A Closer Look

Digital media penetrate every aspect of our contemporary lives. The full potential of these media has barely been explored. Each new round of inventions promisestransformations from the mundane to the almost unbelievably fantastic. Communications and the flow of intellectual and financial resources have been conspicuously altered. Even if less than half of all Americans use the Web, Internet culture has assumed a dominant place in public perception.

Higher education has been slow to feel the effects of these changes. Our investment in older modes of intellectual practice keeps us attached to monastic models of classroom and research. The single teacher conducting a class remains a persistent icon of expertise. Even as technological windows open up the bounded classroom, challenging limitations of time and space, institutionalized conventions of academia resist change. But change is here. And the more actively those of us with a stake in the vitality of creative, scholarly life participate in envisioning the form of this change, the more likely it is that the future of higher education will reflect the intellectual and cultural values to which we are deeply committed.

About a year ago, a colleague of mine asked me how we were going to save the humanities. A modest challenge to a new arrival in this community, the query sank deep. Can the depth of expertise that is the traditional strength of academic culture be well-served by design of electronic environments? What would an “education interface” look like? Would it allow for greater exchange between realms of specialized knowledge and the public sphere in ways that would be more beneficial to a democratic society than our current models of higher education?

The University of Virginia has already produced components of this future vision. The work of English Professor Alan Howard in American Studies demonstrates the viability of a research-team approach to the classroom experience. Howard’s XRoads site has an intellectual depth only possible with long-term commitment to shared expertise and cooperative, goal-oriented production. Professor Charlie Grisham’s dynamic textbook for organic chemistry shows the effectiveness of interactive materials. The Valley of the Shadow project created by History Professor Ed Ayers and Will Thomas, director of the Virginia Center for Digital History, is an exemplary use of digital media to create a data-base archive of unparalleled flexibility and robustness. So are its counterparts at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities under John Unsworth’s leadership (such as Jerome McGann’s Rossetti Archive, and John Dobbins’s Pompeii site). The digital library initiative, with its far-sighted grasp of the principles for implementing new technology, and the rich resources of the Electronic Text Center in the rapidly expanding work of electronic books, make their own significant contribution to the emerging field.

What remains is to make an imaginative leap to synthesize these foundations into an environment for the production and acquisition of knowledge. We have many of the pieces. The next technological step — as well as the next intellectual one — will come as we continue the already energizing conversations that cross schools and disciplines. Many possibilities are envisioned for using digital technology in real-time, augmented situations to enhance memory in contexts that employ intelligent systems (imagine a wrap-around desk-top that displays changing landscapes filled with information). A synergetic dialogue between these technological innovations, the humanities, and the arts will produce dynamically integrated learning environments.

My phrase for this? The Theater of All Possibilities.

Future education will engage the repository of human knowledge in a ludic performance of knowledge creation. That process will be collective, far less hierarchical in its general and specific forms than higher education has been in the past. The theater will be a site in which artificially intelligent systems will synthesize higher orders of knowledge from our participation. Intellectual games whose premises are quite freely borrowed from entertainment, as well as from the narrative and dramatic and rhetorical sources of our humanistic past, will stimulate our cognitive processes far more successfully than we could have imagined.

The only obstacles to such a vision are the entrenched anxieties and habitual responses of academic culture to mass culture and of techno-phobes to the potential of new technology. If the University is to be the site of knowledge acquisition and creation in the future — and nothing at all guarantees that it should be, simply because it has been — then our strategic investment has to be in a vision that communicates a shared excitement of the highest order.

As we obtain the technological capabilities, will we have the intellectual imagination to take the risk of this engagement?