Very Rough Draft
Project Narrative: Commonwealth Courseware
We are seeking funds to build the conceptual, technological, and professional infrastructures required to create and maintain a library of content-rich courseware to aid teaching, learning, and scholarship throughout New England. Collaborating with faculty and librarians on all UMass campuses, and with other academic institutions, external experts, academic societies, and educational organizations, we aim to create a central research destination by disseminating highly organized and carefully edited multimedia materials on major historical and cultural subjects to the general public. At the same time, by gathering contributions from social sciences and humanities faculty and librarians on all campuses, we propose to develop a common library of college-level curricular materials that will be freely accessible on the Internet.
Commonwealth Courseware will be configured to improve undergraduate education, engage the general public, and promote digital resource sharing at public and private educational institutions throughout our region. To this end, the materials within the courseware library will be divided into three formats:
§ Digital Critical Editions of Landmark Texts – Peer-reviewed multimedia editions of classic short works in the social sciences and humanities that will be formally published by University of Massachusetts Press.
§ Internet Exhibits – Multimedia explorations of specific subjects that will be staged by faculty and librarians at individual campuses, tied in some cases to the release of digital critical editions, and launched via campus-based lectures and other events.
§ Topic-Specific Archives– Stable selections, including texts and images, as well as sound and video files, from public domain collections that are designed to document and illuminate historical and cultural subjects that are routinely covered in undergraduate social sciences and humanities courses.
Since each of these formats is designed to resolve some of the practical problems posed by the advent of digital technologies, briefly situating UMass within the context of the digital revolution in higher education will help to clarify the merits of each approach.
Digital Transformation: Salvation
or Threat?
One of the great ironies of higher education in the digital age is that at the very moment when new technologies are furnishing unprecedented opportunities to collect and disseminate massive amounts of information, existing systems of scholarly publication are caught in a long-term crisis. Without oversimplifying these difficulties, we can attribute them in large part to the growing tendency among academics to write for relatively small groups of specialists. Responding to the dictate of ‘publish or perish,’ most professors, especially those who are moving toward tenure, feel pressured to focus on ever more narrow and seemingly “safe” topics in order to produce the type and quantity of original research that will please the established members of their shrinking subfields. As a result, university presses find themselves increasingly unable to meet the professional needs of these scholars because they cannot afford to publish books that require substantial investment but are too esoteric to generate significant sales.
It is hard to distinguish cause from effect in this matrix of problems, but the relative obscurity of most secondary literature in the social sciences and humanities helps to explain the growing inclination among undergraduates to rely on the Internet to obtain information rather than turning to scholarly works on paper. Further entrenching this trend, many university libraries have adjusted to students’ new learning styles by physically removing paper-based books from the learning process, replacing old-fashioned stacks with computer terminals, couches, and coffee bars. While these renovations have certainly succeeded in creating livelier learning spaces, they have also confirmed undergraduates’ assumption that higher education is more about collaborative consumption of networked chunks of information than it is about reading paper-based texts.
Not surprisingly, these transformations have inspired intense controversy. On the one hand, crowds of academics have fully embraced the digital revolution, stressing that our expanding ability to gather and display digital materials has reached a point where it is now feasible to adopt universal access to all recorded knowledge as one of the overarching aims of scholarly activity. Moving towards this distant goal, scores of public and private institutions and companies have digitized and made available millions of objects ranging from out-of-print books to medieval scrolls. Meanwhile, university libraries have begun to organize major digital repositories such as UMass Amherst’s ScholarWorks, which is designed to enable faculty to post monographs and other scholarly materials in open-access archives. Academic publishers are likewise responding to the opportunities presented by digital technologies, not only by making printed texts available as electronic books, but also, in some cases, by establishing imprints for “born digital” scholarship.
For many of those engaged in high-level academic research, the digital revolution holds enormous promise, but to some librarians and disciplinary faculty, the present and the future look far less sanguine. These commentators stress that surfing through hundreds or thousands of disparate bits of superficial information may undermine the level of concentration students need to engage in serious study. Many librarians emphasize that we can lead students out of this blur by teaching them to sift results more effectively, but others argue that time spent devising retrieval strategies necessarily detracts from education because it is time not spent exploring meaningful material. Along these lines, librarian Stanley Wilder has questioned the wisdom of placing information literacy at top of the learning agenda, reminding his colleagues of Roy Tennent’s observation that “only librarians like to search; everyone else likes to find.” [i]
Recent reports on the general downturn in literary reading, as well as declining literacy among college graduates, have further deepened distrust of digital media.[ii] The Internet, in the eyes of its academic critics, stands out as the worst of all mediums because it not only encourages the zoned-out consciousness associated with watching television, but also invites skimming rather than reading and quick consumption rather than serious contemplation. Moreover, even those educators who are not inclined to privilege paper-based books over digital publications agree that the overload engendered by the immediate availability of oceans of information is bound to deter students from focusing intently on individual works.
Offering Solutions at
Commonwealth Courseware
The starting point for our initiative is profound agreement with both sides of this particular digital divide. To the fervent believers in digital transformation who argue that “information yearns to be free,” we say that most of it also longs to be organized, edited, and explained. And to those who fear that the Internet will recreate the worst aspects of commercial television, we assert that the web can be an ideal medium for the dissemination of reliable information and exquisitely rendered works of literature. Thus, all of the materials that we plan to post within our archives will be configured to conform to exacting academic standards while also taking full advantage of the multimedia capacities offered by digital technologies.
Next:
Mining Digital Commonwealth – Building the portal into the development of curricular materials
Description of Digital Critical Editions – Reading New England (documentary editions of landmark works by New England authors)
Internet Exhibits on topics related to New England culture and history
Topic-Specific Archives of curricular materials culled from the public domain [I’m trying to think of a catchy name for this format – something better than “topic-specific archives.”]
Project Assessment
Long-Term Sustainability Strategy
Budget
[1]
Stanley Wilder, “Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong
Assumptions,“ Chronicle of Higher Education,
[2] Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, Reading at Risk: A Forum, Forum No. 2 (Spring 2005), https://www.bu.edu/literary/forum/onlineform.html; Kaiser Family Foundation, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-Olds, (March 2005), http://www.kff.org/e ntmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm.