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27/04/2012

Comments

David Longman

Another interesting post Martin. I was thinking about similar things the other day after making some notes from your chapter about Pedagogy of Abundance and picking up a nice talk by Seely Brown on YouTube who referenced your ex-VC (whose name I forget) who is now at the Commonwealth of Learning (sorry - just making a sidepoint there about links and how they fan out!), anyway he talked about how there is an overall and massive shortage - globally - of HE provision; he reckons there are some 30 million potential students who can't get a foothold (rising to 70 million by 2025). Even if we built a University a week, he says, we simply can't meet the demand which is growing all the time.

Thus we have to learn to use digital abundance in ways that help us offset the material and physical scarcity of HE. Indeed, try to do it all differently.

Your comment here about the pressure on academic time is another aspect of these material shortages and scarcities.

Do we need to frame Digital Scholarship more directly in this context of material shortages? Otherwise perhaps there is a risk that the discussion remains somewhat abstract, when in fact there are real and material problems that DS must address...

It's odd isn't it - one one hand increasing scarcity - on the other increasing but inaccessible abundance. Classic recipe for revolution?

PS should we take care not to frame DS as a way to *manage* these shortages but to remove them?

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