Keeping Scholarship Relevant

Scholarship in academe is the synthesis of a process and a medium. The process challenges thinkers to develop new ideas and to confirm the validity and usefulness of those ideas through affirmation and critique by others who seriously study and work within the field from which those ideas emerge. The medium for this historical effort has been the humble technology of cellulose whose chemical and structural stability and social adaptability have kept ideas alive through centuries and millennia but whose capacity allows but a small fraction of human forms of expression and recording. Thought is limited by its medium of expression. Can scholarship remain current and relevant in the next century by failing to encourage the inclusion of the many 21st century forms of audio, animation, video, virtual reality, electronic remote control and interaction?

The effort to employ and sustain the full range of human thought and expression in pursuit of academic scholarship has been mixed. Problems with such publishing have been chronicled in The State of the Art in Interactive Multimedia Journals for Academia (2000). It has been bittersweet to see the demise of IMEJ of Computer-Enhanced Learning (2006)and the birth of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, a research initiative of USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy.

Deep infrastructure problems remain to be solved. One problem is the tiny fraction of scholars who can do the equivalent of read and write in these other media at even the most elemental levels. Another is the absence of rewards for completing the academic training that would address this. A third problem that contributes greatly to the first is the absence of digital tools of much greater simplicity that would enable the more fully expressive multimedia works to be created by a larger number of scholars. What efforts are being made to rescue academe from the age of the digital dinosaurs? Which institutions are leaders in this effort? Can digital dinosaurs effectively teach the digital natives of 21st century classrooms? See John Seely Brown's keynote thoughts on these topics.