Milton, Freud, and the rest are there, forever maneuvering, scheming, and conniving for higher places in the literary canon (Bloom, 1997). Bloom’s image of the canon is an unwitting reflection of academic life at a research university, with their notorious endless feuds, intrigues, and resentments. By treating the beliefs of the great poets as irrelevant in themselves and simply a means to creation, Bloom unknowingly reduces these, for example the Christianity of Dante or Milton, to hypocrisy. Ultimately, he reduces literature to the clash of titanic egos, which may indeed be a rousing spectacle yet no more exalted than football or wrestling. It is as if Shelley and Whitman were members of some Department of Poetry at a cosmic university, eternally engaged in office politics in order to receive tenure and corner offices. To my mind at least, this is a vision of hell worthy of Dante. T.S. Eliot had wanted very badly to believe in Christianity (Eliot, 1936) but, despite his insistence to the contrary, could not do so, for he was too committed an academic culture where even religious sentiments could mark a person as ‘‘superstitious’’ and ‘‘ignorant.’’ He tried to justify Christianity both to others and himself by identifying it with secular values such as culture and tradition. In an analogous way, Bloom is trying very hard to justify his belief in the literary canon, especially to himself, by giving it the ambiance of popular entertainments that he professes to despise. Reading The Anxiety of Influence in the twenty-first century, the description of literary culture suggests a primitive version of reality television, while the literary canon appears as a cross between the shows Survivor and American Idol. It is a defense of cultural hierarchies that may appear heroic to some and mildly annoying to others, but it is desperate and obviously doomed. This brings us back the theory of Blumenberg, as it appears in the perspective of new technologies. According to Blumenberg, the culture of the book was not only a means to learning, but it structured our very idea of what knowledge is. In the attempt to bridge the gap between literature and experience, people conceived of nature itself as a massive book, perhaps written by the hand of God. Much of both humanistic and scientific culture has consisted in attempts to read the world as an esoteric volume. This meant dividing reality into

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units comparable to words and letters, then translating these one by one. Blumenberg traces this endeavor back to sacred books such as Homer and the Bible, and discusses it as the foundation for attempts by poets of the renaissance and the modern period to see moral lessons in the observation of nature. In the early twentieth century, the literary paradigm for understanding the world found expression in the attempts by Freud and Jung to read dreams as texts in an esoteric language. Still more recently, it is behind the view of the genetic code as a language in which life itself has been written (Blumenberg, 1993). Though Blumenberg does not discuss deconstruction, that approach is a still more recent attempt to apply the techniques of literary interpretation not only to books but the entire world.

The book and the website Blumenberg, for all his prodigious learning that spans many scientific and humanistic disciplines, appears insulated from popular culture to a degree that would probably be impossible today. He views the culture of print as the only alternative to direct experience, and does not foresee any resolution of the tension between the two. He does not even discuss the internet or digital technologies, which have become an alternative for many people. In the two decades or so when Die Lesbarkeit der Welt was first published, these have already vastly changed our perspective on books. The mustiness of libraries that Blumenberg remarked on, for example, is now less likely to be perceived as unhealthy or unnatural, in fact people may find it has a sort of palpable reality that is refreshing. The faint smell of decaying paper can almost seem invigorating by comparison with the antiseptic flatness of the computer screen. As for spending an entire life there, that is hardly a danger even for the most solitary and introspective of us. Besides, the contemporary library is not especially musty, in fact it is filled with sleek digital equipment. The youth rebellions that Blumenberg believed characteristic of book culture no longer seem to occur regularly, and their intensity is greatly diminished. ‘‘Nerd,’’ once a derogatory term for those who spend too much time with books, now refers instead to those who spend their days before a computer screen. It is important to recognize that the digitalization of knowledge was not simply driven by technology. It came precisely as book culture was nearing exhaustion. It is attested, for example, by the way leading philosophers of the modern era such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud showed no confidence in its institutions and were perpetually on the threshold of despair. The last couple of centuries at least had been dominated by apocalyptic visions, shared by Communists, Fascists, and Christians. Even the defenders of literary culture such as Bloom could appeal to little beyond the fear of barbarism, and their work was pervaded by melancholy pessimism. Had digital technologies not come along, it is still not likely that literary culture could have survived much longer without massive changes. It is entirely possible that internet technologies may have actually postponed an upheaval in academia. Digital technologies would certainly not have been adopted so quickly if the culture of print had offered greater satisfactions. Edward Castronova puts it thus: Let us consider the Earth as a synthetic world itself and ask, will this always be a fun game to play? Or, more accurately, what are the conditions under which daily life would be the best game to play, better than any computer-generated fantasy, and for how many people will these conditions apply going into the future? These questions have only troubling answers; not many cultural theorists describe daily life in the modern era as wonderful, uplifting, exciting. Huizinga, for example, lamented the fact that modernity was gradually destroying the institutions of play in daily life . . . (Castronova, 2005, p. 75).

And, even in the modern era, the library has been notorious as a place of drudgery. But do digital technologies enable us to overcome the tension between print and reality? Or do they simply render the same tension in a different form? Is digital technology truly something new, with a potentially transformative effect on human culture? Or are they simply an extension of printed matter in a more technologically sophisticated form? Or is it perhaps an intermediate form, capable of mediating between traditional learning and experience. Digital technologies can produce a sensual intensity far greater than that of a printed page,

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yet they are at least as vulnerable to the charge of being ‘‘unnatural.’’ At any rate, but we might expect any changes to be reflected in the foremost bastions of book culture – our colleges and universities. In this issue of On the Horizon, contributors draw much inspiration from John Dewey, who advocated education through experience as well as books in the early to mid-twentieth century. The two, in his view, needed not to be in conflict, but could be used to supplement and correct one another (Dewey, 1997). The ‘‘progressive education’’ advocated by Dewey became influential as early as the 1920s, yet for much of the twentieth century its influence was largely limited to experimental schools. With the advent of online learning, it has gained new prominence. In the current issue of On the Horizon, Cornel Reinhart has provided us with a sort of manifesto for the transformation of our educational institutions. He argues, I believe convincingly, that universities in the new millennium will be centered not on the traditional library but on the Internet. He further maintains that this change, and the constructivist paradigm that accompanies it, will eventually place in question the model of universities that has prevailed in the west since such institutions of higher education such as Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris (now the Sorbonne) were founded in the late Middle Ages. He supports this contention though a survey of cutting edge educational technologies from podcasts to virtual reality, and finds they do not fit harmoniously with the hierarchic structures of a traditional university (Reinhart, 2008). But, for now at least, massive structural changes remain on the horizon. In their analysis of the current version of Blackboard, by far the most widely used learning management system in the US, Carla Payne and Cornel Reinhart find that it supports more a behaviorist rather than a constructivist approach to learning. The constructivist model calls for active learning and collaboration, yet the learning management system (LMS) tends to subvert this by according ever-greater power to faculty and administrators to structure and control their lessons. Furthermore, the authors contend, Blackboard and other learning management systems essentially take the traditional classroom and transfer it to cyberspace, rather than delivering the paradigm shift that many expected at the advent of online learning during the last decade or so of the twentieth century (Payne and Reinhart, 2008). The constructivist approach, though now very widely accepted in theory, often conflicts with the growing pressure for ‘‘accountability’’ in higher education, which tends to take the form of a demand for measurable results (Zemsky et al., 2005). If knowledge is created in the classroom as constructivists believe, rather than simply transferred, it is impossible to know in advance just what form learning will take. Furthermore, even what is learned may vary significantly from one individual student to the next. Any measurement must have the flexibility to take account of the special needs of individual students. In an opinion piece in this issue, Nish Sonwalkar (2008) proposes a structured system called ‘‘adaptive learning,’’ which is designed to take account of individual differences among students. The learning is divided into stages, which may be completed by individual students in several alternative ways, in accordance with their learning styles or preferences. The essential innovation consists in viewing learning not as a linear progression but as a three dimensional activity, in which all participants have greater scope to maneuver. It is well to remember in this connection that paradigm shifts virtually never occur abruptly with the publication of a new book or the founding of a new organization. The heliocentric model of the universe, for example, continued to be used alongside the geocentric model for centuries after Copernicus. That we speak of the run ‘‘rising’’ suggests that even now the paradigm shift inaugurated by Copernicus is not yet complete. Similarly, the publication of The Origin of Species by Darwin in 1859 did not instantly transform biology, much less popular thinking. Creationists continued to make important contributions to biology well into the twentieth century, and it is quite likely that they still do today. About half of Americans believe literally in the Biblical account of creation in seven days, and two-thirds support teaching creationism in public schools (PEW, 2007). Some historians of science have even challenged Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1996), on the basis that science

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does not work from a single ‘‘dominant paradigm’’ but from many different intellectual models at once (Fuller, 2000). That, at any rate, may be inevitable in education, which is at most a very imperfect science and filled with intangibles. But if, as Payne and Reinhart maintain, educators are now constructivist in their philosophy yet behaviorist in their practice, the tension will be difficult to maintain for any extended period. Unlike intellectual paradigms, institutional structures can be transformed in the course of decades or less, for example the abrupt collapse of Communism during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Could a similar transformation await the universities? We certainly not answer that question with any confidence, but many serious scholars now at least take that seriously as a possibility (Zemsky and Duderstadt, 2004). One indication that the Soviet Union was approaching collapse was its emphasis on increasingly elaborate forms and protocols, detached from any purpose and executed without belief. Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, the Communist leader of Romania, had well over 100 titles, including many honorary degrees, which were all dutifully listed at the beginning of his many books. Prior to the internet, academia certainly had a preoccupation with elaborate titles, forms, and protocols. Understanding of history, for example, might be measured by the recollection of bits of information such as names and dates, detached from context that would make them meaningful. Papers would be judged in large part by their adherence to excruciatingly complicated forms of documentation. There was a pervasive fear that carelessness about these details would, in an almost magical way, lead to the disintegration of standards and, ultimately, to chaos. There has been much liberalization in recent decades, and institutions have shown a considerable ability to adjust to cultural and technological changes. But the universities still do not have any clear sense of their mission or role, and are pervaded by a sense of crisis.

Traffic in Italy The use of intricate structures, or even their availability, can create a dependence on them. This is why, for example, American visitors to Italy are at first terrified by the motorists there, who can appear almost completely wild and uncontrollable. In most of Europe and North America busy intersections have traffic lights, but in Italy they do not, and the Italians rely on custom rather than rules for crossing streets. Pedestrians simply wait at a crowed corner, and after a while the motorists stop of their own volition and allow people to cross. In this case tradition is more efficient than regulation, since motorists are not forced to make unnecessary stops, nor to stop if, for whatever reason, they are in a desperate hurry. The Italian system may take some getting used to, but it has an organic flexibility that more formally regulated systems lack. Most significantly, since motorists in the US are used to relying on traffic lights, they will almost never stop for a pedestrian when there is no light. If they did, the cars behind them would not understand and start honking with impatience. I would like to see an approach to education with a similar flexibility, and I am concerned that the intricate regulation of the online classroom is becoming almost mandatory. It is much too early for any comprehensive evaluation of contemporary approaches to online learning, but I fear we may become excessively reliant on elaborate directions in the online classroom. As instructors, we may frequently incorporate qualities such as collaboration, initiative, leadership, and even spontaneity into our assignments and grading rubrics, but one danger to these qualities is excessive commodification. When people are expected to be ‘‘collaborative,’’ ‘‘creative,’’ and even ‘‘spontaneous’’ on demand, one has to wonder if what they display is the real thing. Like the motorists that only stop when there are traffic lights, we could induce students to, for example, only work in a collaborative manner when there is a directive to that effect. The authors in this issue of On the Horizon have identified a disconnect between the constructivist aspirations espoused now by most contemporary educators and their actual practice. Even if the consequences take some time to be worked out, it may be that recent cultural and technological changes have irrevocably changed the foundation of education. In this connection, I would like to look more closely at Reinhart’s insight that the university will be, in fact already is, centered around the internet rather than the library.

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The internet has not supplanted the library so much as absorbed it. Even the most extensive library contains only a minute fraction of the information that may be found in cyberspace. Furthermore, a great many holdings in even the most esoteric libraries are, or may eventually be, found online. But there are vast differences in both structure and symbolism that will help determine the character of the university in the decades and centuries to come. First of all, the divisions of knowledge by field correspond to the partitions of the university by department. In a sense, these divisions have always been arbitrary, since they do not correspond to any organic divides in knowledge. The divisions are also not pragmatic, since practical problems almost never fit neatly into one academic field or another. But they have been sanctioned by centuries of tradition to a point that it is hard for many people to conceive of knowledge apart from them. On the internet, however, such divisions no longer exist. When you search for information, you need never consider if it is a matter of sociology, biology, or philosophy. You simply type a topic in the search engine and see what comes up. The internet can be terrifying in its apparent formlessness, which evokes associations of primeval chaos. Perhaps even more significantly, inclusion of new materials on the internet is easy and almost instantaneous. The university was originally a largely monastic institution, with roots in the ideal of a contemplative life. The gradual process of writing, editing, publishing, and marketing a book necessitated co-operation, review, and reflection, which, in turn, might be expressed in the final product. These are qualities that have traditionally defined academic life at its best. The speed of electronic communications makes them difficult to sustain (Hesse, 1997, p. 5). But it is possible to take the limitations of the Internet as a challenge. The purpose of the university in the twenty-first century may be not so much the generation of knowledge, as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but providing structure and significance (Sax, 2005). The internet is a resource and not an act of fate.

Conclusions The panic and euphoria that greeted in the advent of online learning in the early 1980s and 1990s has dissipated with remarkable speed, as educators formulated new rules, conventions, and protocols for online learning. The educational revolution that many had feared or hoped for did not materialize. What is most responsible for this is the standardization of learning management systems, of which Blackboard is by far the most notable in the USA. At least in the short-term, they solved the logistical problems posed by online learning, but not the broader questions of the goals and role of education. Despite being efficiently organized, the sheer number of features it bundles together can make learning management systems such as Blackboard and WebCT difficult for both students and faculty to use. Furthermore, professors using it often feel compelled to make their ‘‘contracts’’ with their students, primarily in the syllabus, at times almost as intricate as those legal documents in which only a lawyer can negotiate the fine print. Too many rules in social encounters can conceal a lack of communication, while too much ceremony in a church can conceal a lack of faith; in a similar way, overly intricate codes for the online classroom can be a way to mask the absence of an educational ideal. At present, education in the USA is a massive and growing industry, yet its lacks a sense of mission and purpose. It is increasingly ruled by the whims of the marketplace, and what remains of its values is constantly eroded by ruthless competition (Zemsky and Duderstadt, 2004). It may prove to be not entirely unlike Communism, where organizational structures were able to outlive the ideology that produced them – but only for a limited time. While things are going relatively smoothly, institutions may survive very well on tradition and habit, but in times of crisis, such as a major recession, they are called to justify themselves. There remains the potential for another upheaval in online education, and we should look closely at alternatives to the traditionally organized classroom such as the adaptive learning proposed by Sonwalkar (2008). A major change could occur if new technologies such as podcasts, virtual reality and those yet to come prove too various and too complex to be

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accommodated harmoniously within even the most intricate Learning Management System. As the process of learning takes on the texture of experience, something that cannot easily be divided into standard units or modules, we will be forced to develop not only new techniques but also new ways of thinking about teaching and learning.

References Bloom, H. (1997), The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Blumenberg, H. (1993), Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt on the Main. Castronova, E. (2005), Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Dewey, J. (1997), Experience and Education, Free Press, New York, NY. Eliot, T.S. (1936), Essays, Ancient and Modern, Faber and Faber, London. Fuller, S. (2000), Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Time, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Hesse, C. (1997), ‘‘Humanities and the library in the digital age’’, in Kernan, A. (Ed.), What’s Happened to the Humanities?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Kuhn, T.S. (1996), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Payne, C.R. and Reinhart, C.J. (2008), ‘‘Can we talk? Course management software and the construction of knowledge’’, On the Horizon, Vol. 16 No. 1. PEW (2007), ‘‘Reading the polls on evolution and creationism’’, available at: http://people-press.org/ commentary/display.php3?AnalysisID ¼ 118 (accessed 10 July 2007). Reinhart, C.J. (2008), ‘‘Constructing the cafe´ university: teaching and learning on the digital frontier’’, On the Horizon, Vol. 16 No. 1. Sax, B. (2005), ‘‘All that knowledge, and so what? Scholarship in the digital university’’, On the Horizon, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 216-9. Sonwalkar, N. (2008), ‘‘Adaptive individualization: the next generation of online education’’, On the Horizon, Vol. 16 No. 1. Yeats, W.B. (1919/1983), ‘‘The scholars’’, in Finneran, R.J. (Ed.), The Poems of W.B. Yeats, Macmillan, New York, NY. Zemsky, R. and Duderstadt, J.J. (2004), ‘‘Reinventing the research university: an American perspective’’, in Weber, L.E. and Duderstadt, J.J. (Eds), Reinventing the Research University, Economica, London. Zemsky, R., Wegner, G.R. and Massy, W.F. (2005), Remaking the American University: Market-Smart and Mission-Centered, Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, NJ.

About the author Boria Sax is an independent scholar and author of many books on human-animal relations, which have been translated into many languages. His most recent project is a history of the ravens in the Tower of London. He teaches online for UIS and Berkeley college, and was the winner of the 2002 Sloan-C Award for ‘‘Online Learning Effectiveness.’’ Boria Sax can be contacted at: [email protected]

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected] Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints

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Constructing the cafe´ university: teaching and learning on the digital frontier Cornel J. Reinhart

Cornel J. Reinhart is President and Consultant at the Center for eLearning and eLiteracy, Mooers, New York, USA and Bloemfontein, South Africa

Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to examine changes occurring in the organization and delivery of learning at the level of higher education, and argues that it is now possible to envision the shape and structures of the future digital university. Design/methodology/approach – Beginning with a history of the basic organizational paradigm underlying the traditional university, this paper systematically explores the impact on this paradigm of new technological and pedagogical innovations: learning management systems (LMSs), learning objects, iPods, blogs, student e-mail, wireless connectivity, Google’s search capacity, distance (web-based) education, and blended learning on the pedagogy of tertiary education. Findings – The physical structure of the university is a consequence of the hierarchically organization of knowledge, the predominant model from the late middle ages through the industrial era. As knowledge becomes more extensive and complex, the old organization is proving inadequate. The organization of knowledge in several dimensions will bring a massive restructuring of institutions of higher education. The new digital university will have the web rather than disciplines and the library at its virtual center with (nearly) infinite access to the larger peripheral world. No longer holding a monopoly on information, the postmodern cafe´ university competes with commercial, for-profit institutions of learning, thus offering traditional and new adult learners immediate access and enormous learning flexibility. This enables students of all ages to take advantage of learning experiences from any connected institution, commercial or traditional, in the world. Originality/value – As a comprehensive and systematic examination of the impact of digital tools in the contemporary university, this paper can offer guidance to university administrators, faculty members, and others involved in the educational process. Keywords Universities, E-learning, Higher education Paper type Conceptual paper

Introduction Commenting on the conjuncture of Martin Luther’s theology and the Gutenberg printing press, Eric Erikson warned: It would be fatal to underestimate the degree to which the future always belongs to those who combine a universal enough new meaning with the mastery of a new technology (Erikson, 1962, p. 225).

Assuming the truth of Erikson’s observation, it seems fair to ask: to what extent has evolving digital ‘‘technology’’ influenced the forms and structures, indeed, the ‘‘meaning’’ of the modern university? How has ‘‘technology’’ transformed the learning process itself? What, for example, constitutes literacy today? What are the goals of educators, the goals of the contemporary university? Can the university remain competitive in the delivery of information? When does the modern university become a post-modern institution? Fraught with complexity, the answers to these questions challenge the university’s deepest organizational structures, the beliefs and routines of faculty and administrators, and the

DOI 10.1108/10748120810853327

VOL. 16 NO. 1 2008, pp. 13-33, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1074-8121

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prejudices of those of us raised in an earlier academic world. Have we, to paraphrase Erikson, combined a sufficiently new universal meaning, a new learning pedagogy, with the mastery of digital technology? While this essay addresses these questions, I am primarily interested here in the learning goals and teaching processes of higher education. Teaching and research necessarily overlap; still, as far as possible, my remarks are devoted to the university as a pedagogical institution. We are experiencing an economic and cultural transition every bit as revolutionary and dislocating as the movement from feudal to industrial society. The worldwide web now gives us the capacity to reach individuals directly, point-to-point, for marketing, access to data, and for educational purposes. However we might feel about these developments, as educators they are going on with or without us. Students who just ten years ago had little computing or internet literacy come to us now reasonably sophisticated users of both[1]. The post-modern cafe´ university permits faculty, administrators and learners of all ages to gather in their local coffee shop connected horizontally to the internet, to their colleagues and to the world; an unprecedented array of digital tools for searching and analyzing, for teaching and learning, lie as close as the next cappuccino. We can argue whether the changes confronting our older educational institutions are ‘‘revolutionary’’ or ‘‘evolutionary,’’ but it seems clear that profound changes are taking place.

The Oxbridge model Thomas Kuhn suggested that when the weight of new information grows too heavy for the prevailing scientific (or ideological) theory to support and integrate, it collapses in favor of a new paradigm (Kuhn, 1996). Perhaps, in this context, we can take a moment to sketch the outlines of the modern university. Volumes have been written about the emergence of the western university, its appearance in the late middle ages, its structures and organizational architecture, its functions (see, Rashdall, 1936; Brooke, 1993; and a useful collection of web sources at www.beloit.edu/,ist190/universities.html). From Cambridge University’s A Brief History comes this interesting description: Meanwhile during the late fourteenth century and after, the university began to acquire property on the site today known as Senate-House Hill, and to build on it a group of buildings called the ‘‘schools’’ – some of which survive today as the ‘‘old’’ schools. Here were the teaching rooms of the higher faculties, where lectures and disputations were held, the chapel, the library, and the treasury, with its chests and muniments. Most of the land and buildings in the town was still in private hands . . . although from the late thirteenth century much was already passing to the new institutions called colleges. Before the middle of the sixteenth century, the colleges began to play a decisive part in university life . . . . Their heads often served with the vice-chancellor and senior doctors as members of an advisory council which was soon to be called the Caput Senatus. From the sixteenth century until almost the end of the twentieth, the office of vice-chancellor was always held by the head of one of the colleges (University of Cambridge, 2004a).

Western academics recognize readily these ancient institutions. The forms and structures of the modern university were accreting their powers and privileges in the early thirteenth century. We see in this one sentence all the familiar structures of the contemporary western university: ‘‘here were the teaching rooms of the higher faculties, where lectures and disputations were held, the chapel, the library, and the treasury, with its chests and muniments.’’ This model: the library, the colleges, the lecture halls, the administrative building, faculty governance (eroded, in time, to be sure) all remain today. The physical architecture of the contemporary university demands these buildings with their associated functions: the paradigmatic architecture[2]. The core of the model however is not physical, it is rather an ancient learning paradigm: the master scholar, disciplines organized by faculties, the lecture, the text and rare manuscripts housed in the library, all erected to serve a specific locale: Bologna, Cambridge, Oxford, Wittenberg, Leuven, Glasgow, Harvard (to serve New England elites), the Sorbonne, the University of Heidelberg, the University of the Free State. Today, of course, these universities, like others worldwide, attract students from across the globe – but they remain residential institutions in their core mission[3].

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Our concern here is primarily with the present organization and delivery of learning at the contemporary university and college level[4]. It is possible today to begin to envision the shape and structures of the new digital university. For years, especially as distance education became more popular for administrators and faculty alike, we heard cries of alarm and joy alike that the older university of brick and mortar was soon to be displaced, bulldozed onto the scrap heap of history. Those calls proved to be premature, the old buildings still stand and more important the older teaching structures and routines continue apace[5]. The central organizing feature of the traditional ‘‘Oxbridge model’’ learning complex was the lecture (and disputations), the face-to-face meeting between the master and his students[6]. The text lay close at hand to be read and studied, written about and discussed. The earliest examinations were oral with written work, theses, dissertations, essays and articles following. Soon thereafter, scholars organized themselves, and, most significantly, their specialized information, into disciplines, into faculties, to verify master’s licenses while establishing and maintaining their discipline’s standards (University of Cambridge, 2004b). Administrators appeared almost simultaneously with disciplines and colleges; their titles remain familiar today: chancellors, vice chancellors, deans, registrars and a host of lesser denizens. Administrators and administration were as essential to the Oxbridge learning model as the master and lecture (University of Cambridge, 2004b). Lectures (particularly for undergraduates and in the more democratically ‘‘open’’ universities), had to be scheduled, buildings synchronized with schedules, students needed to know where to go to meet their professors, their masters. Industrialization heightened and intensified these organizational imperatives. Time, efficiency, economies of scale were as important to good administration as learning – yet, despite some tension they reinforced each other. One major change was that the geographical organization of the university gradually became more extensive and complex. The Oxbridge model required lecturers and lectures; the university served a local market disseminating information to residential students, the text resided in the university library and each institution competed to amass the largest collection of volumes and rarest of manuscripts.

Information: organized and disseminated What were these scholars, the masters, and their universities attempting to do? The end of the medieval period or beginning of the early modern is distinguished by the French Encyclopedists valiant effort to amass and organize all known information in the L’Encyclope´die project (Berthier, 1752; Pannabecker, 1994; Darnton, 1979). The early modern university structures, disciplines and faculties, were organized to collect all the information deemed relevant to their discipline, understanding that the master would memorize the appropriate information, and its sources, then serve as a font of learning for his students. Disciplines were organized hierarchically and vertically, into, for example, the science or humanities faculties and further sub-divided by specialized areas of knowledge into biology or physics, philosophy or history[7]. Denis Diderot, the most prominent of the French Encyclopedists, described disciplines in his article ‘‘ART’’ in the first volume of the Encyclope´die: We began by making observations on the nature, service, usage, qualities of beings and of their symbols; then we gave the name of science or of art or of discipline in general, to the center or unifying point to which we related the observations that we had made, to form a system of either rules or instruments, and of rules tending towards the same goal; because that is what a discipline is in general (cited in Pannabecker, 1996).

On the different approaches of Rousseau and Diderot to their common interest in the L’Encyclope´die, Pannabecker writes: ‘‘Diderot’s approach was to represent the mechanical arts as disciplinary content; he felt this content needed to be better organized, systematized, written down, and illustrated in order to facilitate dissemination, critical thinking, and progress’’ (Pannabecker, 1996, pp. 33-34).

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Human development then, for Diderot and Rousseau, was dependent upon proper collection, organization and dissemination of information: ‘‘Diderot probably contributed as much to popularizing the rational systematization of the mechanical arts as Rousseau did to popularizing the importance of the stages of human development in their relationship to pedagogy’’ (Pannabecker, 1996, pp. 33-34). At Cambridge, the introduction of new disciplines advanced rapidly after 1850. The natural sciences and moral sciences were approved: As early as 1851 and before 1900 Triposes in law, history, theology, Indian languages, Semitic (later oriental) languages, medieval and modern (European) languages, and mechanical sciences (later engineering) were all established. To develop these new branches of learning a number of new or remodelled professorships were established by the university and by private benefactors, the earliest being the Disney Professorship of archaeology in 1851. The numbers of other established teaching posts remained small, and most undergraduate teaching was done by lecturers, appointed and paid by the colleges, or by private coaches. As numbers of students grew during the last half of the century (matriculations increased from 441 in 1850 to 1,191 in 1910), much accommodation was added to existing colleges . . . (University of Cambridge, 2004b).

The lecture served as the critical point of contact between masters and students. As universities grew in size, so also did the lecture hall and class size. Martin Luther’s development as a young lecturer at the University of Wittenberg provides a glimpse into the early modern scholar’s institutional role. ‘‘Luther the lecturer,’’ Erikson observes, ‘‘was a different man from either preacher or monk. His special field was Biblical exegesis. He most carefully studied the classical textbooks . . . and his important predecessors among the Augustinians; he also kept abreast of the humanist scholars of his time and of the correctives provided by Erasmus’s study of the Greek texts and Reuchlin’s study of the Hebrew texts’’ (Erikson, 1962, p. 198). Similarly, Luther utilized the latest technologies of his day to disseminate his revolutionary (and later counter-revolutionary) ideas: ‘‘Literacy,’’ Erikson writes, ‘‘and a conscience speaking the mother tongue – these pillars of our present-day identity had long been in the building. But Gutenberg had, as it were, waited for Luther; and the new technique of mass communication was thus available to Luther’s theological performance, which so attracted the charisma, the personality cult, of a nation’’ (Erikson, 1962, p. 225). Of course this organizational model persists today, with junior lecturers handling the great mass of undergraduate students in large halls while senior ‘‘masters’’ pursue their own research, offering specialized disciplinary seminars to small numbers of elite post-graduates. Tragic, but instructive, lecturers today in large American universities, as elsewhere in the world, encounter students in a single lecture class routinely numbering from the hundreds to a thousand or more. Despite these daunting statistics, administrators and faculty continue to affirm the benefits of face-to-face contact[8]. Like Diderot and the encyclopedists of the enlightenment, educators (and the public alike) living and working in the digital age confront the monumental task of organizing and disseminating information. Our new digital encyclopedists are busy creating algorithms they hope will categorize, identify and bring to our laptops information requested a scant second ago. Google’s momentary primacy lies in its capacity to organize a nearly infinite range of discrete bits of data, bringing the scholar or layman those ‘‘facts’’ most relevant to their search. We have known since Socrates, and before, that information is not knowledge. Knowledge is something more, at its most profound a philosophical and pedagogical mystery. But for the purposes of the Oxbridge learning model, it was sufficient to believe that information organized by disciplines and masters yielded knowledge and could be disseminated to undergraduates and post-graduate students in time-honored ways[9]. Today, however, we are awash in information, each digital search yielding thousands of references to the requested information point. Each of these myriad bits of data is linked to an equally voluminous set of new and interesting references – some scholarly, some ridiculous – but in the end nearly impossible to research and organize exhaustively as scholars were expected to do just a decade ago. As Martin observes, ‘‘the infinitude of

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information that is now accessible through the internet dwarfs any attempt to master a subject – it is simply no longer possible to know what is to be known in any area. The responses are to focus on ever narrower or more esoteric disciplines or interests, or to admit that all that can be done is to sample the field’’ (Martin, 2006, p. 7). Birkerts deplores the educational and philosophical results of digital overload: The explosion of data . . . has all but destroyed the premise of understandability. Inundated by perspectives, by lateral vistas of information that stretch endlessly in every direction, we no longer accept the possibility of assembling a complete picture. Instead of carrying on the ancient project of philosophy – attempting to discover the ‘‘truth’’ of things – we direct our energies to managing information (Birkerts, 1994, p. 75).

Whither from here? The old Oxbridge learning model seems increasingly unable to bear the weight of the social and technological changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The old model antedated Guttenberg’s printing press and survived, indeed flourished, after adopting mass printing to its own purposes. Oxbridge also adapted to the industrial age, since the end of the second world war becoming more and more corporate in its language and structures. What strategies will, or can, faculty and administrators develop to confront these new challenges to Oxbridge: from challenges to the university’s regional hegemony posed by the internet’s global reach, to pedagogical problems caused by a rising flood of information and the increasing irrelevancy of the lecture and disciplinary master. Still, these daunting issues have not slowed student demand for a higher education: student numbers grow exponentially as adolescent and adult learners, South American, Asian and African, acquire the technology and resources to demand a university education. Relevant humanist and digital literacy is, arguably, more necessary now than at any other period in human history (Golden, 2006). In the last 30 years, the academy has been roiled by repeated waves of educational curricular reform: great books, the old (dead, white, male) canon, the new (feminist, diversity, voice and identity) canon, post-modernism, writing across the disciplines, interdisciplinarity, and the most current and, perhaps comprehensive, the universal calls for active or student-centered learning with the application of rigorous assessment processes to higher education. These curricular clashes suggest (despite the occasional hyperbole of each wave’s adherents) that content may not be central to the learning experience[10]. Nor, it seems, is discontent with the Oxbridge learning model exclusively a technological phenomenon[11]. The lecture has been dying a slow intellectual death for some years now. It is widely and loudly denounced at most contemporary academic conferences and meetings. Active-learning strategies have long since swept the field, now taken up by most accrediting institutions as the standard for excellence in learning. Assessment discussions and institutional assessment plans likewise feature active-student engagement as a core principle for learning in higher education. Technology certainly has played a role in accelerating these trends but it is not the sole driving force.

Conceptual models for online learning Norm Friesen has explored the divergent and, later, convergent, paths traced by the Anglo-American term didactic, meaning approximately what we understand by ‘‘training’’ or ‘‘pedagogy,’’ and its German analog Didaktic, meaning roughly the same thing as ‘‘humanistic education.’’ At the turn of the twentieth century, John Dewey’s notions of instructional theory closely paralleled the Germanic Didaktic, a broad understanding of learning and human development. By century’s end, however, Edward L. Thorndike’s behaviorism had eclipsed Dewey’s pragmatic and ‘‘experiential’’ philosophy, creating a divide between the two traditions. Friesen sees these two different learning traditions now converging, partially as a result of developments in learning technology, as both traditions struggle to incorporate

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microlearning scenarios characteristic of much web or computer-based instruction. Friesen explains, ‘‘learning displays a contextual and organizational complexity that is irreducible to the ‘generalized structures’ of pre-defined classifications and sequences.’’ By ‘‘pre-defined classifications and sequences’’ Friesen means: learning object metadata, simple sequencing and learning design among other ‘‘components’’ presently engaging Anglo-American researchers interested in ‘‘re-arranging small, recombinant resources to constitute given instructional sequences . . . ’’ (Friesen, 2006, p. 9). Similarly, and ironically, other educators and technologists, borrowing from the Germanic model are busy trying to ‘‘recontextualize’’ these same resources. ‘‘Microcontents,’’ Friesen concludes, ‘‘cannot be recontextualized simply in accordance with the established sequences of a given web didaktiks.’’ Broader humanistic considerations, in other words, must provide a context for more specifically focused lessons to be meaningful (Friesen, 2006, p. 10). Understanding the struggles of the older learning paradigms to incorporate digital learning will help us to evaluate the usefulness of digital instructional tools such as learning objects, learning object metadata, and learning management systems. Norm Friesen’s observations help us to reconceptualize the learning goals, architecture and implications of contemporary ‘‘learning management systems.’’ Friesen calls our attention to Lucy Suchman’s (1987) observation that plans serve only as rough guidelines for activities, gaining their full meaning only when realized in action or, expressed differently, human plans (read LMSs) only attain their full potential when they shift from ‘‘control structures that universally precede and determine actions, to discursive resources produced and used within the course of certain forms of human activity’’ (Suchman, 2003, p. 299; cited in Friesen, 2006, p. 10).

Changing of the guard? ‘‘Technology,’’ in the form of web-based or online learning, grew out of the adult education movement that created numerous distance programs in and outside major residential universities and colleges beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In America, these years saw the appearance of the College Park division of the University of Maryland (actually created after the second world war to serve American military personnel and their families serving abroad), some 25 Ford Foundation funded University Without Walls programs, Empire State College in New York, and many similar adult outreach programs for adult learners across the nation (Maehl, 2000). In Europe, similar pressures to educate adults free of residential requirements led to the appearance of the UK’s world renowned Open University and similar institutions on the continent. Most of these efforts, however, necessarily focused on individualized studies. With adults scattered by geography, work and the pressures of family life, the only viable means of reaching these non-traditional learners was by mail and telephone (later by fax and e-mail). By the late 1990s, the appearance of the internet created opportunities for genuine classroom experiences using first the synchronous chat room and quickly after the asynchronous bulletin board to create a seminar and learning community experience for adult students at a distance (Reinhart, 1998; Reinhart, 2005). While traditional residential enrollments in the US are virtually stagnant, the number of online, non-traditional students is exploding. At UMass Online enrollments have quadrupled to 9,200 students since 2001. The majority of these online enrollments are non-traditional students between the ages of 25 and 50; 30 percent are from outside Massachusetts – this despite paying slightly higher tuition than their residential counterparts. Pennsylvania State’s online program is also growing rapidly with a total of 5,691 students in 2006 up 18 percent since last fiscal year. Noting the rapid expansion of American public universities into the online environment, Gary Miller, associate vice president for outreach at Pennsylvania State, a public land grant institution, asks: ‘‘the question in our case wasn’t, ‘should we do this?’ but ‘how do we do it right?’’’ (Golden, 2006). ‘‘Doing it right,’’ may be as much, or more, a pedagogical question than an economic one: to put more precisely, online pedagogical choices, online ‘‘environments,’’ may have as much to do with economic outcomes as student learning[12].

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Skidmore College’s University Without Walls program offers a useful instance of these significant technological and pedagogical developments. From its inception, Skidmore College has been one of America’s small but prestigious residential colleges, in its earlier years serving elite young women from America’s most distinguished families. In the late 1960s, a slim majority of progressive faculty members decided to support an unusual experiment – to create an individualized studies program offering Skidmore College’s bachelor’s degree to adults living at a distance[13]. The resulting University Without Walls (UWW) program was funded for a short period by a Ford Foundation grant (the same funding source for over 20 other UWW programs at large and small colleges and universities) then later formally adopted by Skidmore College in 1972. Until 1997, all of UWW’s adult students, scattered around the globe, were served by surface mail, telephone, fax, and e-mail. During the spring term 1997, UWW offered its first online course, ‘‘America in the Sixties,’’ abruptly revolutionizing how UWW worked. Suddenly, the technological means were at hand to create genuine ‘‘classes’’ of widely dispersed students; learning communities grew from individual students meeting and talking with each other, first, in a single class, later from contact in numerous learning experiences. Currently, UWW has expanded its catalog of online courses to well over 100 (a tiny fraction compared to larger adult distance programs like Empire State College, University of Maryland at College Park, the SUNY Learning Network, UMassOnline, or Penn State, to name just a few). Borrowing from John Dewey’s notion that information is not knowledge, indeed, that knowledge is socially constructed; the UWW asynchronous seminar was from the beginning quite successful. UWW’s pedagogical and Didaktic approach sought to duplicate – online – the seminar experience of a quality post-graduate education (Reinhart, 2005)[14].

Asynchronicity[15] UWW built its online learning architecture – the core of its new learning paradigm – around the asynchronous ‘‘bulletin board,’’ consciously rejecting lectures as simply another reading online, eschewing as well the use of the then more current synchronous ‘‘chat room.’’ For adult learners, the synchronous ‘‘chat room’’ simply makes no sense whatsoever: it requires adult student learners, not in residence at the college or university, with jobs, family responsibilities and, yet more difficult, scattered over disparate global time zones, to be at a computer at a specific time, a ‘‘synchronous’’ moment convenient only to the instructor. More significantly, the ‘‘chat room’’ was a dreadful learning environment – it offered the worst possible metaphor for an Oxbridge ‘‘face-to-face’’ discussion imaginable. Student and faculty comments and questions could not be handled with deliberation or any degree of reflection; facilitator and students alike crowded onto a queue that crawled inexorably ‘‘up’’ the page until good comments and suggestions simply disappeared. If anyone, including the instructor, couldn’t type, or think sufficiently quickly, the entire ‘‘learning’’ experience became a nightmare of hoping to get a word or phrase into the conversation, somewhere, somehow (Payne and Reinhart, 2004). Despite these apparently overwhelming obstacles, the ‘‘chat room’’ seemed for many faculty and administrators most like their familiar Oxbridge model. The resulting struggle at UWW yielded a compromise: faculty who wished to use the ‘‘chat room’’ could do so, but as an ‘‘office hour.’’ In this way, students could ‘‘arrive’’ voluntarily at the faculty member’s ‘‘office’’ and, with fewer learners in attendance, actually expect to have their questions answered. Later, valued dialogue from this ‘‘office hour’’ could be sifted, copied and posted to the asynchronous bulletin board for other students’ more thoughtful, less pressured consideration and comments. It is interesting how unsuccessful the chat room as pedagogy is, while students engage continuously in instant messaging[16]!

Learning management systems UWW also chose to build the remainder of its prototype web course site – the first Skidmore College online course: ‘‘America in the Sixties’’ – from the raw language available then to create applications for the web: Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Quickly however, the first commercial learning management systems (LMS) appeared on the market to ‘‘facilitate’’ better student and faculty administration with a promise to create online architecture

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congenial to good learning. Blackboard and WebCT (now merged) rather quickly came to dominate the marketplace. Almost as quickly, a range of criticisms emerged from faculty, students and administrators alike about these commercial products. From an economic perspective, they were hailed as inexpensive until the first, and subsequent, contract renewals came due. Likewise, they ‘‘branded’’ their ‘‘LMS’’ product to the larger exclusion of the college or university client. More troubling from a pedagogical point of view, they were often boring, clumsy to use for students and faculty and suffered from template rigidity, so inflexible that faculty could not find ways to create their unique individual ‘‘voices.’’ Having trained faculty at an enormous social cost it seems useful to allow them to express their specialized creativity. Likewise, entire disciplines found the LMS almost useless for learning in their areas, especially true for the arts, humanities and history faculties. Characterized as ‘‘tools,’’ the early LMS was typically designed by persons with excellent technical skills but little understanding of learning, practical or theoretical; in effect a ‘‘didactic’’ tool designed without a clear understanding of its broader contextual purposes. The rapidly expanding interest in open source LMSs draws its vitality from the dissatisfaction experienced by both faculty and administrators with the host of problems associated with commercial LMSs. Moodle in Europe and Sakai in America seem for the moment to be the most viable open source systems and will undoubtedly grow and flourish as additional colleges and universities come to adopt either system[17]. In a short time, the less than perfect learning ‘‘systems,’’ the early core of an emerging digital university model, came to dominate the adult distance education market springing up not only all over America, but – as another manifestation of globalization – around the world as well. Despite deep reservations on the part of some faculty and administrators, LMSs, especially WebCT and Blackboard, were soon being used by residential institutions and faculty to supplement their face-to-face lecture format. This variant on distant education (and the Oxbridge model) was quickly popularized as blended learning. At first, blended ‘‘classroom’’ instructors found web connectivity useful primarily to post assignments, make announcements and offer reminders. Soon this early pragmatic utility gave way to seeing the pedagogical value of opening one or more asynchronous bulletin boards so that students could discuss with each other ideas perhaps already raised in the lecture but where time and numbers precluded fuller discussion. Similarly, in the most recent use of the LMS, lectures, once the centerpiece of the Oxbridge learning model, are posted, archived, as ‘‘learning objects’’ for students to download and read at their leisure while the course increasingly proceeds online in small discussion sections created and facilitated by one or more instructors. In effect, the early adult education distant programs, characterized by individualized asynchronous studies, flexible schedules, and non-residential student learning became the learning frontier for the new digital university. To shift metaphors, the LMS adult education snake – swallowed its lecture-centered, residential, fixed buildings and rigid schedule – tail. Several useful examples of these general observations can be taken from the experience of lecturers at the University of the Free State, a residential institution of 25,000 students located in Bloemfontein, South Africa. At a recent WebCT faculty development workshop, two presenters discussed interesting ‘‘cutting edge’’ uses of blended learning in their own residential classrooms. Nel, from the Department of Computer Science and Informatics drew her audience’s attention to the crucial need for purposeful online course design, building in student-faculty interactivity: ‘‘interpersonal interaction can only be effective if it is intentionally designed into and integrated into the course’’ (Nel, 2005). Thomas, from the Economics Department, described the overwhelming task of instructing 1,400 residential students registered for her fall term 2006 ‘‘Introduction to Economics’’ module/course; imagine 1,400 students for a single face-to-face learning experience[18]! With numerous regional languages in the Free State province, the university offers all modules in two languages (English and Afrikaans) and, in this instance, in twice daily sessions (day and evening). For the university, these concerns create an enormous scheduling challenge. For Ms Thomas, the difficulties are equally daunting. Since many students fail to see the value of sitting in a cavernous hall, they gradually stop attending; only

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a tiny fraction of those actually enrolled are physically present. Likewise, Thomas, as any good instructor, wants to believe her students are learning and her efforts are not in vain. From necessity, and wishing to deepen her student’s learning, Thomas turned to the University’s LMS, WebCT, to solve these complex logistical problems. After several false starts, Thomas currently prepares two weekly lectures (once in English, largely for black students and again in Afrikaans, for white students) as posted reading items – essentially ‘‘learning objects’’ that all students can access whenever convenient, ending the absolute necessity for all students to attend scheduled classes. Thomas meets with those students who do come to the twice weekly ‘‘lectures’’ but now these once mandatory classes have the ‘‘feel’’ of an authentic learning experience – a give and take between facilitator and interested learners. Only those students truly interested come and those participate more fully, asking questions and exploring ideas with Ms Thomas. These extreme face-to-face conditions help us to understand why the intellectual center of the module gravitated to the small group discussion sections Ms Thomas organized on her own initiative. Thomas reassigned her upper level student tutors, originally designated grading assistants, as discussion facilitators. Now, each tutor is given several small ‘‘discussion’’ groups (10-20 per group). Yet, even here, the complexity of time and available physical spaces is overwhelming. Thomas’ solution utilized a bulletin board with each junior facilitator meeting their group asynchronously. It is here, with Ms Thomas monitoring in the background and periodically meeting with her numerous ‘‘discussion facilitators,’’ that the difficult questions regarding macro and micro economic theory, bell shaped curves, supply and demand interstices and related complexities are expressed, discussed and ultimately transformed from ‘‘information’’ to ‘‘knowledge’’ (Thomas, 2006).

Simulations Recent innovations (or challenges) to the Oxbridge lecture model have also proved to be useful and exciting pedagogical experiments for online learning. Simulations have been around for some years in residential classrooms, the most famous and widely adopted in America being the highly successful model UN and model OAS. Perhaps not surprising, given the resistance of higher education administrators and faculty to bend or transform the lecture-centered format, these exciting simulations of real world diplomatic institutions were introduced in America by high school and elementary level teachers. Simulations, of course, grew from the felt need of many teachers and some university educators to directly involve their students in the learning experience, to move from unidirectional lecture to multidirectional interactivity; to allow students to bring their own interests, research, diversity and complexity to the center of the learning activity, in short to move from passing along information to socially creating knowledge[19]. The creation of a Harvard University model UN course, bringing numerous high school model UN programs to Cambridge, Massachusetts each year, immediately lent legitimacy to the simulation as valid pedagogy. Still, limitations of classroom architecture and the challenges of synchronous scheduling create difficult logistical (putting aside traditionalists’ pedagogical concerns) barriers to the wider use of these powerful simulations. While the drama of the General Assembly session remains and will probably always remain a wonderful learning experience for students, nevertheless, a common website and useful simulation software could greatly enhance simulations like the Model UN and model OAS. The internet’s capacity to connect classrooms widely scattered around the globe, coupled with the computer’s enormous capacity to build models, to design interactivity, to access and maintain data, makes for an extremely valuable tool, enhancing existing face-to-face simulations while equally successful entirely online simulations evolve[20]. Many of these same remarks apply to online service-learning modules or courses (Naude´ and Reinhart, 2005). Another exciting example of the potentialities of online simulations is evolving at Second Life (http://secondlife.com) a website developed by Linden Labs. Launched in 2000, Second Life counts among its key investors, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and eBay founder

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Pierre Omidyar (Newitz, 2006). Linden Lab offers educators a discount to host their classes or modules on Second Life servers and ‘‘inside’’ its software architecture. Educators are free to use Linden Lab’s model creation tools or to find and purchase ‘‘inside’’ Second Life (using Linden dollars), the models or simulations already created by other educators (or Second Life subscribers). This concept has enormous educational potential. Imagine for a moment that Second Life was the sanctioned creation of a real world university or consortium of universities, legally certified to grant educational licensees, certificates and degrees. Safely ensconced inside the software boundaries of Anywhere State University, Second Life faculty and students meet to create virtual worlds, bringing their own ‘‘real world’’ experience, scholarship and research to their learning, in the process creating stimulating educational models: historical, medical, biological, geographical, chemical, anthropological or other disciplinary or transdisciplinary exercises[21]. Imagine further, a ‘‘course,’’ or synonymously, a ‘‘world’’ where slavery exists. A world populated by the diverse characters, ‘‘avatars,’’ involved in the pernicious trade in human beings, a legal trade spanning four centuries and encompassing the entire globe. Learners can be expected to develop, elaborate and give context to their avatar’s ‘‘identity,’’ drawing upon real world historical records, primary and secondary[22]. We encounter in our virtual world: the captains of slavers (slave ships); merchant traders from Bristol, Glasgow, Boston, Providence, Porto, (among many other old and new world harbors) shipping to the coast of Africa and beyond; plantation owners from Brazil, the Caribbean and the American South; African kings, their kingdoms and empires; slave-owning priests and evangelical slave traders; black and white abolitionists; individual slaves, field hands and house servants; industrialists and financiers. Given an opportunity to develop their characters personalities, to play roles within the limits of historical validity, learners can be expected to identify with their characters and interact passionately with the other avatars populating their self-created world, a world made by slaves and slave-owners alike (Genovese, 1969). Such a simulation offers opportunities for true transdisciplinary work, testing the skills and developing the digital literacy of all its learner inhabitants, teaching the tools and perspectives of historians, geographers, anthropologists, economists, the skills of business, graphic arts, cartography, music and drama. Similarly, the student and faculty participant-creators of this virtual world might represent every region of our real one: some, hailing from former slave trading ports of Europe and America; others, growing up near the great Portuguese ‘‘castles,’’ the several west African ‘‘Doors of no Return;’’ Afro-Caribbean and African American descendents of slaves.

Student group web projects The internet also offers instructors and students opportunities to create and share research assignments – group web projects. Like simulations and journals, educators have utilized group projects for years, especially at the elementary and high school levels. Educators at the university level assigned group projects with some regularity from the mid-to-early 1960s. Like simulations, group projects created structured occasions for direct student class participation; instructors knew, from experience, that students learned more by discussing their research findings together and, as an educational bonus, developed useful social cooperation skills[23]. Group projects in synchronous class situations also demand that instructors devote considerable classroom time to project presentations. Asynchronous web projects solve many of these logistical problems while permitting learner teams to share their work globally.

Blogs and other ‘‘learning tools’’ As quickly as tools and terms emerge from new digital technologies, educators now are adapting and adopting them for their own pedagogical purposes. In fact, students bring them to the traditional classroom faster than instructors discover them. ‘‘Blogging,’’ like the use of the iPod and wireless connectivity is creating yet a new generation of pedagogical possibilities in this already revolutionary digital age. Since at least the mid-1960s, students have been asked to keep journals. As with simulations, innovative faculty members sought new methods to ‘‘talk’ with their students, to broaden one-sided conversations. Increasingly,

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instructors asked students to record their more private, introspective reflections on their formal learning. Typically, instructors’ evaluations were quite broad, ranging from simply noting their occurrence to structured reflective exchanges. The single failure of these innovative pedagogical exercises was journal observations created at best a two-way dialog, better than a monologue, but marginally. Amazingly, the online journal (blog) turns this seldom-used pedagogical innovation on its head. Offered an opportunity to ‘‘blog,’’ students create enormously interesting learning edifices willingly sharing wonderful insights with fellow students and instructors. Since students choose what to include, and share, issues of confidentiality fade away. Learners employ their blogs as personal spaces to record sorrows and joys, the death of a grandparent or friend, a career success, a life milestone. Building camaraderie and lasting friendships, these postings ‘‘soften,’’ personalize and communalize the online classroom. As important are the learning ‘‘threads’’ students build – unimagined by the instructor and perhaps unimaginable at course’s outset; students blog to bring new information – initially perhaps of unique interest only to themselves – to the entire class. By sharing with others, students begin constructing knowledge, socially; they create new conversational threads – the sinews of learning. These conversational threads, discussion tracks, can be viewed, switching metaphors, as laying new neural tracks in the brain itself. Yet acquisition of information is crucial but not sufficient; the process of acquiring and reflecting on new information marks only the first stage in learning. It is in the sharing and discussion of acquired information (new or old) that students begin constructing knowledge (Dewey, 1966; Winn, 1997)[24]. The major caveat to blogging’s heuristic value concerns the possible loss of spontaneity and authenticity occasioned by instructor-assigned blogs. Steven Downes worries about the loss of creativity: It seems clear that although blogging can and does have a significant and worthwhile educational impact, this impact does not come automatically and does not come without risks. As many writers have noted, writing a weblog appears in the first instance to be a form of publishing, but as time goes by, blogging resembles more and more a conversation. And for a conversation to be successful, it must be given a purpose and it must remain, for the most part, unconstrained (Downes, 2004).

Electronic portfolios Only recently have educators begun to consider the usefulness of electronic portfolios for individual students. Limitations of computer memory and the absence of adequate database tools precluded serious consideration of creating and maintaining learner electronic portfolios. Already students maintain digitized records of their curricular and extra-curricular activities. Soon educators will routinely admit students after evaluating electronic portfolios; institutions at all levels will be asked to facilitate student digital work and we can expect portfolios to be internet-stored and accessed. Even now, as more robust databases become available to institutions of higher education (similar to the capacity and organizational power of corporate databases), we see growing interest by faculty and administrators for creating individual portal accounts allowing learners access not only to routine administrative functions like registration, fee payments, schedules and university news, but as importantly, to maintain a record of their writing, research and creative work. At its most exciting, individual portals afford students opportunities to assemble their own learning tools from among many of those considered here but also from a range of emerging digital learning resources: a student’s digital ‘‘kit’’ arrayed in the service of a constructivist learning paradigm.

Podcasting Portable and wireless technology continues the digital erosion of the Oxbridge model. A recent survey of American college students indicated that 25 percent (up from just 15 percent in 2005) owned Apple Computer’s market dominating music delivery system, the iPod. Ironically, but not surprisingly, recording lectures and making them available for

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downloading from Apples iTunes Music Store is the first genuine educational use for this enormously popular portable technology. Apple has set up an exclusive section at iTunes – iTunes U – available only to students and faculty of participating universities. Apple officials have also hinted that they might sell textbooks, course packets or other educational products through their rapidly evolving iPod U (Chronicle of Higher Education, n.d.). The BBC reported on its website and in its video broadcast, the then cutting edge news: ‘‘Lecturer drops lectures for podcasts.’’ ‘‘Some lecture classes have 250 students,’’ said Bill Ashraf, a microbiology instructor, ‘‘so I question the effectiveness of a didactic lecture for an hour’’ (Spicer, 2006). While podcasting offers extraordinary flexibility and immediate visceral appeal it remains crucial that it, like similar valuable digital tools, serve the learning purposes of the contemporary age, the active-learning strategies of the Constructivist Digital University. Portability is extraordinarily important, but as a mechanism to deliver lectures – even as ‘‘learning objects’’ – it has limited utility. The crucial missing element is interactivity; allowing students to record and share their self-created learning experiences with facilitators and, more importantly, with fellow learners. Any effort to recreate the Oxbridge lecture model, either online, with iPods, or in any other fashion, is doomed to failure if it runs counter to the constructivist pedagogical movement of the last half century. Technology must serve the goals and purposes of educators, not the reverse.

Other ‘‘cutting edge’’ resources We are running out of terms to describe the depth and speed of new technologies. It might be useful here to consider briefly a thin slice of the ‘‘learning object’’ notion. When the concept first appeared it was difficult to understand and did not seem immediately useful, precisely for the ‘‘contextual’’ objections raised by Friesen (2006). Placed in the context of constructivist pedagogy, the value of learning objects becomes clearer. Since thousands of instructors in residential universities and colleges, teach the same or slightly modified course or module every term, it seems obvious that if we can archive the ‘‘standard’’ Psych 101 lecture so that other faculty members can use it for their course, we can save thousands of hours by eliminating duplication, often taken from the same text and reference works. MIT’s decision to put all of its lecture materials online is already a major step forward in this regard (online at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/index.htm). While frightening to some, the reality is that this material is often not worthy of copyrighting; the time to prepare these introductory lectures could be better spent on creative enterprises. Similarly, the lecture as ‘‘learning object’’ is now made available for students to read (or listen) at their leisure, asynchronously and without the necessity to attend a classroom to hear the same material presented to 50, 100, or more somewhat bored students[25]. Murray Turoff, an early digital learning pioneer, recently offered an interesting illustration of these exciting learning opportunities in a discussion thread appearing on Sloan-C, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation website (www.sloan-c.org). Struggling with the typical array of conflicting state regulations, university policies, enrollment and disciplinary restrains, Turoff creatively advertised four separate special topic courses: two at a distance and two face-to-face, encompassing both graduate and undergraduate learners. The combined ‘‘course,’’ ‘‘Design of emergency management information systems,’’ quickly enrolled a total of 28 students, sufficient to satisfy the minimum of 15. Recording his face-to-face classes, Turoff divided the lectures into 30 minute segments. Using his SONY editor, he converted the proprietary audio files to wave files, then utilized ‘‘itunes’’ to convert these to an MP3 format. Lastly, these files were ‘‘uploaded’’ as attachments to a WebBoard entry. Students could view Turoff’s PowerPoints and/or listen to the lectures and face-to-face discussions on their PC or could download the audio to their iPod. Not satisfied with simply podcasting his lectures, Turoff’s most innovative active-learning strategy involved creating an asynchronous bulletin board requiring all students, face-to-face or at a distance, graduate or undergraduate, to participate in a common learning conversation.

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The constructivist digital model Taken together these illustrations provide a glimpse of the emerging digital classroom. The web will supplement or replace the traditional classroom, and do so rather quickly. The current struggle over the form, function and texture of learning management systems will sort itself out and (one can only believe) the victory will go to the most open-sourced, flexibly designed, learner-centered environment (commercial or open source). The extension of the asynchronous seminar (bulletin board) space, pioneered by distance learning instructors, to traditional classroom settings holds the promise of engaging the majority of learners in meaningful written exchanges with fellow students and the professor alike. Likewise, collaborative student projects seem to be an obvious use of the web, both for creation of team activities but also for sharing their productions with other students (and observers) locally and worldwide. Blogs, simulations and archived student efforts, that is, ePortfolios that travel with students during their entire academic careers, begin to sketch the outlines of a new learning paradigm, a non-residential Constructivist Digital University offering asynchronous flexibility and enormous opportunity for creative active-learning strategies. While we seem to have acquired the necessary digital tools to see the faint silhouette of post-modern tertiary learning, we are still some distance from reshaping, reconceptualizing, the Oxbridge university model. Perhaps the two most significant remaining barriers to fundamental change are the university library and the ancient disciplines. Both of these hoary Oxbridge units appeared virtually simultaneously with the University during the late fourteenth century (as previously noted, University of Cambridge, 2004a). It is ironic but fitting that Cambridge University’s library now leads the effort to open source all or most of its library holdings. The ambitious objective of the DSpace@Cambridge Project is to develop an institutional repository to preserve and disseminate digital materials created or associated with Cambridge University. The project utilizes DSpacee, an open source digital repository software platform developed jointly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (online at www.lib.cam.ac.uk/ dspace/index.htm). We are still a long way from Alexander of Macedonia’s dream of collecting all the knowledge in the known world in one location, the Alexandria Library in Egypt, or the similar goal of the Enlightenment’s Encyclopedists, still, never before could humans envision a time when the collected works of the world’s largest and most important libraries would be available to scholars, students and the lay public alike. Using the powerful search tools currently deployed by Google, with the near certainty of newer search technologies emerging, the world’s entire repository of knowledge will soon come to the individual researcher rather than he or she having to travel at great expense to local repositories, primary and secondary. The need for each and every institution of higher learning to acquire significant library holdings to support student and faculty research and study is, in truth, already behind us[26]. Like the library, disciplines (schools, colleges, faculties, departments) lie at the organizational heart of the Oxbridge university model. Authority flows from the universities vertically-organized disciplines; faculty lines are embedded in dean’s and chair’s budgets. As refined by Wihelm von Humboldt at the beginning of the nineteenth century in his plans for the University of Berlin (now Humboldt University), which became the model for the modern research university, there is also a hierarchy of disciplines with Philosophy at the apex. This is intended to give cohesion to the separate areas of study, integrating all knowledge into an elaborate pyramidal structure. Work across the lines of disciplines has tended to undercut this organization, and for that reason it is condescendingly regarded as ‘‘speculative’’ (von Humboldt, 1963). Evolved to collect relevant information, the issue for disciplines today is not can we gather sufficient information or support a faculty with adequate library resources, but rather too much information. For some time now, the central administrative fault line runs between the ancient disciplines’ pedagogical authority and budget dominance and the insatiable pressure for transdisciplinary ‘‘projects,’’ academic enterprises and funding that cross traditional research and pedagogical boundaries (Sax, 2006)[27].

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The essential problem confronting contemporary administrators, steeped in Oxbridge traditions, but often ill-trained digitally, is that information – its collection and dissemination – is now a multi-dimensional enterprise. Data arrives and departs from multiple nodes, an almost infinite variety of web-accessed or distributed information, processed with a perplexing array of digital tools, hardware and software, requiring specialized knowledge and training. We are drenched in information; the web allowing each of us to follow ‘‘facts,’’ data, wherever our interests and research imperatives take us. The web’s hyperlink capabilities offer horizontal and vertical discovery; we routinely track information across any and every disciplinary boundary. As the logic of the discipline-centered university erodes, the remaining organizational vestiges inhibit the growth of replacement structures[28]. Disciplines will no longer behave as vertical towers of information gathering and dissemination, as organizational entities with exclusive budgetary and decision making responsibilities. Still, the elevation provided by standing on the wreckage of the ‘‘old schools’’ does not allow us to peer far enough into the future to see clearly the organizational structures of the new university. Yet, sifting through the accumulating ruins of the ‘‘old schools’’ can perhaps offer useful insights and delineate contextualized trends. The extraordinary capacity of geographical information systems (GIS), for example, to layer and spatially-relate disparate databases, models the infusion of digital mastery into a traditional discipline. At a recent GIS conference, Professor Barker argued that the traditional geographical curriculum provides the framework, the grammar, which all geography students, first year to doctoral, must master to earn their disciplinary degree. He noted, however, that the vocabulary of contemporary geography is GIS (GIS Conference, Bloemfontein, SA, August 22, 2006). Provoked, the delegates debated the essential nature of GIS software: was GIS simply another ‘‘tool’’ like Microsoft Word or Excel or was it an integral part of the ‘‘real’’ curricular imperatives of the discipline, at bottom concerned primarily with imparting spatial relationships to students. Clearly, GIS software has so infiltrated the processes and products of the traditional geographers’ craft that they are inseparable. In less than 15 years, the entire modern geographical disciple, dating from the mid-nineteenth century, has undergone fundamental transformation. Once tiny bastions of academic enterprise, with faculty and students laboring over maps and drawing tables, today geography departments are awash with students of all ages clamoring to attain the GIS literacy requisite for professional employment. More important for illustrating university-wide trends, GIS is increasingly a vital transdisciplinary tool for sociologists, anthropologists, historians, criminologists, urban planners, indeed any practitioner, academic or otherwise, trained in a traditional discipline that wishes to organize and/or represent data spatially. Facts are no longer gathered, transmitted and disseminated only vertically, up or down, the disciplinary tower. Rather, the post-modern Cafe´ University encourages administrators, faculty, and learners to work in their local coffee shop connected horizontally to the internet, to their colleagues and to the world. Their wireless laptops replace the text and the library carrel; an unprecedented array of digital tools for searching and analyzing, for teaching and learning, lie as close as their next cappuccino. If form truly follows function, as it must, we can safely predict that the new university will organize itself along the lines of its emerging structural imperatives, following the lateral vistas produced by the infusion of digital processes and digital languages into the informational heart of the ‘‘old schools’’ (Birkerts, 1994, p. 75).

Conclusion While we continue to grope for a completely satisfactory new teaching/learning and technology paradigm, perhaps the outlines of the new digital Cafe´ University are becoming clearer. If information collection and the ‘‘old schools’’ are no longer at the center of the new university, what is? The web’s capacity to archive and access information, to serve as a repository for enormously powerful software tools and processes, suggests a useful organizational metaphor: like the spider’s web it harkens, the internet allows a digital structure: a central organization with infinite points of contact on the periphery: total,

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non-residential interconnectivity. The new digital university will have the web, rather than disciplines and the library, at its virtual center with nearly infinite access to the larger peripheral world[29]. What might the ‘‘periphery’’ be? Most likely, we will see an extension of the array of contemporary institutional forms, but with adjustments to cultural and technological changes. Undoubtedly, many well-established research institutions will continue, but with increasing cross- or transdisciplinary work. Programs rather than disciplines will garner an increasing share of budgetary resources. We can confidently expect a proliferation of the online extension of university programs, certifications and courses for traditional and non-traditional students alike: By early 2008, Lois Romano reports in the Washington Post ‘‘about one in ten college students will be enrolled in an online degree program’’ (Romano, 2006). Adult learners, graduates and professionals especially, will look increasingly to university centers for online certificate programs to develop or renew professional skills. University and college library budgets will be devoted increasingly to digital resources (journals, search engines, digitization of collections) or diverted to the university’s eLearning unit. We can expect increasing globalization of library materials along the lines of DSpace@Cambridge; Goggle and/or others will reach deeper into library archives to digitize older print, manuscript and analog collections. The regional university, once serving only a geographic locale, will now compete, as well as cooperate, globally with other large research institutions for students and learners, extending its specialized information via courses, workshops and online conferences to individuals and communities everywhere in the world. The University of Wisconsin, to take one example, will continue to serve Wisconsin and the Midwestern states of the US, but it’s history department and associated unique collections held at the Wisconsin Historical Society (www.wisconsinhistory.org/ libraryarchives) will become further available to scholars and students around the world. Many of these same observations apply to the enormous array of medium to large universities serving American states, other countries, provinces, and regions worldwide. These less well-known institutions are already under pressure to compete with distant institutions for students and resources formerly theirs by right of location. Often unaware of the institutions already encroaching on ‘‘their’’ traditional territory, mid-level institutions will need to specialize rather quickly in order to survive the next several decades. Already behind in database and other administrative services, institutions in developing nations must further reorganize their administrative and academic sectors to respond effectively to new global competitors. Small community colleges and similar public institutions will find it difficult just to survive. In the US, ‘‘junior colleges,’’ now called ‘‘community colleges,’’ were established specifically to meet the needs of under serviced locales – often a county-sized region – and groups: working people and adults (non-traditional learners). However regretfully, it is difficult to imagine how these small institutions can survive in the numbers and form in which they exist now. They will almost certainly be pressured into larger units, aggregating (and reducing) their current face-to-face courses online. The SUNY Learning Network and UMassOnline (www.umassonline.net/Home.html) offer such an option now for these two large states with numerous community colleges. Also at the periphery, we can expect to find increasing numbers of commercial institutions (like Phoenix University) with increasing commercialization of the learning space: a variety of competing LMS, learning simulations (‘‘serious games’’), student and faculty digital services, digital portfolio companies, and ubiquitous advertising of numerous products, many not learning related. Competitive pressures on small private colleges will continue and grow. The most prestigious will flourish as social incubators for the children of elites worldwide; those less favored by reputation and endowment will either meet their competitors’ online challenges or close their doors. Equally profoundly, the Cafe´ University, like the disappearing ‘‘old schools,’’ will no longer hold a monopoly on information. Disciplinary structures provided the university with an invaluable commodity to trade with the local community. The ancient

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‘‘rights and privileges’’ granted to the newly capped master, as well as to the town’s parochial university, were given by the city or state in implicit exchange for access to the university’s monopoly on information, information of enormous utility for the local tradesman, manufacturer, policymaker, agriculturalist and the general public. Digital languages and processes travel both ways; they penetrate the university and the community alike. The Cafe´ University already finds itself concerned as never before with service learning projects and community engagement. The new university is competing with commercial, for-profit institutions of learning, giving scant deference to the hoary traditions of the ancient academy. It is offering instead enormous flexibility and immediate access to a host of new adult learners situated globally. We can expect learners of all ages to find and aggregate their learning experiences from any connected institution, commercial or traditional, located anywhere in the world. Faculties, as individuals, departments and disciplines will have to re-think their approach to their core responsibilities: teaching and research. Despite enormous pressure for disciplinary change, we still hover near, or at, the level of individual ‘‘pioneers’’ (Kobulnicky, 1999). To proceed from here, ICT must receive, at a minimum, some recognition in the promotion and tenure review process. To date, at most institutions, and in most disciplines, recognition is granted primarily for disciplinary research (defined in the strictest traditional terms) with evaluation of teaching performance a more subjective process. In either instance, ICT innovations or efforts have been given little, or no, acknowledgement or credit towards either promotion or tenure. Indeed, digital mastery remains for many a technical matter, not really an integral part of any particular discipline except perhaps computer science and geography. Administrators will need to rethink the necessity for new physical structures in light of their learning purposes. Lecture halls and large lecture spaces must yield to smaller and more flexible arrangements. As students access their instructor’s archived lectures, easily finding primary and secondary sources, indeed, information of all kinds, as they engage in interactive discussions from coffee houses, dorm rooms, and home, as they study abroad, talk with fellow students and scholars around the world, they will be able to maintain connection to their ‘‘home’’ institution and its programs. Computer labs with their enormous capital and maintenance costs seem far less useful than simply distributing hardware and software to students directly. Indeed, even these options will likely – and rather quickly – disappear in favor of offering entering students wireless connectivity to the web via a range of emerging mobile digital devices. We can now see an end to the enormous administrative task of scheduling synchronous classes. For Steven Downes, an online learning guru and practitioner of radical educational deinstitutionalization, the original web, Web 1.0 was a ‘‘reading’’ web, an enormous archive from which one ‘‘pulled’’ information. Web 2.0, like its learning embodiment, eLearning 2.0, is more interactive, more expressive of human interests, needs, capacities. Web 2.0 permits users to create their own learning environment, their own portals, using search engines and software, RSS feeds for instance, to seek and bring back, ‘‘pushing,’’ any information the learner might conceivably desire. Students or faculty interested in the slave trade, for example, can easily request their own search tools, to find everything published, cited or being published (digitally) up to the very moment the request is made. The web is morphing before our eyes into a portal-driven experience, an active learner-centered, learner-controlled, digital environment; an interactive, intuitive, extension of our human capacity to acquire, classify, express and retain new information. Ironically, the Oxbridge model was already showing the paradigmatic wear predicted by Kuhn. The emerging complex of ICT resources, however, strengthens directions long urged by progressive faculty: a student-centered, life-long learning environment. Digital tools have little value unless we harness them to the constructivist learning paradigm of the emerging global Digital University. It’s not too early to declare the lecture-learning paradigm – the ancient Oxbridge model – dead, if not entirely buried.

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Notes 1. Students in Africa, like much of the developing world, and among less privileged students in Europe and America, continue to arrive at institutions of higher learning computer illiterate. Resources, or the capacity to access resources, remain the single most significant obstacle to computer and digital literacy for most of the world’s poor. 2. Also see Erikson’s description of the new university being built in Wittenberg under the protection and patronage of the Elector of Saxony – the University where a young Martin Luther was appointed to one of two Augustinian chairs from which post he lectured for 30 years (Erikson, 1962, pp. 165-169). 3. One can find a good description of the intertwined relationship of university and locale in Andrew Taylor’s biography of Gerard Mercator (Taylor, 2004, pp. 56-59). 4. Today, of course, scholars, scientists, social scientists and humanists are all (almost all) ‘‘constructivists’’ converted, or at least informed, by the once radical notions of Clifford Geertz, best seen in his seminal article ‘‘Ideology as a social system’’ and recently discussed with him in a wide ranging interview (Olson, 1991). 5. For a recent prescient and excellent consideration of many of the issues raised here (see Duderstadt et al., 2005). 6. I suppose it is unnecessary to indicate that the master and the student were, for most of this tradition, men. It is fascinating to look closely at a painting of a medieval master and his students apparently painted from life in the late thirteenth century at Bologna University: the lecturers’ audience is variously asleep, talking with one another and gazing everywhere but at the master http://scholar. library.csi.cuny.edu/ , talarico/teach.htm 7. As recently as the 1950s, Franz Boas was remembered by his colleagues as the last master of all of anthropology’s diverse sub-specializations. 8. As a lecturer at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh (a relatively small public institution), I often had classes of several hundred students. At the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, lecture classes routinely range from the several hundreds to at least 1,200 or more in a single lecture class! It is expected that all students will not attend, but the registration process accepts these large numbers. The ‘‘outsourcing’’ of grading has also been utilized in some institutions in order to increase student enrollments, and revenue, in already over crowded lectures. 9. The work of John Dewey has undergone a revival partially due to the need of a philosophical under girding for online learning but more so due to the growing ‘‘constructivist’’ movement in higher education. See especially his classic seminal work (Dewey, 1966; Payne, 2004; Winn, 1997; Payne and Reinhart, 2004). 10. The briefest glance at Cambridge University’s curricular requirements in the 1860s or Skidmore College’s in the 1920s suffices to indicate the range of curricular ‘‘requirements’’ apparently believed necessary to produce an educated person in the not so distant past (University of Cambridge, 2004c; Blankman and Cannon, 1987; Lynn, 2000). 11. I have slightly modified this paragraph from an earlier published article (Reinhart, 2005). 12. While many online ventures flourished some of the more promising collapsed after considerable publicity and significant capital investment. Without writing another article, it is difficult to discover if there are pitfalls common to these closures. The most recent and perhaps most spectacular example is the quiet folding of the Alllearn Consortium, involving three of the world’s leading Oxbridge model institutions: Oxford University in Great Britain, Yale and Stanford in the US, after failing to attract sufficient enrollments (MacLeod, 2006). 13. The University Without Walls program at Skidmore College is one of the few adult, external degree-granting programs of its kind at a small liberal arts college. 14. This is also the professional graduate school model pioneered by German universities in the nineteenth century and adopted first by history departments at The Johns Hopkins University, University of Wisconsin, Harvard College, Princeton, Yale, and today by essentially all of America’s graduate institutions (Billington, 1973, pp. 58-66). 15. Under the leadership of Frank Mayadas and the Sloan-C consortium, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has pioneered the asynchronous online learning movement in the USA.

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16. I wish to thank Chris Whann at UWW for his helpful comments regarding the uses of chat rooms and instant messaging. 17. Unfortunately, as Carla Payne noted correctly in reading an early draft of this manuscript, the opposite could be concluded from the current flap concerning Blackboard’s patenting its LMS: an alarming effort to suppress competition, and therefore innovation. Steven Downes offers perhaps the most wide-ranging and compelling argument for a totally open, student constructed, learning portal. It was my pleasure to attend Steven’s exciting, if a bit chaotic, online learning workshop at the 8th annual WWW conference, Bloemfontein, September 6, 2006. 18. These numbers are in part a positive response to older white institutions of higher learning in South Africa making a genuine attempt to bring university-level education to all the people of South Africa – white, black and colored. 19. It would require another paper to consider fully the long-standing tension between liberal arts abstraction – heuristic models – and pragmatic learning experiences such as simulations and service-learning. Dewey, of course, addressed and sought to reconcile these tensions, yet many liberal arts instructors continue to defend staunchly the primacy of theory over experience. 20. These same technologies could be extremely useful for face-to-face simulations, increasing the contacts during the year of otherwise isolated school districts, reaching out to the web for country demographics and current news. 21. As this article is being written, precisely this scenario is occurring. 22. For students growing up during the dungeons and dragons craze and to even younger learners raised on a diet of video games, avatars are familiar icons offering learners anonymity: an identity-free learning experience. 23. It would seem the greatest difficulty for instructors themselves was determining who or how to assign individuals to groups and, at term’s end, evaluating the group’s final product. 24. For examples see Rum, Slaves and Molasses, University Without Walls, Skidmore College, Fall 2005, online at www.skidmore.edu/uww/courses/rum Due to copyright concerns a password will have to be obtained from UWW’s webmaster: [email protected] 25. A note of caution, however: some administrators are already using learning objects and other digital tools to create ‘‘templated’’ courses raising authentic pedagogical concerns that faculty input and creativity can or will be marginalized or eliminated. 26. The educational implications for learning in the developing world as for all less wealthy institutions are enormous. Limited resources can now be used elsewhere for example, to hire faculty, to create ICT infrastructure and ICT training opportunities. 27. This entire topic requires a separate paper, beyond the focus here. 28. I am indebted to Dean Tienie Crous, the University of the Free State, for sharing his ideas concerning the challenges of administration during a time of considerable technological flux in higher education. 29. As the ICT revolutions in India and Ireland illustrate, a digital-web strategy for tertiary education in developing nations offers significant opportunities to make decisive changes in access to and quality of student instruction.

References Berthier, G.F. (1752), ‘‘L’Encyclope´die’’ ou dictionnaire raisonne´ des sciences, des arts et des me´tiers, (‘The ‘‘Encyclopedia’’ or systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts’)’’, Journal de Tre´voux, February. Billington, R.A. (1973), Frederick Jackson Turner, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Birkerts, S. (1994), The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, Faber and Faber, Boston, MA. Blankman, E.J. and Cannon, T.O. (1987), The Scarlet and the Brown: A History of St Lawrence University, 1856-1981, St Lawrence University Press, Canton, NY. Brooke, C.N.L. (ed.) (1993), A History of the University of Cambridge, 4 vols., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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Chronicle of Higher Education (n.d.), ‘‘Information technology’’, Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 52 No. 27, p. A28, available at: http://chronicle.com Darnton, R. (1979), The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclope´die, 1775-1800, Belknap-Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Dewey, J. (1966), Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, The Free Press, New York, NY. Downes, S. (2004), ‘‘Educational blogging’’, EDUCAUSE Review, Vol. 39 No. 5, pp. 14-26. Duderstadt, J.J., Wulf, W.A. and Zemsky, R. (2005), ‘‘Envisioning a transformed university’’, Issues in Science and Technology, Vol. 22 No. 1, available at: www.issues.org/22.1/duderstadt.html Erikson, E.H. (1962), Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, NY. Friesen, N. (2006), ‘‘Microlearning and (micro)didaktik’’, paper presented at Micromedia and eLearning 2.0: Getting the Big Picture, June 8-9, Innsbruck, available at: http://learningspaces.org/n/papers/ microdidaktik.doc (accessed October 2, 2006). Genovese, E.D. (1969), The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, Pantheon, New York, NY. Golden, D. (2006), ‘‘Online university enrollment soars as quality improves’’, Wall Street Journal, p. B1, May 9. Kobulnicky, P. (1999), ‘‘Critical factors in information technology planning for the academy’’, Cause/Effect, Vol. 22 No. 2, pp. 19-26. Kuhn, T.S. (1996), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Lynn, M.C. (2000), Make No Small Plans: A History of Skidmore College, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. MacLeod, D. (2006), ‘‘Oxford online learning project folds’’, Guardian, March 20, available at: http:// education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,1735137,00.html Maehl, W.H. (2000), Lifelong Learning at its Best: Innovative Practices in Adult Credit Programs, Jossey-Bass Inc., San Francisco, CA. Martin, A. (2006), ‘‘A framework for digital literacy’’, unpublished manuscript, draft version 2.5. Naude, L. and Reinhart, C.J. (2005), The Power of Engagement: An International Model in On-Line Service Learning, American Association of Colleges and Universities, Providence, RI. Nel, E. (2005), ‘‘Creating meaningful blended learning experiences in a South African higher education classroom: an action inquiry’’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. Newitz, A. (2006), ‘‘Your second life is ready’’, Popsci.com, available at: www.popsci.com/popsci/ technology/7ba1af8f3812d010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html (accessed September 29, 2006). Olson, G.A. (1991), ‘‘Clifford Geertz on ethnography and social construction’’, Journal of Advance Composition, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 245-68. Pannabecker, J.R. (1994), ‘‘Diderot, the mechanical arts, and the encyclope´die: in search of the heritage of technology education’’, Journal of Technology Education, Vol. 6 No. 1. Pannabecker, J.R. (1996), ‘‘Diderot, rousseau, and the mechanical arts: disciplines, systems, and social context’’, Journal of Industrial Teacher Education, Vol. 33 No. 4, available at: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ ejournals/JITE/v33n4/jite-v33n4.pannabecker.html Payne, C.R. (2004), ‘‘Design for success: applying progressive educational principles online’’, in Vrasidas, C. and Glass, G. (Eds), Online Professional Development for Teachers, Information Age Publishing, Greenwich, CT. Payne, C. and Reinhart, C.J. (2004), ‘‘Assessing asynchronous discussions’’, Adult Higher Education Alliance Conference, Long Beach, CA. Rashdall, H. (1936), The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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Reinhart, C.J. (1998), ‘‘Learning and teaching at a distance – teaching on-line: America in the Sixties’’, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, Vol. 2 No. 1, available at: www.aln.org/alnweb/magazine/ maga_v2_i1.htm Reinhart, C.J. (2005), ‘‘The liberal arts ideal in an asynchronous age’’, Elements of Quality Online Education: Into the Mainstream: Wisdom from the Sloan Consortium, available at: www.aln.org/ publications/books/wisdom.asp Romano, L. (2006), Washington Post, May 16, available at: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2006/05/15/AR2006051501496.html Sax, B. (2006), ‘‘Knowledge and wisdom in academia’’, unpublished manuscript, draft version 1. Spicer, D. (2006), ‘‘Sloan-C List serve’’, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/ west_yorkshire/5013194.stm Suchman, L. (1987), Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human Machine Communication, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Suchman, L. (2003), ‘‘Writing and reading: a response to comments on plans and situated actions’’, Journal of the Learning Sciences, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 299-306. Taylor, A. (2004), The World of Gerard Mercator: the Mapmaker who Revolutionised Geography, Harper Perennial, London. Thomas, K. (2006), ‘‘Learner perspectives on the use of a learning management system in first-year economics’’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria. University of Cambridge (2004a), ‘‘A brief history’’, available at: www.cam.ac.uk/cambuniv/pubs/ history/setting.html (accessed 2006). University of Cambridge (2004b), ‘‘The medieval university’’, available at: www.cam.ac.uk/cambuniv/ pubs/history/medieval.html (accessed 2006). University of Cambridge (2004c), ‘‘The revived university of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’’, available at: www.cam.ac.uk/cambuniv/pubs/history/19c.html (accessed 2006). Winn, W. (1997), ‘‘Learning in hyperspace’’, available at: www.umuc.edu/ide/potentialweb97/winn.html (accessed 2005). von Humboldt, W. (1963), Humanist without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Wayne State UP, Detroit, MI.

Further reading Cooper, P.A. (1993), ‘‘Paradigm shifts in designing instruction: from behaviorism to cognitivism to constructivism’’, Educational Technology, Vol. 33 No. 5, pp. 12-19. Dunn, R.S. (1972), Sugar and Slaves: the Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies 1624-1713, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC. Geertz, C. (1964), ‘‘Ideology as a social system’’, in Apter, D. (Ed.), ldeology and Discontent, Free Press, New York, NY, pp. 47-76. Gilbert, L. and Moore, D.L. (1998), ‘‘Building interactivity into web courses: tools for social and instructional interaction’’, Education Technology, Vol. 38 No. 3, pp. 29-35. Janicki, T.L. and Liegle, J.O. (2001), ‘‘Development and evaluation of a framework for creating web based learning modules: a pedagogical and systems approach’’, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, Vol. 5 No. 1. Le Grange, L. (2004), ‘‘E-learning: some critical thoughts’’, South African Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 18 No. 1, pp. 87-97. Palloff, R.M. and Pratt, K. (1999), Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Pannabecker, J.R. (1992), ‘‘Printing technology in the encyclope´die: constructing systematic knowledge’’, Journal of Industrial Teacher Education, Vol. 29 No. 4, pp. 73-91.

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Reinhart, C.J. (2006), ‘‘Windward in an asynchronous world, the Antiguan initiative: unanticipated pleasures of the distance learning revolution’’, in Martin, A. and Madigan, D. (Eds), Learning in the Digital Age, Facet Publishing, London. Rothman, D. (1971), The Discovery of the Asylum, Little, Brown & Company, Boston, MA. Schement, J.R. and Curtis, T. (1997), Tendencies and Tensions of the Information Age: The Production and Distribution of Information, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ. Siklos, R. (2006), ‘‘A virtual world but real money’’, The New York Times, October 19, C1. Street, B. (1987), ‘‘Models of computer literacy’’, in Finnegan, R., Salaman, G. and Thompson, K. (Eds), Information Technology: Social Issues, Hodder & Stoughton, London, pp. 33-7. Street, B. (1995), Social Literacies, Longman, London. Street, B. (2001), ‘‘Contexts for literacy work: the ‘‘new orders’’ and the ‘‘new literacy studies’’, in Tett, L., Hamilton, M. and Crowther, J. (Eds), Powerful Literacies, NIACE Publications, Leicester, pp. 13-22. Strijbos, J.W., Martens, R.L. and Jochems, W.M.G. (2004), ‘‘Designing for interaction: six steps to designing computer-supported group-based learning’’, Computers and Education, Vol. 42 No. 4, pp. 403-24. Thorndike, L. (1944), University Records and Life in the Middle Ages, Columbia University Press, New York, NY. Udas, K. and Feldstein, M. (2006), ‘‘Apples to Apples: guidelines for comparative evaluation of proprietary and open educational technology systems’’, Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, May, available at: www.obhe.ac.uk/products/reports/

About the author Cornel ‘‘Corky’’ Reinhart is the former Director of the University Without Walls program at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (1996-2005) and an American social historian. Dr Reinhart founded Skidmore College’s University Without Walls’ online distance program for adult learners. Corky offered UWW’s first on-line course: ‘‘America in the Sixties’’ and co-facilitated Skidmore College’s faculty workshop: ‘‘Putting Your Course On-Line.’’ Presently, Corky is an international consultant assisting educators with the architecture and pedagogy of learning online. Dr Reinhart has shared his work at numerous conferences and is a past-President of the Adult Higher Education Alliance (www.ahea.org). Cornel Reinhart can be contacted at: [email protected]

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected] Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints

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Can we talk? Course management software and the construction of knowledge Carla R. Payne and and Cornel J. Reinhart

Carla R. Payne works for the Community College of Vermont, Vermont, USA. Cornel J.Reinhart is President and Consultant at the Center for eLearning and eLiteracy, Mooers, New York, USA and Bloemfontein, South Africa

Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to explore the question: how well do course management systems (CMS) support constructivist pedagogy; how well do they support conversation? Design/methodology/approach – This article reviews the basic pedagogical orientation of CMS as recently represented by analysts and proponents, while offering an analysis of the implications of these theoretical positions for learner activity within CMS. It compares CMS structural design for its capacity to support collaborative learning against inherent tendencies to fragmentation, individualization and learner isolation. Sampling a widely adopted CMS in use, the article analyzes how well CMSs fulfill the specifications for a progressive, collaborative, learner-centered environment. Findings – Despite protestations to the contrary, this paper finds that the imperatives to manage discussions and count participation supersede pedagogy in most online courses. Curiously, despite the reemergence of the ideas of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky, the CMS is more behaviorist than constructivist. Originality/value – As a comprehensive and systematic consideration of the application of constructivist principles to course management systems at the tertiary level, this paper offers guidance to university administrators, faculty members and others involved in the educational process. The author’s conclude that if the underlying, non-neutral, behaviorist principles of the emerging CMS model are subjected to educators’ analysis and thoughtful debate, perhaps it’s not too late to build learning architecture that encourages student interaction and conversations; that cedes greater control to learners for integrated participation and constructed learning. Keywords Knowledge creation, E-learning, Conversation Paper type Conceptual paper

Introduction ‘‘Talking’’ is usually enjoyed in a local cafe´, kitchen or living room over a cup of coffee among friends and with family; a casual exercise of the complex human capacity to articulate ideas and feelings. In the classroom, ‘‘talking’’ is something different. For John Dewey, like other educational constructivists, ‘‘talking,’’ purposeful conversation, is an essential social means for creating knowledge. In asking, ‘‘can we talk?’’ our concern here is: how well do course management systems (CMS) support constructivist pedagogy; how well do they support conversation? Our focus is the asynchronous discussion function, the digital bulletin board included in every CMS. As the most obvious area for talking, for learner activity, interactivity and collaboration, the ‘‘bulletin board,’’ exhibits the tension inherent between constructivist principles, traditional didacticism and the imperatives of ‘‘efficiency.’’ The introduction of course management systems to the postsecondary classroom, and the wide acceptance of constructivist principles are two of the most significant recent developments in tertiary education. Are these trends consistent and compatible with each other? Does course management software support learner-centered education? The

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ubiquity of CMS should not create a climate uncritical of its architectural assumptions. In many discussions of the educational uses of CMS, and the necessary preparation and training for implementation, it is asserted that CMS software, generically speaking, is a transparent or neutral medium neither impacting nor shaping teaching and learning. In this chapter we challenge that assumption and point to some of the ways in which ‘‘course management’’ is also learning management in a substantive sense. We review the basic pedagogical orientation of CMS as recently represented by analysts and proponents, while offering an analysis of the implications of these theoretical positions for learner activity within CMS. We compare CMS structural design for its capacity to support collaborative learning against inherent tendencies to fragmentation, individualization and learner isolation. Sampling a widely adopted CMS in use, we analyze how well it fulfills the specifications for a progressive, collaborative, learner-centered environment.

Constructivism Constructivism emphasizes the active and personal construction of knowledge by the student through his/her experiences and social interaction within a learning environment (Bostock, 1998; Heinecke et al., 2001). Constructivist instructional principles place importance on: negotiation of learning objectives; student control over his/her learning; authentic, purposeful and contextual learning; problem solving; collaborative learning; multiple, alternative perspectives; knowledge construction and validation through action and discourse; authentic, contextual assessment; and development of metacognitive skills (Heinecke et al., 2001). The instructor is viewed as facilitator and coach; the goal is the development of deep understanding. Students are offered opportunities to express their conceptions and interpretations.

Dewey and Vygotsky The questions we confront are: why is constructivism important today; why should its tenets be given primacy over behaviorist principles; how should we understand and apply constructivist concepts to a digital learning artifact, the asynchronous ‘‘bulletin board?’’ Constructivism grew initially out of the progressive educational philosophy of John Dewey (1859-1952) and the semiotic (and Marxian) insights of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), augmented in the 1970s by Clifford Geertz’s notions concerning culture and social constructivism (Olson, 1991). Dewey came to the University of Chicago in 1894 as Chair of the combined Departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Pedagogy. He was well aware of Joseph Mayer Rice’s (1893) sensational report on American public schools: ‘‘Instruction throughout the school.’’ Rice observed after visiting schools in New York City: Consists principally in grinding these answers verbatim [author’s emphasis] into the minds of the children. To reach the desired end, the school has been converted into the most dehumanizing institution that I have ever laid eyes upon, each child being treated as if he possessed a memory and faculty of speech, but no individuality, no sensibilities, no soul (Wirth, 1966, pp. 32-33).

Dewey shared Rice’s conclusions, but went further, articulating his own critique of American education and in the process helping to forge ‘‘progressive education,’’ an important part of the progressive era’s larger ‘‘revolt against formalism.’’ While at Chicago, Dewey was stimulated by corresponding with William James, and his association with Alfred Henry Lloyd and lifelong friend, colleague and neighbor at the University of Chicago, George Herbert Mead (Wirth, 1966, pp. 22-23). Central to Dewey’s pragmatism was his interest in consciousness. In later years, Dewey said his own thinking was revolutionized by Mead’s central thesis: that the ‘‘individual mind, the conscious self was . . . the world of nature first taken up into social relations, and then dissolved to form a new self which then went forth to re-create the world of nature and social institutions’’ (Wirth, 1966, p. 49). A few years later Dewey forcefully brought these notions to his consideration of the psychology of elementary scientific education: ‘‘The bare physical stimulus of light is not the entire reality.’’ Dewey argued, ‘‘the interpretation given to it through social activities and thinking confers upon it its

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wealth of meaning. It is through imitation, suggestion, direct instruction and even more indirect unconscious intuition, that the child learns to estimate and treat the bare physical stimuli. It is through the social agencies that he recapitulates in a few short years the progress which it has taken the race slow centuries to work out’’ (Wirth, 1966, p. 83). For understanding learning, Dewey’s contribution is fundamental: it is through social interactions that the child, any learner, ‘‘recapitulates,’’ reinterprets his or her reality. In short, individual learning is mediated by social agency; an individual’s learning is socially constructed. Nor was Dewey finished yet. His relentless search for how learning occurred drove him further, to look closely at language: ‘‘since language tends to become the chief instrument of learning about many things,’’ he observes in his now classic Democracy and Education, ‘‘let us see how it works . . . . The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible [his emphasis] is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared experience‘‘ (Dewey, 1937, pp. 17-18)[1]. This last, breathtaking, insight opens the door for the semiotic work of Russian philosopher and psychologist (and a host of other disciplines) Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). While neither Dewey nor Vygotsky lived long enough to reflect on digital teaching and learning, their ideas are foundational for contemporary thought concerning thinking and learning. Thought and Language, arguably Vygotsky’s most important work, appeared in Russian in 1934 (shortly after his death of tuberculosis), and in English in 1962. Like Dewey, Vygotsky was influenced by George Herbert Mead. We can hear Mead’s influence in Vygotsky’s argument that: ‘‘children solve practical tasks with the help of their speech, as well as with their eyes and hands. This unity of perception, speech and action, which ultimately produces internalization of the visual field, constitutes the central subject matter for any analysis of the origin of uniquely human forms of behavior.’’ In Jerome Bruner’s apt paraphrase, ‘‘language is (in Vygotsky’s sense as in Dewey’s) a way of sorting out one’s thoughts about things’’ (Bruner, 1986, p. 23). Language is also a uniquely social medium, an understanding that carried Vygotsky to perhaps his most famous contribution to learning theory: the ‘‘zone of proximal development.’’ For Vygotsky, this ‘‘zone’’ was ‘‘the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’’ (Bruner, 1986, p. 24). Vygotsky’s ‘‘zone of proximal development’’ offered new opportunities for understanding learners and learning. Exploring the corollary question of cognitive value of peer interaction, Forman and Cazden noted that very little research had been done on peer collaboration primarily due to investigators’ interest in individual achievement. Studies undertaken in Geneva, Russia and Japan on the effects of peer collaboration, however, all reached similar conclusions: ‘‘that peer interaction helps individuals acknowledge and integrate a variety of perspectives on a problem, and that this process of coordination, in turn, produces superior intellectual results’’ (Forman and Cazden, 1986, p. 330). If alive today what might Dewey and Vygotsky say about course management systems (CMS)? First, I think we can safely argue from their similar perspectives that lectures online are as static and unsocial as they are in the live classroom. We can imagine further that they would agree that a digital ‘‘space,’’ something like an asynchronous bulletin board, might, if properly constructed, afford rich opportunities for socially constructed learning: learning facilitated by a knowledgeable instructor, mediated by peer-to-peer interactions. Both might approvingly observe that the medium of expression, written language, properly elicited, serves multiple purposes: allowing learners to articulate their experiences (readings, web and other research, life events) while offering opportunities for peer-to-peer interactions, exchanges and challenges, building on and testing each others expressed thinking. Once archived, these socially constructed ‘‘talks’’ occasion new learning and assessment opportunities. It is not too hard to imagine that these two giants of pedagogy might find that the asynchronous bulletin board, designed to facilitate ‘‘talk,’’ socially constructed learning, an acceptable alternative to face-to-face discussion.

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Course management systems A significant claim for course management systems is that they are becoming ‘‘operating systems for education’’ (Finkelstein and Pittinsky, 2003). If by ‘‘course management system’’ is meant a software application offering tools and functionalities for curriculum design, course delivery, communication, and student involvement (Papastergiou, 2006), then we must understand how and whether such a system embodies an educational agenda. We must understand the educational implications of neutrality or non-neutrality? And, if ’’neutrality’’ here means that the medium is without bias toward any particular pedagogical orientation, then what indicators are present in CMS to support or refute such a claim? The actual neutrality of CMS is insisted upon by various commentators: Carmean and Haefner assert that even though ‘‘the use of a CMS demands the adaptation of pedagogy, the choices belong to the individual faculty, not to the shell of a software application . . . ’’ (Carmean and Haefner, 2002). While Katz frames the matter politically, he also adheres to this view: ‘‘although the CMS does not dictate either a discipline or a pedagogy, it does possess a structure that threatens faculty hegemony’’ (Katz, 2003). Katz’s latter clause contradicts his first, since pedagogical considerations certainly include an instructor, or learner-centered educational process. Katz admits that in the effort to master a CMS, ‘‘many faculty struggle to force the system to conform to their view of how classroom experience is to be structured;’’ implying at the very least that the CMS is resistant or inflexible to faculty perspectives. Katz concedes that ‘‘course management systems will need to become more flexible and to enable, in customizable form students and faculty to choose among pedagogies embedded in their structure’’ (Katz, 2003). The question of which pedagogies will be so embedded is not addressed. BlackBoard’s Chair, Matthew Pittinsky, also presents his product as liberating the instructor to make pedagogical choices freely: There is certainly an instructional agenda behind BlackBoard. I would call it an antidote to the ‘‘bolted-down chairs’’ approach to instruction. Put simply, we want to make sure that the online classroom does not suffer from the rigid, facilities-driven classroom organizational structures that still predominate in the physical classroom. By definition, this is not an issue of BlackBoard designing a pedagogical approach into the courseware; quite the opposite, it means unbolting the chairs so that instructors can organize the classroom anyway they like (Finkelstein and Pittinsky, 2003).

Weigel takes a dramatically contrary view: One of the great weaknesses of the contemporary CMS is its facile acceptance of behaviorist approaches to learning, which emphasize parceling up knowledge or skills into bite-sized chunks that can be easily digested (Weigel, 2005).

Dutton makes a similar point: Traditional teaching paradigms are in fact designed into many e-learning products . . . . They are even sold using analogies to what teachers already know in order to make the system’s functionality more understandable. BlackBoard, for example, uses the analogy of the ‘‘chalk-and-talk’’ to convey its centrality to traditional conceptions of teaching (Dutton et al., 2004).

Speaking of the ‘‘logical impossibility’’ of pedagogical neutrality, Earle observes that this notion is ‘‘based on the fallacy that unless a pedagogical position is made explicit (whether in terms of an individual’s beliefs or the functionality of a system), it does not exist. In effect, what is usually touted as pedagogical neutrality by software vendors is merely pedagogical naivety’’ (Earle, 2002). Following Bruner, Earle argues that: Everyone holds . . . ideas about teaching and learning which themselves have an impact on the educational strategies they employ . . .. Moreover, these beliefs are deeply rooted in the cultural environment which imposes epistemological values on its communities which in turn have pedagogical implications of their own. Even if, or arguably precisely because – systems designers are not able to articulate their own pedagogical stances, their beliefs will, by default, be

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articulated into the systems design process. More importantly, by construing pedagogical issues as outside of the remit of systems development, such designers will not be able to recognize the unintended pedagogic effects of other, apparently unrelated design decisions (Earle, 2002).

How do these considerations affect the potential of CMS to create and implement constructivist educational environments? In a broad review of contemporary academic utilization of CMS, Papastergiou concluded: ‘‘CMS still refrain from effectively supporting alternative forms of assessment and collaborative knowledge building activities’’ (Papastergiou, 2006). This oblique criticism is not well supported by Papastergiou’s earlier conclusions, that ‘‘CMS use has been successful in subjects that offer themselves to discussion-oriented approaches’’ and that CMS have ‘‘enabled the creation of learning environments of social constructivist inspiration, imparting to faculty and students satisfactory online experiences’’ (Papastergiou, 2006). According to Papastergiou, the literature points to technical limitations in the CMS ability to support collaborative learning, rather than to any underlying antithetical tendency. Regarding the debate between those maintaining that CMS cannot fully support innovative pedagogy, and those claiming that CMS have supported a nontraditional, discursive, collaborative approach, she takes the optimistic view that supplementation of existing CMS with new features can create environments conducive to constructivist, Deweyean learning. Papastergiou’s position is undercut by her own observation that presently no indication exists that ‘‘participatory design’’ processes will replace the market-driven development common to the commercial CMS or that open source and custom-designed systems can compete successfully with them (Papastergiou, 2006). A recent Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness study (quoted in Abel, 2006) notes that ‘‘despite much enthusiasm for open source there are no signs that a large shift is occurring at this time;’’ Morningstar reported recently that Blackboard has a market share of just more than 80 percent in the e-learning higher education market’’ (Morningstar, 2007). Given this situation, what evidence exists that commercial CMS are moving from their initial teacher-centered model towards student-centered, collaborative learning as Papastergiou claims? Higher education and the online learning community are now seven years and several BB releases beyond Papastergiou’s conclusions (based on studies of 1999 and 2000). Surely we should be able to detect an evolution in the principal vehicle for interaction between learners, that is, in the threaded discussions within the CMS. To test this we focus on the latest upgrade to the asynchronous discussion utility in BlackBoard, examining the pedagogical implications of its structure and online presentation[2]. High on Papastergiou’s list of constructivist principles is ‘‘student control over his/her learning’’ (Papastergiou, 2006). The issue of control turns out to be crucial because it concerns the quality, form and content of learner participation in class discussions. For Dewey, as other constructivists, greater control must be ceded to learners for their integrated participation: ‘‘external enforcement of rules, excessive concern for order, and even teacher directed study are forms of discipline that Dewey finds contradictory to an education designed to prepare students for active participation in a democratic society’’ (Connell, 1994). The Deweyean concept of ‘‘control’’ is complex: control, Dewey says, subordinates a person’s ‘‘natural impulses’’ to another’s end; indeed, control as we use the term, has ‘‘a flavor of coercion or compulsion about it’’ (Dewey, 1937, p. 28). To operate in such an impositional manner is neither good nor practical: too restrictive, not leading to growth. Yet a type of control is needed; Dewey calls this ‘‘the other more important and permanent mode of control’’ (Dewey, 1937, p. 33). This other mode is not the self-control of mere imitation. It is rather the control style Dewey calls ‘‘personal not intellectual’’ (Dewey, 1937, p. 39), ‘‘a guiding of activity to its own end’’ (Dewey, 1937, p. 29). While guiding is partly our own individual ‘‘doing,’’ still much control lies beyond our individual will. For Dewey: ‘‘basic control resides in the nature of the situations’’ developing (Dewey, 1937, p. 47). That is, in the ‘‘sense of control residing in the situations themselves – in the betweens and amongs, in the dynamic inter/transactions.’’ It is here that Dewey gives us a hint of self-organization (Doll, 2000) (www.lsu.edu/faculty/wdoll/Papers/RTF/methods_of_control.rtf). In what ways then does the structure of the BB discussion board address ‘‘control’’ and ‘‘self-control’’?

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‘‘Student-centered’’ or ‘‘learner-centered’’ are frequently used descriptors in the BB literature and in discussions of CMS in general, but in those contexts they do not seem to have the same meaning as they do for constructivists, for whom they refer to a learning process beginning with the student’s own questions: constructing ‘‘knowledge’’ by the revision of mental models to accommodate new information and experience. In BB instructor manuals and tutorials we find references to student ‘‘needs and wants,’’ but the emphasis on instructor ‘‘control’’ of asynchronous discussion is immediately apparent. The BB student manual (differing substantially from the instructor manual) says: ‘‘the discussion board is a tool for sharing thoughts and ideas about class materials,’’ but the specifics of implementation do not indicate that students determine the conditions and content of discussion (BlackBoard, Inc., 2006b). The ‘‘pedagogy of control,’’ rather than the ‘‘pedagogy of choice’’ appears to be operative. ‘‘The pedagogy of control assumes that those who have the control determine the sequence in which the learner approaches the material to be learned and the pacing at which that material is presented’’. The option to hide or make threads and discussions unavailable is another part of the command structure, as are the remove, lock and unlock buttons. The power to exercise these options (and others) is associated with roles. ’’Course roles control access to the content and tools within a course’’ from the control panel (BlackBoard, Inc., 2006a). Users assigned the student role have no access to the control panel; at the other end of the control continuum, ‘‘administrators may modify the privileges associated with different course roles. Therefore, all of the privileges listed may not apply. Administrators also have the option to change the names of course roles,’’ affording administrators even more control than instructors (BlackBoard, Inc., 2006a). The relative lack of control allowed to students within the BB discussion board architecture is also reflected in the way content conversation is regulated: B

Opportunities for discussion. ‘‘Forums can appear throughout a course, in any area where an instructor chooses’’ (BlackBoard, Inc., 2006a).

B

Forms of student expression. ‘‘Instructors can determine whether students can moderate, modify, delete, post anonymously, include attachments, and other options’’ (BlackBoard, Inc., 2006c, d).

B

Topics of discussion. ‘‘Generally, the purpose of the forum will dictate whether or not users can start threads. A moderated, graded forum used to evaluate student performance will usually be tightly controlled. In this case, it would not be appropriate to allow users to create threads. Other forums are designed for users to share opinions and thoughts on tangential or unrelated topics. In this case, it is safe to allow users to create threads and spark discussions’’ (BlackBoard, Inc., 2006a). ‘‘Preventing members from starting threads helps focus their posts on the topic’’ (BlackBoard, Inc., 2006a).

B

Content of discussion. (Presented as an option) ‘‘Moderating posts requires that all posts are reviewed by a responsible party before the content is shared with the class’’ (BlackBoard, Inc., 2006a).

The negotiation of learning objectives is another of Papastergiou’s important constructivist principles. Realization of this ideal is doubtful where the initial learning decisions are so unequally allocated (Papastergiou, 2006). Even Carmean and Haefner’s vigorous defense of CMS as pedagogically effective, allowing ‘‘for a synthesis of appropriate, engaging and student-centered experiences’’ is coached in terms of the freedom of faculty to make choices based on their ‘‘individual pedagogical styles, personalities, cultures and character’’ (Carmean and Haefner, 2002). These authors also interpret the requirement for active learning (duly listed by them as a key component of the construction of knowledge) as satisfied by ‘‘interactive assessment’’ or testing. Propounding a sharp distinction between educational content and educational environment, Carmean and Haefner reject the notion that ‘‘pedagogical limitations’’ are imposed by the software ‘‘shell,’’ while acknowledging that faculty must adapt pedagogical practice by arranging the classroom chairs or choosing ‘‘which areas of the CMS to enable, which areas

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to add or relabel, how to set up the course, what to include, when to reveal, what features to disable . . . ’’ (Carmean and Haefner, 2002). The question of the locus of control overlaps with the constructivist requirement that learning environments be collaborative and foster substantive interactivity between participants. Although the construction of meaning is an individual process, ‘‘common understandings regularly result from social negotiation of meaning which is supported by collaborative construction of knowledge.’’ Here Jonassen et al. follow Vygotsky in emphasizing ‘‘cooperative learning in which the learner is exposed to alternative viewpoints that challenge initial understanding, that is, reciprocal teaching’’ (Jonassen et al., 1993). Likewise, Vygotsky’s notions regarding the physical architecture of the learning environment are just as applicable to designing contemporary digital learning spaces. As an example, we focus on the latest upgrade to the asynchronous discussion utility in BlackBoard, and examine the implications of the ways in which it is structured. After looking at three tutorials for ‘‘BlackBoard Academic Suite Release 7.0: rating and grading, management, and moderation,’’ our impression is that BB offers almost no explicit learning advice or pedagogical philosophy, in the effort, we assume, to present a ‘‘neutral’’ product. However, the capabilities and structure of this CMS are not oriented to empowering of the learner, but instead create an instructor-centered environment. In the Overview tutorial, for example, we discover that Cathy, the instructor, can choose to allow or not allow students to create new threads: ‘‘this gives a great amount of control for Cathy for her online class’’[3]. BlackBoard (BB) platform 7.0 is almost totally driven by the assumption that faculty need or demand ‘‘control’’ of the classroom environment and make the facilitation of grading a primary objective. That this orientation is not particular to one course management system is confirmed by Jafari et al. In considering what the ‘‘next generation e-learning environment’’ might be like, they emphasize that ‘‘faculty want to be able to track and analyze students’ work across system functions. For example, they would like to track participation and contribution in e-mails, discussions, chats, and collaborative areas, as well as to aggregate and analyze an individual’s contributions’’ (Jafari et al., 2006). The issue of control turns out to be crucial because it concerns the quality, form and content of learner participation in class discussions. BB has created just about all the possible manipulations of student discussion data/postings possible. If an instructor wants to know what Johnny or Sally said in any or all postings, right down to the last word, or how long they were online, that can be found. What was not discovered after close searching was the management tool allowing instructors to see, count, record the ‘‘interactions’’ among participants. Unless done manually, nothing is built in to facilitate this analysis. Given the enormous attention to counting all other aspects of participant’s postings, it is pedagogically noteworthy that interactions are not measured. Additionally, the tendency to ‘‘chop’’ data up into manageable discrete, but relatable, bytes of information is also reflected in the decision to divide each discussion board into separate forums: it is easy to see all the forums but they do not necessarily ‘‘relate.’’ BB discussion board has always been divided into separate forums (although there is no reason why an instructor has to have more than one per course, if that works). In direct experience with BlackBoard (releases 7.0 and 7.2), facilitating weekly forums, the greatest challenge is the ‘‘view’’ of what is happening in any one forum. In BlackBoard release 6 and before, all participants could see the discussion in ‘‘profile;’’ previous to the upgrade from 7.0 to 7.2, you could not even ‘‘see’’ that much, all one was allowed was a ‘‘keyhole’’ into the discussion, permitting the instructor, or learners, to view only three or four posts at a time. Presumably an instructor with care could better integrate each forum, but one does not get the feeling of a synthetic integration of a course; rather an observer encounters discrete ‘‘conversations’’ called forums, sub-divided by threads and sub-threads. Discussions also have to be totally integrated into a course’s readings, assignments, and other work, as Payne has observed; otherwise they become an add-on. Payne shows how students who are well supported individually by the instructor (through comments on written

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assignments, emails,) take more risks and make more substantive contributions to discussions (Payne, 2004). We argue here that the sense of an integrated learning experience is lost when one divides the entire course into discrete forums. We believe BlackBoard does this to better manage the data of participation, not to encourage or facilitate it. We also suspect that this result is driven not only by the need for data analysis and relational issues but also to allow grading and rating for each forum. The underlying pedagogical model favors grades and management rather than learning and participation.

Conclusion Productive discussion is talk between participants, rather than rehearsed postings to an instructor. The constructivist pedagogy of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky loom over the twentieth century. As these educational giants of the last century taught us, learning is a complex undertaking. Both rejected rote learning, classroom architecture that favored individualistic teaching and learning, and a ‘‘fact’’ driven curriculum. Despite philosophical roots arising from quite different traditions, both men agreed that learning was a social process; deep learning was socially constructed. The twenty first century digital ‘‘classroom,’’ the CMS, has arisen to satisfy the needs of instructors and administrators to ‘‘control’’ online teaching and learning. Despite protestations to the contrary, we have found here that the imperatives to manage discussions and count participation supersede pedagogy. Curiously, despite the reemergence and acclaim of the ideas of Dewey and Vygotsky, the CMS is more behaviorist than constructivist. But – it’s early yet. We believe if the underlying, non-neutral, behaviorist principles of the emerging CMS model are subjected to educators’ analysis and thoughtful debate perhaps it’s not too late to reverse present trends and directions. As John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky said in the last century, we argue in this digital age: that learning architecture must encourage student interaction and conversations; that greater control must be ceded to learners for integrated participation and constructed learning.

Notes 1. Also compare Clifford Geertz’s suggestion that ‘‘mind’’ is not in a one-to-one relationship with reality, reality is not mirrored by the mind, it is rather ‘‘refracted’’ through the mind, refracted by innumerable subjective and environmental influences (Geertz, 1964). 2. BlackBoard’s own overview of the Discussion Board (for release 7.2) puts the emphasis on assessment: ‘‘The Discussion Board is an outcomes based learning tool that can be applied in a number of ways to enhance learning and measure performance’’ (BlackBoard, Inc., 2006a). 3. See also BB Manual for mentions of control and the format/language of the dialogue windows for administration of the discussions: for example, the use of the word ‘‘force’’ regarding grading of posts and threads, and ‘‘queuing’’ of posts for prior vetting by instructor.

References Abel, R.J. (2006), ‘‘Best practices in open source in higher education study: the state of open source software’’, The Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness, Inc., Lake Mary, FL, available at: www. a-hec.org/media/files/A-HEC%20open%20source%20hed%20030106.pdf (accessed May 31, 2007). BlackBoard, Inc. (2006a), ‘‘BlackBoard academic suite instructor manual release 7.2’’, available at: https://e-campus.uibk.ac.at/portal/Lehrende/Blackboard_Instructor_Manual_V_7.2(en).pdf (accessed June 15, 2007). BlackBoard, Inc. (2006b), ‘‘BlackBoard academic suite user manual release 7.2’’, available at: https://behind.blackboard.com/s/student/refcenter/docs/browse.Bb?ProductID ¼10000&DocumentType ¼ UD (accessed June 15, 2007). BlackBoard, Inc. (2006c), ‘‘Quick tutorial ‘discussion board’’’, available at: www.blackboard.com/corp/ objects/images/quicktutorials/discussionboard.swf (accessed June 24, 2007). BlackBoard, Inc. (2006d), ‘‘Quick tutorial ‘‘discussion board overview’’, available at: www.blackboard. com/viewlets/Bb_Discussion_Board_Overview_viewlet_swf.htm (accessed June 24, 2007).

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Bostock, S. (1998), ‘‘Constructivism in mass higher education: a case study’’, British Journal of Educational Technology, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 225-40. Bruner, J. (1986), ‘‘Vygotsky: a historical and conceptual perspective’’, in Wertsch, J. (Ed.), Culture, Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 21-34. Carmean, C. and Haefner, J. (2002), ‘‘Mind over matter: transforming course management systems into effective learning environments’’, Educause Review, Vol. 37 No. 6, available at: www.educause. eduirlibrarypdfERM0261.pdf (accessed January 20, 2007). Connell, J. (1994), ‘‘Revisiting Dewey’s concept of discipline’’, Philosophy of Education: The Yearbook, Philosophy of Education Society, available at: www.ed.uiuc.edu/eps/PES-Yearbook/default.asp (accessed June 2, 2007). Dewey, J. (1937), Democracy and Education, Macmillan, New York, NY. Doll, W. (2000), ‘‘Methods of control’’, Louisiana State University, available at: www.lsu.edu/faculty/wdoll/ Papers/RTF/methods_of_control.rtf (accessed June 2, 2007). Dutton, W.H., Cheong, P. and Park, N. (2004), ‘‘The social shaping of a virtual learning environment: the case of a university-wide course management system’’, Electronic Journal of Learning, Vol. 2 No. 2, available at: www.ejel.org/volume-2/vol2-issue1/issue1-art3.htm (accessed January 20, 2007). Earle, A. (2002), ‘‘Designing for pedagogical flexibility – experiences from the CANDLE project’’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, No. 4, available at: www.jime.open.ac.uk/2002/4 (accessed May 27, 2007). Finkelstein, J. and Pittinsky, M. (2003), ‘‘The evolving role of course management system providers in the transformation of education: an interview with Blackboard’s Matthew Pittinsky’’, The Technology Source, January/February, available at: http://ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show ¼ article&id ¼ 1034 (accessed April 14, 2007). Forman, E.A. and Cazden, C.B. (1986), ‘‘Exploring Vygotskian perspective in education: the cognitive value of peer interaction’’, in Wertsch, J. (Ed.), Culture, Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 323-47. Geertz, C. (1964), ‘‘Ideology as a social system’’, in Apter, D. (Ed.), Ideology and Discontent, Free Press, New York, NY, pp. 47-76. Heinecke, W., Dawson, K. and Willis, J. (2001), ‘‘Paradigms and frames for R&D in distance education: toward collaborative electronic learning’’, International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 293-322. Jafari, A., McGee, P. and Carmean, C. (2006), ‘‘Managing courses, defining learning: what faculty, students, and administrators want’’, Educause Review, Vol. 41 No. 4, available at: www.educause.edu/ apps/er/erm06/erm0643.asp (accessed January 7, 2007). Jonassen, D., Mayes, T. and McAleese, R. (1993), ‘‘Manifesto for a constructivist approach to technology in higher education’’, available at: http://apu.gcal.ac.uk/clti/papers/TMPaper11.html (accessed June 15, 2007). Katz, R.N. (2003), ‘‘Balancing technology and tradition: the example of course management systems’’, Educause Review, Vol. 38 No. 4, available at: www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0343.pdf (accessed April 11, 2007). Morningstar (2007), Morningstar, available at: http://quote.morningstar.com/Quote/Quote. aspx?ticker ¼ BBBB&SC ¼ Q (accessed June 23, 2007). Olson, G.A. (1991), ‘‘Clifford Geertz on ethnography and social construction’’, Journal of Advance Composition, Vol. 1 No. 2. Papastergiou, M. (2006), ‘‘Course management systems as tools for the creation of online learning environments: evaluation from a social constructivist perspective and implications for their design’’, International Journal on E-Learning, Vol. 5 No. 4, pp. 593-623. Payne, C. (2004), ‘‘Design for success: applying progressive educational principles online’’, in Vrasidas, C. and Glass, G.V. (Eds), Current Perspectives on Applied Information Technologies: Preparing Teachers to Teach with Technology, Information Age Publishing, Greenwich, CT, p. 237.

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Rice, J.M. (1893), The Public-School System of the United States, The Century Co., New York, NY. Weigel, V. (2005), ‘‘From course management to curricular capabilities: a capabilities approach for the next-generation CMS’’, Educause Review, Vol. 40 No. 3, available at: www.educause.edu/apps/er/ erm05/erm0533.asp (accessed April 14, 2007). Wirth, A.G. (1966), John Dewey as Educator, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY.

Further reading Burgess, T. (1993), ‘‘Reading Vygotsky’’, in Daniels, H. (Ed.), Charting the Agenda: Educational Activity after Vygotsky, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 1-29. Cole, M. (1986), ‘‘The zone of proximal development: where culture and cognition create each other’’, in Wertsch, J. (Ed.), Culture, Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 146-61. Dewey, J. (1900), ‘‘The psychology of the elementary curriculum’’, The Elementary School Record, Vol. 1 No. 9, pp. 221-32. Dewey, J. (1931), ‘‘George Herbert Mead’’, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 28, June, pp. 309-14. Dewey, J. (1963), Experience and Education, Macmillan, New York, NY. Dworkin, M.S. (1967), Dewey on Education, Teachers College Press, New York, NY. Lipman, M. (1996), Natasha: Vygotskian Dialogues, Teachers College Press, New York, NY. Van der Veer, R. and Valsiner, J. (1991), Understanding Vygotsky, Blackwell, Oxford. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Wertsch, J.V. and Stone, C.A. (1986), ‘‘The concept of internalization in Vygotsky’s account of genesis of higher mental functions’’, in Wertsch, J. (Ed.), Culture, Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 162-82.

About the authors Carla R. Payne retired in 2006 as Professor of Graduate Studies at Vermont College of Union Institute and University in Montpelier, Vermont, where she supervised low residency MA students in individualized interdisciplinary studies, and designed and implemented an online Master’s program. She continues to teach ethics and philosophy courses online for the Community College of Vermont. Her BA in Philosophy is from Barnard College, and her MA and PhD, also in Philosophy, were earned at SUNY/Buffalo. Publications include ‘‘Good practice and motivation in online learning,’’ in Virtual University Gazette (2002); ‘‘Teaching and technology for human development,’’ co-authored with A.W. Chickering and G. Poitras, in Educational Technology (2001); ‘‘Design for success: applying progressive educational principles online,’’ in Current Perspectives on Applied Information Technologies: Preparing Teachers to Teach with Technology (2004); ‘‘What do they learn?’’ in Flexible Learning in an Information Society (2006). Cornel ‘‘Corky’’ Reinhart is the former Director of the University Without Walls program at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (1996-2005) and an American social historian. Dr Reinhart founded Skidmore College’s University Without Walls’ online distance program for adult learners. Corky offered UWW’s first on-line course: America in the ‘‘sixties’’ and co-facilitated Skidmore College’s faculty workshop: ‘‘Putting Your Course On-Line’’. Presently, Corky is an international consultant assisting educators with the architecture and pedagogy of learning online. Dr Reinhart has shared his work at numerous conferences and is a past-President of the Adult Higher Education Alliance (www.ahea.org). Cornel Reinhart is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: [email protected]

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected] Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints

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Adaptive individualization: the next generation of online education Nish Sonwalkar

Nish Sonwalkar is based at iDL Systems, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Abstract Purpose – Despite the predictions and expectations that the online education will become a ‘‘killer app’’ and with major impact on education, the first generation of online education has led to more disappointments than success stories. The current – one-size-fits-all static approach is extremely ineffective and leads to increased effort on the part of faculty and instructors teaching online courses. This paper discusses adaptive learning as an alternative transfer of traditional structures from a geographically-based to an online setting. Design/methodology/approach – This article begins with an overview of the development of online education, and concludes that its initial promise has not been fulfilled because the innovations in technology have not been accompanied by any corresponding changes in the way classrooms are structured. It then proposes adaptive learning as a means by which, with the help of digital resources, learning can be adjusted to the needs and interests of individual students. Findings – To improve current state-of-art and to increase effectiveness of the online education, systems that can adapt the content to match the learning preference of the individual learners, termed as the ‘‘adaptive learning systems,’’ are needed. Systems that will support adaptive learning in a university and college environment will facilitate a paradigm shift for instructors to ‘‘guide-on-the-side’’ from ‘‘sage-on-the-stage.’’ Originality/value – This opinion piece argues the need for a massive restructuring of higher education, using a student-centered model. Keywords E-learning, Higher education Paper type Viewpoint

1. Need for paradigm shift The quest for online adaptive learning that is pedagogically effective and responsive to the user needs have been going on for ages. With the advent of any new paradigm of information dissemination, experts predict that the new disruptive technology will lead to significant impact on the learning. For example, with the invention of radio, it was predicted that every school would use the educational programming on radio to enhance education. With the invention of television, it was predicted that the educational programs would make a major impact on education and eradicate literacy issues worldwide. There is no doubt that every generation of technology has made some impact but most often the promise is oversold and educational impacts are rather modest. With the invention of worldwide web as an international mode of information dissemination, experts both from education and commercial sectors predicted that the online education would be the ‘‘killer app’’ for education. The jury is still out, but the results from the first generation of online education are disappointing and have created backlash in the higher education sector for the use of online education as replacement for in-class education. For the reasons, which are justified, the static page-turners have not generated continued excitement or captured the imagination of the learning community. The computer as a

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DOI 10.1108/10748120810853345

learning platform is proving to be an ineffective and boring medium. Despite these drawbacks, the online education programs are growing in size. There is a consensus among university and college faculty that online teaching is much more demanding and requires much more effort than classroom teaching. These factors clearly show that there is acute need for paradigm shift because of following reasons: B

static page turners are ineffective;

B

most course management systems only support information exchange and do not help in pedagogy for learning;

B

faculty responsible for online courses have to answer a load of e-mails or be available by phone to answer questions learners;

B

there is no pedagogical framework provided for instructors to be effective online;

B

the feedback from faculty to students and vice-a-versa has significant delay; and

B

it is hard to know how students are progressing through the course.

1.1 The promise of adaptive learning The need for paradigm shift is indicating a possible model that can harness technological framework to enable effective education, something that involves for more than information transfer. Early developments of the intelligent tutors that thrived during mid-1980s can help us to devise pedagogical models that take into account the preferences of online learners. AI researchers represented the creation of knowledge in terms of networks for communication, and proceeded to create student-centered rubrics to evaluate successful learning. ‘‘Adaptive,’’ or student-centered learning was influenced by formal theories of knowledge representation, connectionist approaches to learning, and symbolic representations of knowledge creation. Connectionist models tried to replicate models of the human brain that represented interconnected processes called ‘‘neural networks,’’ while the symbolic representations of knowledge creation were based on the interaction in communities of expertise. These two models still dominate debates on using artificial intelligence for tasks that exceed the normal capacity of human beings. Adaptive learning has the following advantages: B

making possible the formal representation of educational processes;

B

inclusion of various learning styles and strategies in accord with the learner’s preference;

B

providing a basis for continuous assessment towards meeting educational goals; and

B

providing a framework to provide intelligent feedback on the learning performance.

Adaptive learning provides a pedagogical framework to accommodate learning styles, media, and interactivity. The ‘‘learning cube’’ framework implemented by the author (Kinshuk and Lin, 2003) provides a convenient starting point to consider multi-dimensional educational space needed for adaptive learning systems.

2. Adaptive individualization The term ‘‘adaptive learning systems’’ originates from the area of AI and adaptive controls and optimizations research, where it generally referred to technological systems that have ability to learn and adapt based on the received input signals. In addition, systems developed to provide accessibility for learners with special needs are termed as ‘‘adaptive systems’’. Therefore, it is essential to clearly define the definition in reference to educational adaptive learning systems. The educational ‘‘adaptive learning systems’’ organize content based on the learning preferences of individual learners in order to maximize learning performance.

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The first task for adaptive learning systems is to allow for content sequencing (organization). This requires flexible and dynamic assembly of learning objects or else the availability of multiple pathways through the learning content, in order to accommodate diverse learning styles. The second task is to create a framework for identifying the preferences of the individual learner, the approach most suited to the cognitive abilities of the student among the multiple learning pathways that are made available. The third task is to provide continuous intelligent feedback, guidance, and encouragement overcome concept deficiencies, thereby maximizing learning performance. Figure 1 shows the four iterative processes involved in an adaptive learning cycle that adapts to the learning style of an individual student. The conventional hypertext and hypermedia environments cannot achieve these three desirable goals without a paradigm shift in the strategy of instructional design, course management software capabilities, diagnostic assessments, and intelligent feedback.

3. Adaptive individualization in higher education The paradigm shift towards the adaptive learning systems will lead to learning systems that are significantly more effective and meaningful for online learners. Online education has not yet met the standards of quality and pedagogy and quality demanded by students. The majority of the top research universities have stayed away from the distance learning and online education with the stiff resistance form the faculty who fear dilution of the ‘‘brand.’’ The improved effectiveness and the pedagogical strength of the proposed model is intended to alleviate that fear. Adaptive educational courses designed with input from professors with the necessary expertise in their subjects will finally make possible the paradigm shift from ‘‘sage on the stage’’ to ‘‘guide on the side,’’ thus reducing the workload on the faculty involved in the teaching online courses. The higher educational institutes need embrace this Figure 1 The adaptive learning cycle

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paradigm shift, which will improve the overall quality of education for both on-campus and distance learning students.

Reference Kinshuk, A. and Lin, T. (2003), ‘‘User exploration based adaptation in adaptive learning systems’’, International Journal of Information Systems in Education, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 22-31.

Further reading Brusilovsky, P. (2001), ‘‘Adaptive hypermedia’’, UM and User Adapted Interactions, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 87-110. Cloete, I. and Zurada, J.M. (2001), Knowledge Based Neurocomputing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Dietterich, T.G. (2001), ‘‘Ensemble methods in machine learning’’, in Arbib, M. (Ed.), Handbook of brain Theory and Neural Networks, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Merrill, D. (2000), ‘‘Instructional strategies and learning styles: which takes precedence?’’, in Reiser, R.A. (Ed.), Trends and Issues in Instructional Technology, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Minsky, M.L. and Papert, S.A. (1990), Perceptions, 4th ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Sonwalkar, N. (2001a), ‘‘Changing the interface of education with revolutionary learning technologies’’, Syllabus, November, pp. 10-13. Sonwalkar, N. (2001b), ‘‘The sharp edge of the cube: pedagogically driven instructional design for online education’’, Syllabus, December, pp. 12-16. Sonwalkar, N. (2002), ‘‘A new methodology for evaluation: the pedagogical rating of online courses’’, Syllabus, January, pp. 18-21. Sonwalkar, N. (2003), ‘‘Optimizing individual learning performance with multi-dimensional evaluations and adaptive systems’’, NASA, available at: www.idlsystems.com/press/brochures/als.pdf Sonwalkar, N. (2004), Changing the Interface of Education with Revolutionary Learning Technologies: An Effective Guide for Infusing Technology Enabled Education for Universities and Corporations, iUniverse, New York, NY. Sonwalkar, N. and Fay, J.A. (1996), A Fluid Mechanics Hypercourse, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Stillings, N.A. (1995), Cognitive Science: An Introduction, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Winston, P.H. (1992), Artificial Intelligence, 3rd ed., Addison Wesley, New York, NY.

Corresponding author Nish Sonwalkar can be contacted at: [email protected]

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