A reflection on “The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age” by Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg.

 
Reading Time: 5 Minutes, 45 Seconds
 

The End of the Road

 
As we near the end of our journey exploring networked learning facilitated by participatory and collaborative technologies — for this course, at least —  we have an opportunity for pause and reflection. Both in studying and more directly practicing in this so-called new ecology of learning, we have encountered powerful opportunities and challenges for our work as educators, and indeed learners ourselves.  The texts that served as the lodestars guiding our journey over the past twelve weeks, in the flexibility of their framework, allowed us to choose our own paths for investigation and application. That is, steered by the rudder of our experiences, interests, and professions, we took many routes of exploration.

It was surprising, then, for me to find myself returning again and again to a concept that seemingly had little connection to my interests or experiences to this point.  While in many ways I have been energized by the unfurling of what I had narrowly understood to be the possible structures, places, and forms of learning, I have been unable to shake certain nagging questions. These questions hinge on forces that I argue run parallel to the great populist promise of participatory learning: class, power, and institution.
 

Cash Rules Everything Around Me: Wu-Tang Clan or the University

 
Davidson and Goldberg’s text most directly tackles the role of institutions, focusing on the ways they are responsible for creating and must, in turn, respond to emerging technologies and practices. The authors stress that very real funding, organization, and leadership sustain seemingly free and organically-formed collaborative technological networks. We can most clearly see informal learning happening at the surface, enabled by the participatory functionalities designed and built into social networking sites, wikis, blogs, and other interactive digital platforms. Davidson and Goldberg highlight, though, that “beneath these sites are networks and, sometimes, organizations dedicated to their efficiency and sustainability” (2). Even technologies that enable cross-institutional collaboration are themselves the product of institutions — ones that have their own motives, assumptions, standards, and protocols. It is these institutions “below the virtual waterline” that I hope to examine further here. 

I found myself wondering: What is the nature of a “free space” for ideas when that free space is in effect an affordance of highly structured and often monetized systems and institutions? What are the boundaries implicit in those spaces? Norms? And rewards?

We can consider the university as one example of an institution that supports and responds to developments in technologies and pedagogies. While the university is undoubtedly afforded greater flexibility in the teaching practices it can sustain than K-12 institutions, it nonetheless has changed more slowly than the “inventive, collaborative, participatory learning offered by the Internet” (3). We might consider, then, why the institution has been so slow to change in response to these informal learning spaces. How do they threaten the institution as it stands?

Davidson and Goldberg wondered if the institution of Wikipedia is its organizing corporation, the Wikimedia Foundation Inc., its global community of virtual volunteers, or the artifact of the encyclopedia itself.

In turn, we can ask the same of the institution of the university. Is the university its community of undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, and faculty, or perhaps, in the case of Penn State at least, the multi-billion dollar corporation that funds, organizes, and sustains its endeavors? Of course, it is both, and more. The institution is also made of the globally distributed alumni, the military grants, the private philanthropists, the taxpayers. And it is in the interplay and negotiation between these interested parties that the ship of the institution is steered. We can ask: How do the different invested groups establish and enact their goals? And how do those goals have implications for the kinds of knowledge, ways of being, and standards passed on in the classroom?
 

The Choice Between a Carrot and a Stick

 
The question of rewards is a big one. While our 21st century “flat world” might require collaboration in process, it continues to reward products largely on an individual basis. This week, I attended the National Communication Association convention in Las Vegas. While participating academics are certainly expected to cite their influences (texts and collaborators) in their works, the discipline’s awards were mostly granted to individuals and their individual products.

If knowledge-workers like professors spend their careers working to gather the currency of reputation, what do they stand to gain by divesting themselves of authority by contributing to anonymous online collaborations? Do they not deserve to be compensated for artifacts of their expertise, just as a businessperson or artist might be? Time spent contributing to Wikipedia, for example, is time not spent researching and creating works that the institution of the university values and rewards: both in the currency of reputation and in the trade of that reputation for promotions, salaries, and power.

This dilemma reinforces the point that Davidson and Goldberg raised in arguing that “the cost is too high for individuals to bear alone” (36). Innovation often arrives from the efforts of forward-thinking individuals reaching a critical mass. If the university fails to take up the cause by developing incentives to reward collaborative behavior, though, the institution reinforces a system that incentivizes a silo mentality. And if educators adopt a highly individualistic practice in their own work, how can they be asked to model collaborative practices in their teaching?

I agree with the authors’ assertion that institutions must adopt a more material-technological understanding of networked composition in addition to the traditional marketplace practice of “author-as-owner”. One response could be to incorporate evidence of participation in populist, open knowledge-sharing networks as part of tenure or other professional review processes. Given my inexperience with this process, as a student and reviewer, I welcome more informed perspectives on the value and feasibility of this suggestion.
 

Access as a Reward

 
In addition, in its role as a gatekeeper, the university might broaden the practices, products, and standards it uses to decide student admission. We are already starting to see universities abandon the requirement of the SAT, citing the standardized test’s class-based bias and failure to indicate students’ potential for future success (Two Mass. universities drop the SAT requirement). As reinforced by an early reading from this semester, Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design, institutions must be attentive to the role that class plays in determining students’ access to and engagement with spaces for learning, those enhanced with technology and those more traditional in delivery.
 

There is No End of the Road

 
I find myself unsatisfied with the conclusions I have reached here. Over the course of this semester, we have wrestled together with complex and important ideas. I expect that I will continue to struggle with these questions throughout my career as an educator.

The diverse insights and perspectives that my classmates have brought to my experience on this journey have been invaluable to my developing understanding. In my personal practice, I must strive to better highlight and credit the value that this sharing among equals has brought to my work.
 
A sincere thank you to all.