At many of our universities (and hopefully here at iThinkEd, too) scholars, technologists, and administrators are reconceiving the academy. The educational and cognitive impact of the “information age” presaged for more than 40 years by pioneers such as Marshall McLuhan (we think especially of The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media) is finally becoming broadly recognizable — not just in our words, but also in our teaching. And the key, I think, has not been either pervasiveness or accessibility. It has been both.

The computer was initially a tool for doing old things in a new way — categorizing, organizing, searching. But recent developments are offering the opportunity to do completely new things — and to move from modes of organization to modes of discovery and integration. This is a recurring message in recent video work by Kansas State’s Michael Wesch, whose Digital Ethnography Group continues to turn out some of the most insightful work on media and convergence that we’ve seen (a recent example about classroom learning is presented below). Old conceptions of teaching and learning — and old assumptions about them — will have to be reconsidered as the pervasiveness of technology and associated infrastructures increases and as accessibility (including ease of use, ease of configuration, and ease of integration) fuels even more adoption and experimentation.

However, technology alone isn’t the answer. It’s what the technology can do to enhance communication, connection, and collaboration that’s essential. In other words, it’s not about delineation and control; it’s about community and convergence. Social learning theory tells us that humans learn best in community — when they feel connected to others. And community forms when people explore and collaborate together, connecting their experiences. Any technological solution aimed at increased learning must enhance community and convergence. If it doesn’t, it’s likely to be pedagogically irrelevant.

For many years, we’ve been interested in the use of technology in education, and we’ve seen certain trends emerging in the 21st-century academy that differ in key ways from the 20th-century academy:

One way to consider the differences we see emerging in the 21st-century university is to compare Web 1.0 with Web 2.0. As the early web developed, it adapted models from business and publishing. Entities created information which they then offered to others who functioned primarily as consumers. Clear distinctions existed and were maintained between content creators and consumers, with creators exhibiting high levels of control over how their material was presented and used. Information was often single-purpose, and it typically did not spread far from its original intent.

Under Web 2.0, dominated by blogs, mashups, and wikis, information is constantly and fluidly being generated and repurposed, often with little or no control by the content originator(s). Yet as information is synthesized, connected, and converged, new patterns and forms emerge, expanding the utility and life of the original content. Social networking sites, search engines, and venues like YouTube further these transformations by providing ready-made audiences for the information generated under these new models.

The transformation of the web has important implications for the emerging learning environment. The flexibility, creativity, and community manifest in Web 2.0 chafes against the more linear, more hierarchical, more univocal teaching strategies common to the 20th-century classroom. Students today — who can’t remember or have never known a world without the web — increasingly expect their educational experiences to tap into and mirror their online experience. Already equipped with a variety of web devices, they dynamically augment their teachers’ lectures with images and media culled from search engines; they fact-check class content using online references; they search library and full-text databases for sources even as assignments are being made in class. They are born multitaskers for whom convergence is second nature.Rather than fighting against a change that’s old news for our students, and rather than passively waiting for the development of new pedagogical models, I think we in the academy must embrace and nurture the trends we’re seeing. And I and my ACU colleagues see the Apple iPhone as a device uniquely well-suited to this purpose, offering multiple communication technologies — phone, voicemail, email, multi-session chat — while also bringing together an unprecedented level of media and information access — audio, video, photography, and the web.

At its heart, the iPhone supports the strategies of the 21st-century university. This device offers students unprecedented opportunities for building academic and social community — and it does so by bringing together technologies in a way that encourages participation, creation, and exploration rather than passive consumption. We see it as an ideal platform for developing innovative and integrative applications for higher education, and we’re excited to be working with it and thinking about it (and other converged devices) on this blog.

What do you think about all of this? We’d love to hear your comments…