Existing Digitally, Audrey Watters

If technologies are shifting our industries – and certainly we’re told they are – then how should we, how must we respond – and respond not in the service of “industry needs” but in the service of our own needs.

What I often fear is that we don’t really know what our needs are – technologically at least. Indeed, I think we’ve shied away from figuring this out, in part because we’ve been convinced that technology is too hard, too complicated. We’ve surrendered too to the notion tech is necessarily intimidating – or conversely to the idea that tech “just works” – and that we needn’t interrogate, let alone master it. It’s “someone else’s job.”

“Someone else’s job” – perhaps, but that job is increasingly encroaching on our own work.

This passivity results on strange relationships between higher education and scholarly publishing, ownership of learning materials, ownership of courses, ownership of educational technology, data.