Filed under: Community Building
Middlebury College lecturer Barbara Ganley isn’t happy about the decline in literate letter-writing, which she posits is largely technology-related in Blogs and Letter Writing–Reading today’s Sunday The New York Times Book Review. Television is a major culprit, being both passive and essentially isolationist in nature.
Ganley hopes that technology can reverse this trend. One of her responsibilities at Middlebury College is directing the Project for Integrated Expression, and she hopes to use new media, and social software in particular, to foster learning communities.
Higher education is early in a new step in its evolution, as crowded lecture halls yield to electronic interaction between professors, other instuctional staff, and students. No doubt some traditional institutions will approach this cautiously - they perceive that much of their unique appeal is in their bricks and mortar. If interaction skewed too far toward the electronic, then the field of competition (for students, for funding, and everything else) would shift quite dramatically.
Will a discussion forum ever provide the same experience as a group of students arguing about Kant at 2 AM in their dorm? Certainly not… but it’s good to see a well-regarded and very traditional school like Middlebury forging ahead to build electronic communities to augment their in-person interaction.
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