The work of an education professional in digital environments is changing as the place of technology within our lives and institutions is shifting. The affordances of digital mediums including accessibility, reproducibility, and the diversity of software and hardware interacting with academic theory are potential game changers in education but our current market based mechanisms of content distribution and the monetisation of individuals or organisations data seeks to maximise revenue and has the effect of increasing costs to education organisation’s budgets.
The creative techniques that are used in dealing with reproducible and remixable formats existed before the digital computers we use today. The education professional needs to clarify to learners that “The first medium to lend itself towards the capabilities of the digital medium was film even if this originally meant physically cutting and reattaching strips of film stock to itself. We could copy, cut, rearrange, and join unique works together to make further new works” (Sacha.juggler 2019 October 7). Computers have made this kind of creative process a lot faster but then as now our imagination always seeks to produce what is at or slightly beyond the capacity of our tools. Education professionals can emphasise to students that this dynamic is ongoing, normal, and healthy; while guiding them to achievable ends within the confines of their formal education and showing them examples of both success and overreach from the past.
The education professional in digital environments is ongoingly navigating new changing forms of literature defined by how they are disseminated rather than literary style and the “works being manifested across genres with increasing freedom; including Harry Potter starting as a series of novels then transitioned to being movies, computer games, and online interactive website exploring the phase space of the work” (Sacha.juggler 2019 August 26). This diversity of expressions increases the importance in teaching of students fluency in media literacy and them being able to synthesise information from across different forms of the same text. This trend of increasing diversity of texts in the digital environment involving the same or similar narratives is set to continue to be part of the education professionals teaching remit.
A notable instance of pushback against imposed limits by the education sector was when (Fox & Brainard 2019) the University of California this year stopped paying to subscribe to Elsevier, a publisher of scientific papers, in order to be able to access and distribute the papers produced by their institution which constitute 10% of academic papers in the U.S.A, instead of paying once for them to be hosted and paying again for them to be made openly accessible. This decision was driven by education professional “Jeff MacKie-Mason, who heads UC Berkeley’s library and is also co-chair of the negotiation task force [who] says Elsevier just didn’t move far enough to UC’s position” (Fox & Brainard 2019). The barriers that were presented to the educational institution were in conflict to the potential of modern digital mediums which are characterised by “The increased speed of reproduction and transmission [which] changes the nature of the medium into one where we can modify, reimagine, and remix works back into the cultural milieu that in the past may have seemed inviolable sacrosanct works” (Sacha.juggler 2019 July 9). Elsiever is resistant to change as it could undermine its very profitable model but the greater value of the information is in its interactions and in being read rather than being locked behind a paywall.
A further development relevant to the practice of education professionals has been the increased diversity of texts studied by students in the classroom and the physical forms in which they encounter them. Whereas literature in the past would have been predominantly in the form of a book, now education professionals must guide learners through hardware such as interactive whiteboards, Ipads, and smartphones in combination with ebooks, apps, and interactive websites. This has increased the complexity of the teaching environment but allows for the educator to emphasize using general principles applied across different contexts rather than a monolithic repeated process that does not serve interpretation in a more diverse world. We are required to accept that “different use cases of learners, projects, and systems will dictate a range of resources for different circumstances” (Sacha.juggler 2019 October 7).
The changes for education professionals in digital environment are ongoing, exponential, and radical. Interactions between markets, technology, and the educative systems of society create friction due to each accepting change at different speeds. By holding steadfast in enabling the positive potentials of digital and empowering learners with more flexible practices that can be generalised across evolving mediums we equip the next generation with the tools to remix their world in the ways they see fit.
References
Fox, A., Brainard, J. (2019). University of California boycotts publishing giant Elsevier over journal costs and open access. Retrieved from https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open
Sacha.juggler (2019, July 9). Reflections for information professional transformation [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/sachareflections/2019/07/29/inf533-assessment-1-reflections/
Sacha.juggler (2019, August 26). Reflections for information professional transformation [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/sachareflections/2019/08/26/critical-reflection-of-digital-literature-experiences/
Sacha.juggler (2019, October 7). Reflections for information professional transformation [Blog post]. Retrieved from
https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/sachareflections/2019/10/07/digital-literature-milieu/