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{{Setup|tick=Robbie}}
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<h3>On the digital campus</h3>
<h3>On the digital campus</h3>
<p style="margin-top: -0.5em; text-indent: 0.25in;">I'm Robbie McClintock, a retired professor working to further <i>the digital campus</i>, an important emergent transformation in higher education.</p><p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >A <i>campus</i> situates the activities of academic life, and by <i>digital campus</i>, I have in mind the many academic places on the internet where increasingly higher education finds a place. Alma Mater has her URL, a “<i>uniform resource locator</i>,” the gate to her domain, her website, her digital campus where much academic life takes place. </p><p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >Her websites may seem static; they represent the distinctive structure and established constituencies of academic life. Before the late 1980s, colleges and universities had no websites. Through the 1990’s, an online presence was springing up everywhere with nascent capacities offering visitors copies or recapitulations of printed catalogs, schedules, news releases, and public documents. Text was plentiful, pictures scarce, and interaction nearly non-existent. To get things done, people went in person to where they had always done them. </p>
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in">I'm Robbie McClintock, a retired professor working to further <i>the digital campus</i>, an important emergent transformation in higher education.</p><p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >A <i>campus</i> situates the activities of academic life, and by <i>digital campus</i>, I have in mind the many academic places on the internet where increasingly higher education finds a place. Alma Mater has her URL, a “<i>uniform resource locator</i>,” the gate to her domain, her website, her digital campus where much academic life takes place. </p><p style="text-indent: 0.25in; margin-top: -0.5em;">Her websites may seem static; they represent the distinctive structure and established constituencies of academic life. Before the late 1980s, colleges and universities had no websites. Through the 1990’s, an online presence was springing up everywhere with nascent capacities offering visitors copies or recapitulations of printed catalogs, schedules, news releases, and public documents. Text was plentiful, pictures scarce, and interaction nearly non-existent. To get things done, people went in person to where they had always done them. </p>
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >Within the stable structure and function of academic life, digital capacities quietly grew, but their expanding powers were not widely perceived or understood. Cultural lag hid the digital campus until Covid closed physical campuses, chaotically sucking online capacities into full historical view, revealing big differences from one place to the next. Examined closely, academic websites vary in their ability to use ongoing infrastructural developments to support academic life. Much work must be done to bring academe up to the state of its art, and a line from the least to the most developed points to further possibilities to which all can aspire.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >Within the stable structure and function of academic life, digital capacities quietly grew, but their expanding powers were not widely perceived or understood. Cultural lag hid the digital campus until Covid closed physical campuses, chaotically sucking online capacities into full historical view, revealing big differences from one place to the next. Examined closely, academic websites vary in their ability to use ongoing infrastructural developments to support academic life. Much work must be done to bring academe up to the state of its art, and a line from the least to the most developed points to further possibilities to which all can aspire.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >Should we ask whether academic life is beginning to experience a change of phase? Are the promotional websites of the dot-edus becoming digital places where faculty, students, staff, alumni, parents, and the general public can actually do most activities they believe Alma Mater is the place for doing? How can and should the constraints and affordances for engaging in the academic life change by adding the digital campus to the material campus traditional in higher education? What synergies and dysfunctions might arise? What pedagogical, political, social, economic, and cultural choices would confront those affected by these emerging actualities?</p>
<p style="text-indent: 0.25in; >Should we ask whether academic life is beginning to experience a change of phase? Are the promotional websites of the dot-edus becoming digital places where faculty, students, staff, alumni, parents, and the general public can actually do most activities they believe Alma Mater is the place for doing? How can and should the constraints and affordances for engaging in the academic life change by adding the digital campus to the material campus traditional in higher education? What synergies and dysfunctions might arise? What pedagogical, political, social, economic, and cultural choices would confront those affected by these emerging actualities?</p>