The university’s walled garden
A quick Q & A with Jay Rosen from his Tumblr site:
akakensmith asked: Your clearly show journalism disrupted by a changing world and journalists inventing very new versions of their work for a new time. Just as clearly, you and others show active citizenship changing, too, driving other changes and responding to change. But the university seems to be getting off without much disruption to its familiar ways. Aren’t the social disruptions you study going to demand something of the university sometime soon? Can it make knowledge within its walled garden forever?
Jay Rosen: Yes, I think it’s coming. It’s happening at the lower end already. This is one reason I do so much of my “teaching” in public and for free, as with my Twitter feed and blogging, which I think of as a kind of journalism education. That’s not enough, but it is preparation for what’s ahead. Here’s someone whose experiments I am following closely.
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Addendum: An interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education a day or two later predicts that technology and economies of scale create opportunities for certain kinds of excellence that will sweep around universities unwilling to innovate and leave them to die. That’s still the university operating in its walled garden, I suspect, just now the garden is virtual.