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It appears that one of the primary roles of academic institutions is to prevent people from exchanging knowledge quickly and publicly. Overwhelmed by the exacting nature of a school schedule, degree requirements, or tenure review, students and scholars are made to feel that they have neither the time nor the right to explore or share outside of the approved genres and locations of intellectual communication that academia has approved.

Meanwhile, the Internet has proven that many of the structures academia has depended upon aren't necessarily the best means to educational or scholarly goals. It turns out you don't have to be in a specific location, held to a designated curriculum or calendar, or kept from engaging with people of all varieties in order to learn and share meaningfully. It turns out that you can circulate your ideas in progress and refine them publicly rather than perfecting these before getting them out. It turns out that popular media and technologies (videos, computer games, cell phones) can be used for profound and not just for trivial pursuits. In the emerging environment of instant, ubiquitous interconnection and access, acquiring and sharing knowledge are being reborn and rejuvenated alongside the explosion of creative popular culture. It is an extremely liquid environment that makes possible this learning renaissance, stimulating new levels and genres of creating and communicating.

But academia has largely refused the intellectual stimulus package that is the Internet. Oh, there is plenty of educational content online, but scholarship--purportedly the most important knowledge produced by the world's best and brightest--is the intellectual capital with the least liquidity today. Most scholarship remains behind the Electron Curtain of restricted access. Conventional, toll access scholarship is nothing less than academic impedence, evidence that sustaining the established reputation economy is of more value to scholars and their institutions than does the actual advancement of knowledge. Otherwise, all scholarship would be in full circulation.

Any scholarship that is not fully Open Access cannot really be said to be in circulation. I would go so far as to say that it is not published at all (in any meaningful sense of the word today). If a scholarly monograph reaches only a few hundred library shelves, or a scholarly article online is kept from the view and use of thousands in order to make thousands of dollars for its publisher, then this sort of "publishing" really isn't public, is it? Regardless of one's opinion of the nature of such scholarly communication, no one can pretend that the structures of traditional scholarly publishing are "liquid" in the way that, say, this blog post is.

The traditional classroom, the traditional scholarly article, the traditional academic degree--they are old technology. How can you tell? Because they lack intellectual liquidity. We should be cautious about the degree to which we continue to invest in legacy systems that are so out of sync with the present environment that they actually work contrary to their original intentions.

academicevolution.com, Academic Evolution, May 2009