Digitizing Knowledge

Digitizing Knowledge
Tomorrow’s Professor has a guest post up by Sarah Scrafford in which she lays out the pros and cons of the imminent shift to the digital realm that academia will someday make: The term education is no longer bound by the traditional concepts that shackled it for so long - we don’t have to [...]

Tomorrow’s Professor has a guest post up by Sarah Scrafford in which she lays out the pros and cons of the imminent shift to the digital realm that academia will someday make:

The term education is no longer bound by the traditional concepts that shackled it for so long - we don’t have to rely on the traditional methods of information access and content delivery that formed our staple learning diet all these years. Thanks to the Internet and associated technology, there have been rapid advances in the way we access and assimilate information.

Digitizing information and knowledge is so simple and helpful in some ways; the severe reduction in the usage of physical space is a huge bonus. The downside of course being (all romantic notions of books and libraries aside) every aspect of copyrights, royalties, and the validity of digital versus traditionally published and printed information is just a big fat new ball of wax that has been dumped into a squirming bucket of worms. It’s an effing mess, but like most painful evolutions, it’s inevitable. The best thing to do is take a deep breath and get on with it.

Scrafford makes an interesting point about the younger students’ ability to accept and adapt to this change, and the older educators’ trepidation after decades of printed and bound knowledge:

Students, with the advantage of youth and the capacity to embrace new technology on their side, are likely to adapt to innovations with an ease that their professors and teachers, who are steeped in tradition, cannot manage. This throws up an irony of sorts, as those who are meant to be taught end up grasping the medium of education (if not the content that must be taught) at a faster rate than those who are meant to teach.

For an excellent dousing of intense information regarding the current quandaries academe is facing due to the impossible-to-ignore technological advancement of mankind, may I suggest reading Scholarship in the Digital Age by Christine L. Borgman. I’ve read it, and found it simultaneously fascinating (it’s a complicated damn issue) and disturbing (I fear change and love dust-collecting, physical-space-wasting books).

Posted by Alexa Harrington