The fire hose and the teacup

Karl Gude, an information graphics instructor at the Michigan State University School of Journalism, used the idea of the fire hose and the teacup during his Lansing TEDx presentation to visualize for the audience just how fast information is coming at us right now. Of course, in his video demonstration, the teacup was destroyed by the force of the water coming out of the fire hose. Connected networks, social networks, 24-hour news networks, and the expected need to be always "on" to be a successful and productive employee, feed the fire hose and press us to multitask or else. Or else what? Or else you will be left behind as a non-productive, expendable, line item that doesn't answer email at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night.

But is this really the environment we want for our higher education institutions and the intellectual growth they provide? I am not saying that all the information streams are bad. Nor do they provide useless content and information. This is the world we live in. Open. Social. Information. I use YouTube as one of my research resources for this blog. I am an avid Twitter user as part of my Personal Learning Network. I spend time on Facebook keeping up with the lives of friends and co-workers and long before any of the aforementioned social networking sites were even a thought in the mind of their creators, I was trolling and posting online message board forums to inform and feed my passion for college and professional sports. As a resource for fast information, these tools can be wonderful.

However, as I reflect on the thoughts of Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg in The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age and some of the ideas of John Seely Brown during his HASTAC and New Media Consortium presentations (watched on YouTube), I am suspect of their idea that knowledge creation in higher education classrooms (virtual or otherwise) should be student generated; a sort of death to the syllabus. While by profession, I am a educational technologist, and it is my job to find the best technological fit for pedagogical applications, I am also cautiously optimistic about user generated content because I've seen the extremes since the first time I signed up for an account on the Freep forums. Virtual worlds, Web 2.0, and gaming have a place in higher education, however I do not think they are the game changers of technological inclusion of intellectual discourse.

Intellectual property law on user generated content in peer-to-peer networks and social networking is an evolving business. However, academic freedom is the stalwart in higher education institutions. Does policy concerning the academic freedom of faculty extend to Twitter? Professor Jo Ann Oravec, from the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater, expresses three concerns in this regard: surveillance of everyday interaction, privacy of critique of students work, confusion about whether tweeting (and other social networking activities) are "publication" and "speech" (Oravec, 2009 Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning). Currently, the answer about these concerns is most likely, "it depends."