Also, I should clarify a bit. When I said “we” in the post, I should have said “the Teaching and Learning Centre” so as not to sound like the entire University made the decision. The TLC was paying the membership fee for that organization, so the decision to renew was ours. Someone else in the University may still decide to renew it, but we won’t be doing it ourselves.

One of the most important elements of an academic institution is the community of scholars who have spent most of their lives thinking through the most prominent issues in their respective disciplines, and committing their life to teaching, publishing, and conversing on these topics. I don’t necessarily think this framework should change that dramatically, however the general accessibility to what the world’s thinkers teach, publish, and converse should change dramatically. I also think the way we currently imagine and implement credentials might be up for certain amount of re-consideration, as should the way in which we approach peer-review. So, yeah, I guess nothing short of a major overhaul, but all which keep the fundamental ideas of an education in tact -a space for focused thought, rigorous challenges, continual feedback, and the expectation to participate in the process of discussing and sharing one’s ideas. I think so much of the technology we already have can pretty easily enable and manage these relationships, but we still need to concentrate on the means of framing these spaces as meaningfully open, accessible and on-going. That is the challenge, and institutions still do this better than the distributed networks currently because they currently house and fund so many of the world’s most important thinkers and teachers. Bringing this back to an interesting and necessary discussion of economics, intellectual property, state-funded resources, public access, etc.

Great stuff, D’Arcy!