|
October 20, 2010
There is a post on the Our Kingdom blog at Open Democracy on the universities that goes beyond the crisis in the humanities in a neo-liberal mode of governance and the calls for greater public funding to consider the institutional model in a digital age where information is flowing everywhere.
In Universities in an age of information abundance Aaron Peters says that universities have been charging high fees for access to information. His argument centres around access to information:
The proposition that in the 21st century ‘information wants to be free’ is true in two key respects - firstly, information and content can move more freely between persons and communities than ever before and are no longer the monopoly of elites as evidenced in peer-to-peer file sharing, citizen journalism and blogs. Secondly, and perhaps more pertinently, the costs of information creation, reproduction and dissemination are being reduced much more quickly than legislators can ever possibly hope to adapt to.
Just as the arrival of the printing press permitted the possibility of universal literacy and hitherto impossible social innovations such as public libraries, mass education and informed, deliberational public spheres through the distribution of newspapers and other printed documents, as described by Jurgen Habermas, so too the information abundant world means that institutions predicated on the realities of information scarcity will become historical anachronisms.
He adds that the question that must be asked then is. “Why on earth should students be asked to pay an increased contributiuon in the form of higher tuition fees (or even hypothetically a graduate tax) when the fundamental costs of running a university are lower than ever before?"
He adds that the computing capabilities and costs of universities will be a wifi or VPN network and a moodle-like course platform which utilizes very cheap and exceptionally useful sound and video technologies. Furthermore, with the advent of the e-reader, universities will no longer need to buy costly editions of books but will rather purchase copies of texts that will be available to students to lend, as is currently the case with books using platforms such as Google Books or Amazon who will inevitably establish bespoke products for universities.He finishes thus:
To place so much focus on indebting young people to subsidize the university sector amounts to a state enforced private subsidy of the industry and will not incentivize such institutions to fully engage with the possibilities of a technological moment where the running costs of undergraduate and taught graduate degrees are set to massively diminish.
The university becomes an information distributing institution does highlight how the institution model is out of kilter with a digital economy--- eg., the high costs of academic journals.
|
