Thought fodder for this morning. First, this from Jim Groom:
Oh, how far we have fallen! Just two decades later the LMS, not the web, has become where universities do most of their web-related work with students. University websites are little more than glorified admissions brochures. In a depressing twist of fate, higher ed has outsourced the most astounding innovation in communications history that was born on its campuses. Through a process that started in earnest during the late 1990s—roughly at the same time the dot.com market boom—universities moved to a market-driven corporate IT logic. Digital communications were understood as services, and the open web got lumped with email, intranets, and the LMS as a business application. Somewhere during this time the internet was confused with efficiency and the web was mistaken for an interactive fact sheet.
Follow that up with this from Jack Hylan:
We have moved from a Read/Write Culture to a Read/Consume and bicker culture. It is time for us to retake our creativity and expand upon our most wildest dreams. Stop consuming and start creating. That is the importance of the internet for future generations.
via Internet Stuff | A place on the internet for the internet.
I left a rambling comment on Jim's post:
Absolutely. I got onto the internet in 1987, the semester I started a as a biology undergrad. I had to get a prof to sign a piece of paper saying that I was worthy of being granted access. I fooled him into signing it anyway. And everything – EVERYTHING – on the internet back the was on higher education servers, with a few governmental ones, and a handful of corporate. The internet, from my n00b undergrad perspective, was owned by SUNY, CUNY, Stanford, and UCalgary. (UCalgary, because that was how I got online via AIX terminals, and accessed the command-line tools to get to the others. SUNY and CUNY were the big Gopher servers back in the day, full of awesomeness).
Over the years, it got more crowded, and then the web hit and the shift to corporate holdings began.
I think we can push innovation from higher education again, by not caring about venture capital and the other nonsense that completely derailed the sense purposeful design and collaboration. It's largely lip service now. Web 3.0 is all about collaboration! No. It isn't. It's about tricking users into creating accounts on your servers so you can sell the company to yahoo/Facebook/google and cash out. Real collaboration is building the tools and platforms together, not just posting our animated gifs on the same servers.
The reality check part of my brain is tingling, whispering something about nostalgia and revisionist history, but I'm ignoring that particular set of voices at the moment.
We can do this. Again. Still.
and
Also, I realize there is an insane amount of privilege that needs to be unpacked from my description of the early days. It was restricted to those who were worthy due to being able to be at a post-secondary institution, etc… The modern corporate internet is more readily accessible by everyone, so it's definitely better in that sense. But I'm still not comfortable with delegation of real innovation to corporations who are mandated with leveraging us for profit. That's diametrically opposed to the culture of the early days – and something we need to try to restore on some level.
I've been kind of working both sides of the fence for a few years not - pushing for real collaboration and innovation, while also trying to work from within the IT organization to infuse a sense of purpose and connection to why we're doing this stuff in the first place. I think I've had varying levels of success at that, but it's important to keep pushing.