Analogue's Allure Obscured By Digital Determination

Discussing traditional university structures and their relevance into the future during this week’s tutorial, I found myself leaving feeling surprisingly positive about my time at UoW ­­­­and at a polar opposite to the bleak vocationally-oriented outlook I demonstrated in last week’s post. Prior to the tutorial I worked my way through the set readings, beginning with Arvantikis’ (2009) utopian dream of knowledge democratization, making educational material freely available to all for the purpose of creating a new form of biopolitical knowledge production that would treat education as a cultural commons. I am all for the distribution of knowledge of any form to anyone motivated enough to consume it but I thought this dream was still a fair way off, that was, until I came across The Cost of Knowledge movement. This online petition implores academics to boycott journals that oppose the free exchange of information and charge exorbitant subscription fees, namely Elsevier, and after reading the blog post that spawned this movement (Gowers 2012) along with an article celebrating the 10,000 signature milestone (Neylon 2012), I couldn’t help but feel appalled that this is how a number of the sources I use in everyday university research come to be published.

I was further dismayed by the worrying trend of universities outsourcing academic labour and moving away from the tradition tenure model as outlined by Schell (2009) and by the time I got to the end of Miller’s rant (2010), I couldn’t see a clear future for the form of tertiary education I am currently participating in. It wasn’t until I arrived in Charlotte’s tutorial that my view was reversed, with class discussion making it obvious to me that a purely online approach is just as ineffective as an educational approach based solely around the canon of yester-year and that a combination of both is the best way for education of all kinds to progress into the future. Furthermore, this discussion made me value the uninhibited, intelligent debate only available in a physical classroom and has made me aware of how much I missed intelligent debate with intellects similar too and greater than my own during my two year leave of absence.

References:

Arvanitakis, J 2009, ‘The Autonomous University and the Production of the Commons, or, “Pirates were like Ninjas, they Learned to Use their Environments”’, Toward a Global Autonomous University, The Edu-factory collective, Autonomedia, New York, pp.154-156

Gowers, T 2012, ‘Elsevier — my part in its downfall’, weblog post, Gower’s Weblog, accessed 17/4/2013, http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/

Miller, R 2010, ‘The Coming Apocalypse’, Pedagogy, vol.10, no.1, pp.143-151

Neylon, T 2012, ‘Life after Elsevier: making open access to scientific knowledge a reality’, The Guardian, 24 April, accessed 17/4/2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/apr/24/life-elsevier-open-access-scientific-knowledge

Schell, E 2009, ‘Online Education, Contingent Faculty and Open Source Unionism’, Toward a Global Autonomous University, The Edu-factory collective, Autonomedia, New York, pp.114-118