Technology

Market Forces and the College Classroom: Losing Sovereignty

Using concrete examples from our own university we consider incremental changes, driven largely by concerns over external assessment and accreditation, that have altered the sovereignty professors once had in the classroom. At the same time, this turn of events is clearly more than local, and the anecdotes we offer are hardly confined to our institution alone. Thus, prior to “entering the college classroom,” we must give consideration to market forces and such attendant issues as competition, standardization, bureaucracy, mass production, and technology.

Biology, Theology, and Academic Freedom: The Challenges of Interdisciplinary Teaching at a Catholic University

Emerging genetic technologies resulting from the Human Genome Project continue to have ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI). This essay will address the challenges of teaching this topic in an interdisciplinary course at a religiously affiliated school, specifically a Catholic university. The article will examine the concept of academic freedom; explore the concept of Catholic identity in higher education; demonstrate how academic freedom and respect for a religious tradition can be achieved through specific pedagogical techniques; and finally, offer some general suggestions for teaching genetics in a religiously affiliated institution.

Academic Freedom and the Digital Revolution

In spring 2009, the University of Michigan Press sent out a letter by e-mail to its authors announcing the end of business as usual at the press. Having entered into an agreement with the university library at Michigan, UM Press, the letter stated, had initiated “a transformative scholarly publishing model” in which all publications are to be made available primarily in digital format, with print-on-demand versions of texts available to bookstores, institutions, and individuals (Pochoda, letter). Long-term plans outlined by editor Philip Pochoda call for books to be “digitized and available to libraries and customers world-wide through an affordable sitelicense program,” as most academic journals currently are. The announcement stressed the revolutionary potential inherent in the shift online by suggesting that digital publications will be “candidates for a wide range of audio and visual digital enhancements—including hot links, graphics, interactive tables, sound files, 3D animation, and video.” This is not, in other words, simply a change in models of distribution, but also potentially a radical metamorphosis in modes of scholarship in the humanities.

MOOC Platforms, Surveillance, and Control

In the mid-1980s, while she was a professor at the Harvard Business School, Shoshana Zuboff formulated three laws about the implications of information technology:

1. Everything that can be automated will be automated.

2. Everything that can be informated will be informated.

3. Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control.

Faculty Forum: Live and Unplugged

Now that course content, classroom discussions, and even entire universities have gone online, many wonder whether face-to-face college education has a future. With unlimited digital information easily available in the public domain, do we still need classrooms and laboratories?

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