ontheuniversity.com

From the journal First Monday:

The early twenty–first century networked information economy has generated new communicative fields and literacies, and new forms of knowledge production, sociality and creative expression. The emergence of decentralized techno–fields, such as Facebook, Twitter, Second Life and virtual gaming communities, on teaching, learning, institutional hierarchies and sources of authority, presents both problems and opportunities. This article claims that the current moment represents an Epistemic Break in the Academy, and this piece traces some of how this is so. In doing so, we argue that as educational products and experiences contend with other multi–mediated forms of communication, significantly more attention must be paid to the aesthetic, functional and emotional elements of multimedia design creation and modification of course materials, as these materials vie for the attention of Digital Natives. The conclusion suggests both practices and policies needed for higher education to successfully compete for student attention in the current media intensive environment.

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For colleges and universities, a sustained commitment to flexible and expert design, testing and implementation of online formats, informed by the successes of the open source movement, and consistent with Sterling’s notion of producing communication formats with low cognitive loads and low opportunity costs, is the critical task, once infrastructure is in place. Flexible communicative vehicles may well be known by their fruits. They facilitate collaborative efforts that allow participants to be both active consumers and producers. As might be inferred from the success of South Africa’s Ubuntu Linux, ambitious design projects may well require a strong and responsive executive, one that exercises power in such a way as to create opportunities for collaboration and creative and productive action from the edges of an organization (Whitworth and Friedman, 2009).

For the article…