Acerca de un largo post de Henry Jenkins (mencionado por Francis Pisani) Se refiere al uso del Web 2.0 en entornos académicos.
Traducción muy libre de algunos conceptos
- En contraste del circuito cada vez más lento de publicación académica, que hace cualquier respuesta significativa a un cambio de entorno casi imposible, el Flow (un blog escrito por académicos de primer nivel) aparece cada dos semanas.
- Los blogs representan una herramienta de gran alcance para conectarse a conversaciones públicas más grandes. En mi universidad, notamos que un número creciente de estudiantes desarrolla blogs centrados en su investigación de la tesis.
- El hecho de bloguear también ha profundizado su investigación, proporcionando la retroalimentación en sus discusiones, conectándolas con referentes previamente desconocidos, y dándoles un impulso que ningún comité de la tesis podría emparejar.
- La "adhocracia", (una forma de organización social y política con pocas estructuras o relaciones fijas entre sus integrantes, con mínima jerarquía y máxima diversidad, que se da frecuntemente en las redes sociales en Internet), es como una escultura de hielo, construída para un momento, no para durar. La universidad moderna debería dejar de definir campos de estudio y dedicarse a remover obstáculos de manera que el conocimiento pueda circular y ser reconfigurado de distintas maneras.
Un extracto del original en inglés:
Academic programs are only starting to explore how they might deploy these new media platforms -- blogs and podcasts especially -- to expand the visibility of their research and scholarship. Consider, for example, the case of Flow, an online journal edited at the University of Texas at Austin. Flow brings together leading media scholars from around the world to write short, accessible, and timely responses to contemporary media developments: In contrast with the increasingly sluggish timetable of academic publishing, which makes any meaningful response to the changing media environment almost impossible, a new issue of Flow appears every two weeks.
Blogs represent a powerful tool for engaging in these larger public conversations. At my university, we noticed that a growing number of students were developing blogs focused on their thesis research. Many of them were making valuable professional contacts; some had developed real visibility while working on their master's degrees; and a few received high-level job offers based on the professional connections they made on their blogs. Blogging has also deepened their research, providing feedback on their arguments, connecting them to previously unknown authorities, and pushing them forward in ways that no thesis committee could match. Now all of our research teams are blogging not only about their own work but also about key developments in their fields. We have redesigned the program's home page, allowing feeds from these blogs to regularly update our content and capture more of the continuing conversations in and around our program. We have also started offering regular podcasts of our departmental colloquia and are experimenting with various forms of remote access to our conferences and other events.
We make a mistake, though, if we understand such efforts purely in terms of distance learning or community outreach, as if all expertise resides within universities and needs simply to be transmitted to the world. Rather, we should see these efforts as opportunities for us to learn from other sectors equally committed to mapping and mastering the current media change.
Each media-studies program will need to reinvent itself to reflect the specifics of its institutional setting and existing resources, and what works today will need to be rethought tomorrow as we deal with further shifts in the information landscape. That's the whole point of an adhocracy: It's built to tap current opportunities, but, like ice sculpture, it isn't made to last. The modern university should work not by defining fields of study but by removing obstacles so that knowledge can circulate and be reconfigured in new ways. For media studies, that means taking down walls that separate the study of different media, that block off full collaboration between students, that make it difficult to combine theory and practice, and that isolate academic research from the larger public conversations about media change.
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Sociedad de la Información
Guillermo Lutzky
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