KATHERINE LADD

A tussle has broken out amongst higher education teachers, and, however politely the arguments are framed, it is dividing the world of academics into those who ‘get’ the digital revolution and those who don’t.

For some, even the word ‘revolution’ is a red rag to a bull. It is almost as though they believe that the internet will somehow just fizzle out and fade away, transforming students into the passive receptors they once were. What these particular academics don’t realise is that for the first time in 40 years, young people are watching less television. They prefer to share their knowledge, play games virtually with others around the world, create websites and blogs, make objects and sell them online, make political comments and agitate in ways that were undreamed of even 10 years ago. And people who say that this is leading to a dumbing down of culture should remind themselves that 40 years ago we all sat on our sofas watching the Des O’Connor Show or the Black and White Minstrels.

What this means for education is that students expect a degree of co-creation and co-learning in their course materials and learning outcomes. This in turn entails radically re-thinking the way we deliver higher education courses; what defines an assessable outcome and how should we evaluate our students?

At some universities it is forbidden to post lectures online, arguing that they fear prosecution over copyright. Google publishes millions of images every second of every day, but do they fear prosecution? I think not. In a university copyright law allows for lectures to contain freely available materials – except from freeview TV sites and the Open University. What is not permitted is public publishing of this material. However, if you keep the lectures on the University server, accessible only by students with a password, this could be argued as being ‘fair use’ – as members of the public would not be able to view the lectures.

Imagine, though, a world where all academic lecture content was freely available by everyone. Google is currently digitising millions of books for free access in university libraries in the US. If lectures were also freely viewable, to add to this body of knowledge, what sort of experience would education become?

Lectures just might become obselete.

However, imaginations, creative juices and ideas would flow. Students would get an insight into what they want to study by virtually sitting in on courses they may never have thought they had the time and money to explore. Some lecturers would study the techniques of others and try to improve their performances. Some ideas would be stolen and passed off. Some lecturers would face derision for their incompetence. Others would gain admiration for their skill. In short, everything that already happens to the printed word would happen to online lectures.

And lectures might even fall out of use in physical classrooms, because lecturers could just direct students to their past recordings or those of others. To keep students interested in the classroom, lecturers would have to focus more on creating discussions, debates and workshops, or group projects and presentations; things that can’t be contained and rolled out in a lecture. This ‘flipping’ of the classroom is already happening across much of the US.

Such a radical change in the UK is unlikely in the short term. There’s just too much resistance. One thing is certain, though, and that is sooner or later students will start voting with their feet, by choosing universities that match their own open source, free access, co-creating ‘net native’ mentalities.

It’s not just lectures that are under scrutiny. Academic publishing is also coming under pressure to reinvent itself. The commodification of knowledge is a huge point of contention at the moment. In January 2012 a young activist, Aaron Schwartz, killed himself as he was facing prosecution, possible $1m fine and 50 years in prison for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR for free distribution on the net. He wasn’t aiming to make a penny from his activities; just to open up knowledge for everyone.

Read this article by Martin Eve from the Guardian newspaper’s Higher Education Network, 25 March 2013, which gives an open-source academic’s viewpoint on publishing freely online…definitely food for thought.

A recent post in the New Scientist blog describes the phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley – the place where a robot’s similarity to a human, without being actually exactly like a human, becomes unacceptable and downright unsettling. Apparently, we like our robots small and cute, like Wall E. I know I do.

The phrase was translated from the Japanese “bukimi no tani,” coined by Masahiro Mori of the Tokyo Institute of Technology back in 1970. Mori’s theory was that realistic robots remind us too much of corpses, and that most people would be terrified if a corpse suddenly sprang into life. This feeling may also extend to artificial limbs. The running blades of a ParaOlympian seem so much more sexy than if they were a realistic pair of pinkish, human, lookalike legs tacked onto someone’s torso, running a bit awkwardly.

So why do scientists still build robots that mimic humans? It is surely the emotional response that elicits the best human-robot interaction. I’m thinking of the Tamagotchi craze, where children would become inconsolable when their little black and white pixel creature ‘died’ in real time. Tamagotchis were banned in schools because of their disruptive power. However, robots these days are more likely to be designed in a human shape so that they fit into human working environments, but with a distinctly un-human facial appearance.

Read a more scholarly dissection of the concept by the University of Glasgow’s Frank Pollick in 2009 here.

What I’m reading at the moment. Fascinating stuff. Blurb on the back says…

“Through a range of case studies from Facebook to Second Life to Google Earth, Digital Anthropology explores how human and digital can be defined in relation to one another, from avatars and disability; cultural differences in how we use social networking sites or practise religion; the practical consequences of the digital for politics, museums, design, space and development to new online world and gaming communities. The book also explores the moral universe of the digital, from new anxieties to open-source ideals. Digital Anthropology reveals how only the intense scrutiny of ethnography can overturn assumptions about the impact of digital culture and reveal its profound consequences for everyday life.”

In essence, the book describes how far from alienating or radically altering human experience, technology seems to be a reinforcing agent of that humanity, and in the contexts of different cultures. Technology merely reveals pre-existing tensions, good or bad, inherent in the human condition. Like fire, you can cook your food and share it with your neighbour, or you can burn down your neighbour’s house.

My research interests are heading this way as I begin to consider ways of digitising ethnographic methodologies. I prefer to be optimistic about technology rather than indulge in what the great anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss called ‘entropology’ –  the cultural tendency to imagine the destruction of the species.