Eduardo A., Lubomir and Ken...Thank you for you thoughtful replies. Indeed this subject is as deep as the sea given its history and scope.
The common thread I am seeing in your replies centers around the fact that the 'university' as it is in 2017 appears to be a decentralized digitized entity. Digital technology has freed knowledge to now exist dynamically outside of the university...has it not? Ken and Eduardo A. has suggested references to this kind of knowledge that anyone can access if they participate in the right discussion group online. (I am currently reading their offerings...thank you)
Each semester I devise more and more methods to compile more and more data on my students and then hand it over to the administrations who are asking for it. These administrations then turn it over to their respective governing over lords in order to keep their organizations funding and keep the campus grounds from becoming high rise apartment blocks. So much of this data and knowledge is just going to rot in the cloud now as the algorithms of our careers in academia get more and more sophisticated.
It appears that more and more each day we are living in a 'post knowledge' world and that the university's new role is to qualify and quantify warm bodies that can add to the data base that is now universally accessible by any and all organizations with the right passwords. What I have observed with Generation Z is that they now make sense of the world through their own connections to information well before entering the university now. Information that they generate, compile and manipulate at school is secondary to their daily life that uses the same methods and gateways to make sense of information. So...are we now adjusting our definition of what used to be a public and physical space for knowledge generation, storage and sharing, only to soon be re-purposing the physical campus model to make room for even more server farms?
I see many schools on the chopping block here in Korea due in part to changing demographics, but the commute times of my students do not make sense anymore either. Many senior academics (with bad behavior) are losing their positions due to the growth of the legal system here in Korea and many shareholders of university and higher ed organizations are getting into legal trouble as they leverage their power in ways that do not serve knowledge or the student body, but allow for loop holes to be exploited in the everyday world of business, P&L ledgers, ownership privileges and all other manner of perks.
Cheers from Seoul
Stephen B Allard
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|