Digital Discourses , On - Line Classes , Electronic Documents : Developing

This paper explores the many possibilities for a "virtual university" by rethinking the experiences of building the Virginia Tech Cyberschool and then counterposing them against another vision for the virtual university, namely, the Western Governors University. Along the way, it considers how the idea for a virtual university expresses broader changes, including the informationalization of the economy, globalization in society, and the digitalization of cultural discourse. It concludes that learning on-line represents a new technoculture, or the collective understanding of social acts and artifacts organized around technologies, that should direct our attention to reassessing how larger changes in the culture, economy, and society affect the university instead of arguing over whether or not computers belong in the classroom. O. Prologue: Cyberspace as Environment Inasmuch as individuals and groups now choose, or are coerced, to communicate, keep accounts, publish, buy products, work, access documents, or learn on-line in computer networks, the digital domain is becoming an inescapable venue for the conduct of life. All of these activities are migrating out of analog settings into cyberspace. Cyberspace today, however, is evolving into a heteronomous global anarchy with many proliferating layers in which new would-be authorities are competing to control its uses in a self-help system of platform wars, chip races, and operating system alliances. Dizard characterizes these networks of networks as "the Meganet," or, ...a powerful but enigmatic engine of change, the biggest and most complex machine in human history. Its effects are paradoxically universal and parochial, uniting and dividing, constructive and destructive. It will create a new communications culture, overlaid on old ethnic, economic, religious, and national patterns and attitudes. An electronic environment is evolving in which old guideposts are submerged in a stream of bits and bytes exchanging a bewildering variety of messages among billions of individuals (1998: 14). Unlike many overwrought celebrations of cyberspace, this analysis highlights how the machinic infrastructure of boxes and wires, cables and satellites, servers and relays that underpin the computer networks are, in turn, generating a new technoculture. The expansive telemetries of the digital domain are displacing, subsuming, and reshaping the material markets of closed territorialities in the real world (Deibert, 1997). While the name is anachronistic, this "wired world" plainly is much more than its boxes and wires: It is an entirely new product space. It is an entirely new market space. The Internet product space, combined with the World Wide Web market space, establishes one of the most powerful platforms ever contrived for doing business. The Wired World is to the friction-free economy what the interstate highway system, air cargo system, and telephone/fax system were to the old economy (Lewis, 1997: 115). Even though enthusiasts continue to effuse over "a near-infinite supply of products, services, and ideas" that this friction-free economy apparently produces "a near-zero cost" (Lewis, 1997: 115), its modularization, specialization, acceleration, and componentization of many goods and services on-line actually is not generating a free friction economy. Indeed, because it is scorching many who feel its first effects. Cyberspace cannot be dismissed as an ephemeral playground of electronic fantasies, transnational businesses instead are turning it into a temporal environment in which important daily events are set and at which new social discourses are addressed (Cairncross, 1997). Cyberspace is becoming the basis for reimagining community (Anderson, 1991), because it now materially surrounds individuals and groups as an environment. It mediates economic forces, articulates political directives, and circulates social constraints as informational effects. Work is accomplished through cyberspace, culture is refashioned out of cyberspace, and power is transmitted within cyberspace. In these ways, as the digerati (Brockman, 1996) assert, it now operates as a primary scene of society and essential setting for the economy. content I. The Virginia Tech Cyberschool: Basic Foundations To understand the significance of using computers to teach college and university courses, however, one ought not to fixate upon the machines themselves. The shopworn humanist lament over boxes and wires ensnaring autonomous personal development in a telematic tangle of electronic alienation utterly misses what is really happening under its upturned nose: epochal changes in human culture. The acts and artifacts used to reproduce collective understandings among specific social groups are changing profoundly: print discourses, face-to-face classes, paper documents are being displaced by digital discourses, on-line classes, electronic documents. The former will not entirely disappear, but so too can they not be counted upon to reign hegemonic. The latter will never fully be perfected, but so too can they not be expected to remain oddities. Some misconstrue this change as a confrontation of humans with machines, but it is, in fact, a conflict between two different technocultures--one older and tied to mechanism, print, and corporal embodiment, another newer and wired into electronics, codes, and hyperreal telepresences. Building the virtual university is one piece of this new technoculture, just as the first founding of medieval universities articulated yet another technoculture tied to the scriptorium, lecture hall, and auditor. Even though they can throw much light upon each other, these new university technocultures do not exhaust the full range of structural change occurring with informationalization in the global economy