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Chapter 10 Technology, Learning, and Campus Culture Daniel R. Porterfield President, Franklin & Marshall College In his final Sunday sermon on March 31, 1968, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Through our scientific and technological genius we’ve made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood.”1 Of course, forty-four years ago even Dr. King could not have imagined the densely interconnected global neighborhood we would create through inventions like the Internet , digitized content, search engines, massive social media platforms, massive online open courses (MOOCs), GPS systems, and proliferating smartphones. Nor could anyone have forecasted the revolutionary applications of mushrooming digital capacities in fields ranging from finance to physics, from education to entertainment, from commerce to law enforcement, and from health care to warfare . What Dr. King saw, however, was prophetic for our time—the need to “remain awake” to our shared humanity and basic needs, because astounding inventions and discoveries do not necessarily lead to progress in human relations and may exacerbate current problems or create new ones. Even as we revel in the benefits of the digital revolution, which are legion, we must attend to potential dark sides. For example, it is discomfiting that companies , law enforcement agencies, and governments covertly watch and preserve histories of our web browsing. No one knows how the next decade of enhanced computational capacity will affect labor trends, international finance, medical care, or developing economies. Will the digital divide worsen or take new forms?2 How will cyber-terrorism unfold? Are we ready for quantum leaps in the uses of artificial intelligence, “Big Data,” and designer genomes? Then there is the reality that new technologies become “persuasive,” in that using changes the user, and not always for the better. We all know people who 116 Knowledge, Learning, and New Technologies have become addicted to e-mail culture or who use Facebook to compulsively “egocast.” We all recognize that it is easier to surf the Web than to study, and to cut and paste ideas rather than create new ones. At a deeper level, the social critic Jaron Lanier argues that the Internet has evolved to create tools and frameworks that limit individual consciousness and “tend to pull us into life patterns that gradually degrade the ways in which each of us exist as an individual.”3 Reminding us that social media is still in its early stages, MIT Professor Sherry Turkle and others argue that heavy use of social media weakens people’s ability to interact authentically and may make us more transactional, guarded, superficial, reactive, and lonely in our relationships.4 Adolfo Nicholas, S.J., the superior general of the Jesuits, decries what he calls “the globalization of superficiality” perpetuated by technologies that are “shaping the interior worlds of so many . . . , limiting the fullness of their flourishing as human persons and limiting their responses to a world in need of healing, intellectually, morally and spiritually.”5 Such concerns are not without precedent; in general, societies tend to create and apply new breakthrough technologies before developing shared intellectual and ethical frameworks for understanding the implications of the changes. The Campus as a Greenhouse for Technology Of course, the academy actively takes part in our twenty-first-century digital revolution . Our campuses are greenhouses for technology. We create and sustain technological cultures. We have made extraordinary discoveries about phenomena like the genome, the earth, and the cosmos. If the West has experienced a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the uses of digital technology and the kinds of research questions advanced computational technology now allows us to address, then American higher education has been both a driver and a beneficiary. Looking forward, some see enormous promise for democratizing education. K–12 schools and higher education of all types are exploring both blended online-classroom learning, which has the goal of improving student outcomes.6 Many colleges and universities are now experimenting with MOOCs, both to expand access to knowledge and, perhaps, to create new efficiencies or revenue sources.7 Hopeful visionaries like Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown argue that new information technologies may help us create a revolutionary “culture of learning” to empower individuals to become active creators and curators of knowledge and not simply consumers.8 How do we make sense of the pace, scope, directions, and meanings of the digital technology revolution? Surely it is not enough to simply adopt the stances of the...

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