Page 39 - Campus Technology, July 2017

C-Level View
Campbell: To avoid getting so abstract that I lose track of everything, I started to think with my students about this, asking simply stated questions like, “What are we doing, when we get together and discuss a poem by Robert Frost?
re-envisioning liberal education in the digital moment. The phrase they use and talk about is “digital opportunity.” This is so interesting because, when you think about it, we have a light-speed, global communications network that did not
into procedural and operational gatherings and workshops, which are valuable but not the result we are looking for if we want to contribute to the mission and to conceptual frameworks.
CT: What about students and faculty coming together? Might discussions of curriculum be another useful place to start?
Campbell: Curriculum is an opportunity for the best of self-directed learning and the best of expertise-imagined learning to exist in a synergistic relationship. Curriculum ought to reflect structures of thinking that experts bring to the work they do and that learners probably wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise.
But curriculum also ought to be available for students to think about as well as a tool for them to think with, as they bring their own experience, interests, desires and growing awareness of the world to an unusually rich learning opportunity.
When curriculum exists within the realm of “digital opportunity,” it means to me not just that we tell the learner to go look at all the great stuff on YouTube, or some such thing — instead, we ask ourselves: How could the digital opportunity and the digital ecosystem provide a way for students to communicate and express the story of their
“Students should always, always be thinking about what they are doing, why they are here, and what they believe should happen as a result.
This questioning is something we haven’t really built into the student experience — and we should.”
What do you believe is happening here?”
I do realize these might actually be difficult questions for
students to consider, whilst they are staring down at a series of assignments and related curricular events. But I think that very difficulty points to something important that we may have lost track of over time: Students should always, always be thinking about what they are doing, why they are here, and what they believe should happen as a result. This questioning is something we haven’t really built into the student experience — and we should.
Alongside that, I’ll put forth what I think is a great phrase that Randy Bass and Bret Eynon highlight in their book Open and Integrative: Designing Liberal Education for the New Digital Ecosystem (AAC&U, 2016), in which they discuss
exist just a few years ago. This is a wholly new medium — even a meta-medium, if you will — for human communication. It’s a new digital opportunity, and it changes everything.
CT: What is the faculty’s role?
Campbell: I think faculty development should be a really good place to start to think about this. The heart of the university is its faculty. Questions of mission, of conceptual frameworks for learning, and of the complex nature of the digital opportunity — to think deeply in these areas should be natural for faculty. In every discipline I can imagine, faculty are always engaged with rich, fundamental questions.
Too often, though, faculty development programs devolve
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | July 2017