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Rise of the digitized public intellectual
- 1. Rise of the Digitized Public Intellectual langehigh@yahoo.com Twitter: @langehigh Josh.lange@ucl.ac.uk Josh Lange
Editor's Notes
- When I asked a group of students ‘in what university was Socrates a professor?’…Socrates taught on the street corners to anyone who would listen, here behind prison walls for teaching openly and questioning the theories that came from the powerful knowledge elites
- universitasmagistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of teachers and scholars“ notice the cross and ‘libertas’ symbolically representing protective mechanisms over a church steeple and the religious scenes depicting the development of new knowledge through a community of scholars are trapped inside the church walls, perhaps a representation of how all new knowledge would remain confined within the church?
- Fast forward over a thousand years. Martin Luther posts his 95 theses challenging the church’s monopoly on knowledge – a public intellectual challenge that spawned a reformation of the church and led to the Bible being available to the public in a language that they could understand
- Fast forward 500 more years to today. More confining walls holding new knowledge as the ‘property’ of the church and its intellectuals
- This phenomenon is obvious in other cultures as well and as with the outside…
- …the inside is domineering with the elevated academic ‘preaching’ from his high chair or behind a ‘pulpit’
- Yes. Online learners who achieve a passing grade in a course can earn a certificate of mastery. These certificates will indicate you have successfully completed the course, but will not include a specific grade. Certificates will be issued by edX under the name of HarvardX, designating the institution from which the course originated.
- the public doesn’t respond well to ‘big words’ that make little sense to them and academics can seem quite scary. This creates an unnecessary gap between the intellectual and the public. The DPI speaks in a language that most people can understand, not using rhetorical flourishes and scientific jargon but approaching a topic through the spoken language of the people. The DPI is not a monster even though he may resemble frankenstein
- But academics don’t have to be monsters hidden from the public view. They can speak to the public just like Professor Schweber is doing on this Australian news channel on a current public issue. The power that tries to own the transmission of knowledge cannot control what the digitized pubic intellectual says on the internet nor can it control what dialogue it creates. The DPI shares information openly and broadly to anyone interested in a reasonable debate about rational ideas. The DPI is not a lobbyist although her or his views may align well with parts of the establishment.
- And the digitized public intellectuals learn to embrace simplicity, with clear presentation of new ideas and theories they find new formats that engage the public such as TEDx and Open Contribution Formats such as open source webpages, community-developed ezines, and blogs
- And the DPI uses online media not for the mere transmission of knowledge and theory but rather a dialogue of learners, public intellectuals, and engaged citizens. The DPI creates a virtuous circle in the professions such as this teacher trainers blog at New School in NYC where he has posted his MA students insight and then debated it openly, and many practitioners have commented on his response, thus informing and simultaneously being informed by the digitized professional community
- Conference presentation offered through Google hangout by AJ Cann at the university of leicester presenting a published paper that demonstrates statistically that social network engagement and commentary during a course is a proxy for academic engagement. Notice the audience at the physical setting at the bottom of the screen. You can even watch people coming in late! This was retreived from blogspot.co.uk.
- Those who would keep deep knowledge behind their physical and virtual walls also cannot control property that lies outside of their walls, that can be ‘tweeted’ or shared openly across the world instantaneously. The digitized public intellectual responds to their students, their ‘public’, their principles across virtual and physical boundaries. The digitized public intellectual is an educational idealist, a change agent, a knowledge broker who only requires literate digital public engaged into the pool of memes circulating across generational and cultural divides.
- Sophisticated instruments such as GPS mapping. ….This is all available to us based on the legal principle which underpins the internet today.
- No longer is the monster intellectual behind the protected walls of the elite institutions, but rather their humanity is revealed through open dialogue on the internet where the digitized public intellectual learns as much as he teaches and his knowledge grows in proportion to his connectedness with us little ones as it buds, flowers, and then is picked up by us and shared back with him in a co-construction of new knowledge that surpasses any walls of hierarchy, particularly those walls created by money and sophisticated measuring instruments
- This principle doesn’t come cheap
- Those who would like the freedom to share their scientific projects openly, to collaborate with the public, to think outside of the walls of the imaginary ownership of knowledge have that freedom today. But to keep it we all have to support the DPI through new avenues for disemmination of content, new forms of synthesizing and consolidating content to where it reaches the uneducated public, and a new generation of intellectuals who are determined to have their ideas and discoveries shared publicly: because without the DPI we wouldn’t have access to the ideas in the first place.
- So who will follow on from Aaron Swartz and become the Martin Luther of the internet age? and what says their 95 thesis? Does it speak of network neutrality? Will it speak of the DPI? If you’re interested in knowing more about the topic of ownership of knowledge, you can even take a free online course from Harvard on copyright to gain the knowledge to build your protest!