By K. A. Laity
I'm just wrapping up a graduate class focused on performance and New Media, and one of our last discussions focused on the job market ahead. I repeated my mantra of late that so many of our colleges and universities are still preparing students for the jobs of yesterday. A good portion of our grad students are folks already engaged in teaching, so I was a bit taken back by their reluctance to use a lot of New Media during the class and final comments that they weren't too inclined to stick with things like Twitter and Facebook.
We're at a strange juncture in American academia. Between the poorly performing economy and the always low opinion of "eggheads" colleges and university face all kinds of pressures to both make their curricula cutting-edge and yet keep costs low. We load up classrooms with computers, but we're still working with the old models.
An opinion piece this week in the New York Times by Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, floated a number of changes that will doubtless raise eyebrows, suggesting (yet again) that tenure should be abolished, even that departments should be abolished and retirement forced. While many of those opinions will prove too incendiary to even be considered by most universities, some of the other suggestions are well worth taking up and soon.
In particular Taylor's argument for increasing collaboration between fields and disciplines is an absolutely essential one. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I may have a bias toward this kind of work, but it seems perfectly sensible. The long tradition of continuous narrowing that has been an essential part of higher education has resulted in disconnected work. I had already learned from academic publishers that "there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text," but our system is still producing them.
One of the reasons is that while there are scholars moving into the collaborative and interdisciplinary modes that web connectivity makes possible, they're still facing a good deal of resistance from the gatekeepers of the academy, many of whom remain dubious about the value of anything on the web as if the medium itself affected the content. In a recent note at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey R. Young writes that " journals about digital humanities often run co-authored pieces, suggesting that new technologies are leading to more collaboration in humanities disciplines." However, if those new collaborations are seen as a liability in tenure review, untenured scholars will shy away from them.
It seems best to argue that our students need this new approach, but too often faculty assume that they already know about this technology. It's true to a certain extent: our students are adept at some things: texting on their phones, using Facebook to trade pictures and such, Googling things they want to look up, but they don’t have much experience with using New Media in the ways they will on jobs -- collaborative work on documents, professionally communicating via email (how many arguments come from mis-read emails?), and consciously considering their on-line “performance”.
For example, when a student applies for a job and the potential boss Googles her, does she find the student is “sexychick69″ on her email, that her FB is publicly available and full of drunken party pictures and that her personal blog is so poorly written and edited that she makes no sense?
There are a lot of technical skills that need to be taught, but we also have to pay attention to how we negotiate the wide open spaces of the web and its divide between public and private. The problem is that a large number of our faculty aren't prepared to teach these issues and skills. Educators should be at the forefront of this sea change -- but will enough of them be willing to risk it? Let's hope so, because the next generation of tech savvy students needs them now.
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