James Morrison,
Thank you for these comments. I agree that many of the postmodern
critiques of the Internet/Cyberspace/Biotech revolution we are witnessing
are about "predictions of doom" particularly about the future of traditional
universities.
I will try to find the "Vision" article by José-Marie Griffiths and Gary
Gatien you recommend. I agree that we business schools are adapting the
curricula to the new cyber media. And we are infusing Web instruction into
our ways of teaching management and organiztion.
However, the problem that I am addressing is one of social control. As with
any new technolgy implemented in enterprise, it can and often does become a
new means of social control. With mroe an more part-timers, under-paid
adjuncts, and the usual slave-grad students recruited to staff the
techno-instruction, there will be the inevitable downsizing and
consolidation, as business ed. vertically integrates. Tenure is a relic,
and this geneeration will be that last on the planet to enjoy what is left
of Academic Freedom. There will be Internet management ed. but most of us
will not be writing the modules, such modules will be carefully controlled
by the administrative apparatus. The professors role will not be to provide
ethical critique of the relation of techno to social, it will be to champion
the new technologies, the Cybertech and Biotech worlds.
I like your idea about using internet to introduce Improv Theatrics in new
playful roles for students and faculty in the chat rooms. But, I would
argue more for a role for postmodern theatrics, the ways in which postmodern
theater does its ironic paradoy on modern forms of theater, to illuminate
the other sides of the issue. And while there is value to MOOs (and BOTS)
for eductaionts, the Bot world has its downside. I think that it does not
look very carefully at the coevolution of cyber/biotech with the half the
world's population that earns less that the world's richest 300 folks, or
the relation of the new techno race to the planet's ecology. And, since we
will be part-timers, on contract employment, there will be no university
critique of any of this (at least not in the business shcool).
I suppose that one answer is to set up shop as independents, and enroll
students in our own universities, one that compete with the new corporate
cyber universities (aka the Business College).
david