Com sempre, la revista Educause Review, editada per Educause, porta interessants articles sobre la relació entre la Universitat i les TIC. En aquesta edició el títol general és Timeless Fundamentals: Changing the Future of Higher Education, i l’article que em sembla més rellevant és Scholars, Scholarship, and the Scholarly Enterprise in the Digital Age, on el resum ja indica bé el seu contingut: Information technologies have empowered the individual and are unleashing a torrent of change, one that will reshape nearly all of our institutions. To secure the place of the traditional scholarly enterprise, leaders must rethink a number of the fundamentals behind the higher education institution.
Hi ha una paraula anglesa que no és pas fàcil de traduir, que és scholarship (o scholar, que podríem dir que és “persona estudiosa”, encara que un traductor en diria “erudita”). Per a mí, es tracta d’una visió acadèmica del món, la creació de coneixement, en definitiva la recerca de la integració. Com diu aquest article,
Let’s begin with the question of the impact of information technology on scholars and scholarship. For this purpose, I use Ernest Boyer’s characterization of scholarship as consisting of discovery, integration, application, and teaching. With regard to scholarship, two trends stand out. First, as Clark Kerr observed, higher education “is ever more central to the evolution of society.” Second, the information and scholarly communication environments that are emerging in the Digital Age are empowering scholars and are enriching scholarship in palpable ways. This empowerment, enrichment, and enlargement are made possible by
- rapid and low-cost connection with others;
- tools that promote our capacity for multi-tasking, multi-processing, and otherwise dividing our attention;
- the interconnected and accessible complex of digital instruments and visualization techniques that make it possible for us to work at nano- or cosmic scale; and
- access to an abundance of easily discovered recorded knowledge.
These very new capabilities are destroying distance and are demolishing barriers of all sorts. They are liberating scholars and scholarship from many traditional bounds of culture, community, and practice. They are redefining or even eliminating the rationing of academic tools and resources (e.g., space telescopes, particle colliders). They are predisposing scholars to a scholarship of open content, knowledge, and learning. And they are liberating us all from the “busy-ness” of knowledge work.
També parla de la scholarly enterprise, la universitat:
Although information technology has had an undeniably salutary effect on scholarship and on the life of the scholar, new practices — enabled by technology — threaten to erode scholarship, isolate scholars, and marginalize the rightful place of the scholarly enterprise in an age dominated by knowledge and innovation. Within the academy and in society, technology may be fostering new practices that are sharpening contradictions within the community of scholars. Is the modern college or university, for example, centrally important as a storehouse of knowledge? As a purveyor of expertise? As a cultural arbiter? Despite the fact that many of our finest institutions continue to lead society in these ways, the overall answer to these questions is “no.”
Em sembla important una darrera conclusió de l’article: el valor d’una universitat no és la seva mida, sinó la xarxa en la qual participa:
Finally, in a globalized economy, scholarly enterprises will increasingly need to define their geographic scope and, where possible, behave like global citizens. In a networked economy, the value of a scholarly enterprise is a function of its institutional connections and not, per se, its size. To become effective global operators, scholarly enterprises will need partners to surmount the cultural, academic, and business issues associated with global markets, and they will need partners who are able to navigate the inevitable tangle of international laws and regulations.
En aquest sentit, les universitats han de seguir tenint en compte les raons de la seva existència vinculades a la seva ubicació geogràfica, per exemple la Universitat de Girona, però no han de descuidar la seva pertinença a un món de l’educació superior globalitzat. Si saben jugar-hi bé, ocuparan un lloc rellevant independent de la seva mida i que anirà més enllà del plantejament que les va crear, a finals del segle XX.
