January 26  LUNCH COLLOQUIUM   

Martha Fehsenfeld spoke about her association with Samuel Beckett and how she came to be editor of his letters.  Viola (Tiny) Westbrook reports on this rare opportunity to hear from a person who knew one of the major literary figures of the 20th century. 

 Click here to read about the Colloquium 

Medshare

Marianne Scharbo-DeHaan reports: 

Thirteen EUEC workers packed 578 boxes for medical facilities in third world countries and we had fun doing this worthwhile activity. We have some new faces in our group and would welcome others to join us the 4th Thursday of the month from 1-4 PM.

Accessing e-journals and other library resources

It is extremely expensive for the libraries to purchase licenses to online journals (the journal Science alone can cost over $20,000/year).  Because of increasing price pressures and demands from publishers, the libraries have changed the methods used to access journals and other databases online.  For users on campus, these methods make access much less convenient.  The change may not affect users off campus as much.  The Health Sciences Library has produced a tip sheet on how to access these journals most conveniently.  You can read that tip sheet by clicking here.   

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EUEC Reception

Our celebration on February 5 was to honor the Heilbrun Fellowship, EUEC Distinguished Faculty, and EUEC Distinguished Service recipients, our new members, and the many EUEC members who have financially supported EUEC during the current year.

The reception in Governors Hall of the Miller Ward Alumni House was well attended and enjoyed by all.

Rudi Makkreel, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, was one of the recipients of the Heilbrun Distinguished Fellowship.  The award was for his book project on Kant's Critical System.  He is shown here with Dean Robin Forman, who made the presentation. 

The other Heilbrun Distinguished Fellowship recipient was Cory Kratz, Professor of Anthropology Emerita.  Her award was for her book project on ethnography and the production of knowledge.  Cory was not able to attend the reception in person, and so appeared virtually, thanks to Skype, from Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

One impressive part of the presentation of the awards by Dean Forman is that he had spent time learning about the specific work that Rudi and Cory were doing, and described in detail not only their work, but the importance of their work in a broader context. 

As announced in the last newsletter, Gretchen Schulz was the recipient of the EUEC Distinguished Faculty Award.  Both Herb Benario and John Bugge nominated her for the award.  Herb presented the award, and he is shown in this picture presenting the award to Gretchen.   A number of Oxford faculty, both active and retired, came to the reception to honor Gretchen. 

Jim Keller was the recipient of the EUEC Distinguished Service Award.  Pat Douglass (who was last year's recipient) nominated Jim and is shown here presenting him the award.  Most members of the audience had personally benefited from part of Jim's service in the last year! 

It was a great pleasure to welcome 27 new members to EUEC.  New members are the lifeblood of EUEC and we look forward to their contributions in the future.  New members were asked to submit short biographical information for the program and many did.  Even with that brief information, it is clear that we are welcoming a distinguished group of new faculty into our midst.  It is certainly difficult to summarize a multi-decade career into fewer than 150 words.  The "winner" was new member Stuart Zola, former Director of Yerkes National Primate Research Center, who summarized his distinguished career as follows:  "Memory, Monkeys, Magic"! 

It was a pleasure and great honor to be able to thank the 133 (!) members who have donated to EUEC since our annual campaign began in August of last year.  That support is so important for our operation and I am profoundly grateful to each of our supporters. 

A list of our new members, the brief biographical information they supplied, and our donors is available by clicking here.   

Finally, I would like to thank Pat Douglass for her help with this reception, and especially Kimberly Hawkins in the EUEC office who made everything happen and took care of a myriad of details with great efficiency and calm.  She was simply superb! 

 --Gray Crouse

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The University in Crisis, Part II

SUMMARY REPORT

Emory University Emeritus College

Interdisciplinary Seminar:

The University in Crisis

Fall, 2014

January 8, 2015

PART 1:

THE UNIVERSITY'S INSTRUCTIONAL ROLE UNDER THREAT FROM THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Continued...

Digital Badging  

Marilynne McKay, Professor Emerita of Dermatology in the School of Medicine, led a seminar on the relatively recent trend in post-secondary education toward redefining the nature of academic credentials. She notes: "Digital technology has significantly changed the ways that students and teachers interact. What hasn't changed is our approach to grading and credentialing. Students presently have little input on how they will be evaluated or how their skills will be assessed."

"Are there other ways to define learning besides an 'ABCDF' transcript?  Let's encourage Emory to explore ways to give learners more autonomy over their own experiences. Let's start recognizing students who excel at peer teaching and have special skills that contribute to the learning environment.  Let's encourage faculty to work with students to develop simple credentials that provide a uniform way to describe what occurred within the teacher/student learning process."

McKay then turns to "digital badges, which have been proposed as one way to certify validated educational accomplishments obtained inside or outside school. Each badge represents an integrated learning experience with performance requirements that will later become part of an e-portfolio.  A badge is earned; it is not a prize for each student enrolled in a class. Learners are encouraged to shape the content of a course badging system: they can propose or add new badges, or alter the missions required to earn them. Expectations are clearly defined and teachers benefit from increased student involvement and commitment to course goals."

One of the readings Dr. McKay assigned was an essay by Jeffrey Young in The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 8, 2012) entitled "Badges Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas." The title says a lot, but only suggests the degree to which this new form of credentialing poses a threat to traditional residential college education. Young writes that, not surprisingly, "the biggest push for badges is coming from industry and education reformers, rather than from traditional educational institutions."

Nevertheless, some institutions have been experimenting with digital badging. With a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the University of California at Davis has integrated it into their academic program in sustainable agriculture, giving badges instead of grades for mastery of "core competencies." As Kevin Carey writes in "A Future Full of Badges," The Chronicle (April 8, 2012), "Badging, once accepted, will create hardship for traditional institutions that now use the revenue generated from their undergraduate-credential franchise to subsidize the cost of graduate education, administration, scholarship, and other activities."

McKay recommended that Emory might well need to engage in a serious rethinking of the whole matter of credentialing in order to stay ahead of and perhaps capitalize on the trend toward digital badging. Some members of the seminar were emphatic in suggesting that a task force on this should be formed immediately and charged with coming up with recommendations that would place Emory in the forefront of this movement among its peer institutions.

Academic Libraries as Digital Gateways

A closely related topic, centering on the role of libraries in the ongoing information revolution, was developed by Selden Deemer, Libraries Systems Administrator Emeritus, whose specialty is information technology. The readings proposed for the session, along with the discussion that ensued, were eye-opening in the extreme, as analysts of the cybernetic revolution made a number of predictions about its future impact not just upon the traditional role that university libraries play on their campus, but upon higher education in general.

First, university libraries will (and must) be transformed. From time immemorial the library was a place to store information when it was scarce and precious; the Internet has made information abundant and essentially free. Thus the library is ceasing to be a place to do research. As Thomas Frey writes in "The Future of Libraries - Beginning the Great Transformation," libraries will be profoundly affected by "Ten Key Trends in Information Science":

1. Communication systems will continue to alter how we access information.
2. All technologies extant today will be replaced.
3. The ultimate small storage particle is on the horizon; once attained, it will allow standardization of all search procedures.
4. Search technology will become more complicated, and will require librarians as guides.
5. Time compression will affect how people use libraries. (E.g. people won't use keyboards, but voice.)
6. We will transition to an oral society. Literacy will be dead by 2050.
7. Information will be globalized, and we'll need to understand other cultures.
8. We are about to get global systems - tax codes, investment and banking regulations, etc.
9. We are moving from a product-based to an experience-based economy, which will affect how one interacts with one's library.
10. Libraries will become centers of culture, no longer just centers for information.

In another reading, Jane Hutton, in "Academic Libraries as Digital Gateways," writes that the university library will become an information portal, supplying the means - electronic search software, for example - for patrons to access sources across the world; this will be vastly more important than owning actual buildings to house book collections. Unfortunately, however, at present academic libraries are failing miserably to provide access to electronic books and texts. Between 20 and 100 billion documents are still unavailable through web search, and not even "visible" to search engines. Hutton writes that in 2006 there were at least 3.5 million online college-level students, but very few of them were able to locate e-books on their libraries' web sites.

When and if such online searches can be conducted, advances in information technology (IT) will have begun nothing less than a revolution in higher education - the biggest, some say, since the Renaissance. Deemer sees IT increasingly infiltrating the enterprise of undergraduate education; he maintains that either it will undermine the raison d'être of the undergraduate residential college, or perhaps more likely, it will cause the "re-elitization" of higher education - with most higher education conducted online, and with only wealthy and privileged elite having access to a traditional "college education."

In another of our readings, Alex Halavais, an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at Arizona State University, predicted, "I suspect we will start to see some really extraordinary changes in the way people learn over the next decade. . . . Especially in higher education, the current institutional structures are at a breaking point. The Internet is both a large part of the problem and a part of the solution. Already, it is possible to learn in new ways using network resources, and this will continue. The larger change will be in the ways in which this learning is measured and communicated. As the diploma (high school and college) is joined by other forms of accepted credentials, traditional institutions of education will be joined by a range of alternatives. [As with] other institutions, the degree to which they can support and interact with these new alternatives, rather than compete with them, will determine their success."

Thus, Internet learning will combine with the changes in "credentialing" that a previous seminar considered under the direction of Marilynne McKay.

Finally, Deemer recommended that, like every other major American university, Emory will need to find ways to integrate itself into a global university network. As Tapio Varis, chair in global e-learning for UNESCO, writes, "The future will bring a creation of global knowledge centres for the benefit of global development and regional and local services in education, healthcare and business. There will be an implementation of a global university system, utilizing broadband Internet and creating global knowledge centres for multiple services."

To be continued...

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