In his essay, Gardner Campbell writes:

“Pointing students to data buckets and conduits we’ve already made for them won’t do. . . For students who have relied on these aids, the freedom to explore and create is the last thing on their minds, so deeply it has been discouraged.  Many students simply want to know what their professors want and how to give it to them.  But if what the professor truly wants is for students to discover and craft their own desires and dreams, a personal cyberinfrastructure provides the opportunity.”

Last year I took a year off from school to ponder, among other things, exactly this. How and why did it happen that so often in education exploration and creativity are, if not explicitly discouraged, brushed by the wayside? And why should I be motivated to attend a class where all I am required to do is scribble down notes, internalize them, and then spit them back out in more or less the same form in an essay?  What am I actually learning by memorizing these dates and proving that I can remember them for a handful of weeks?  What is this degree for, anyway? I thought I came here to learn.

Luckily, it isn’t all so bad.  I am no stranger to the world of educational blogging (thanks to a handful of awesome professors at UMW) and was sold long ago on the benefits.  But what exactly is a web presence, through a blog or wiki or what-have-you, doing to make education better?  Couldn’t the same creativity and freedom offered in a wide open “write a blog on anything relevant” assignment be carried out similarly in a standard academic paper?  Well, yes, but only sort of.  An online presence offers more opportunities for communication than a paper does.  No matter how interesting, that paper gets handed to a professor, graded, and handed back or filed away.  No one else gets to hear about those ideas, comment on them, or challenge them.  Publish that same paper on the web, however, and it’s fair game for pretty much anyone.  If the interest is there, those conversations can continue beyond the scope of a single semester, or could prove useful to the next round of students taking the class.   Even if that work is read only by students in the class, such connectivity transforms the learning experience from one of transaction to interaction.

So there are cyberinfrastructures at work in some places within higher education.  Classes can have their own blogs and own little network; this can be pretty awesome and move well beyond the standard (but look at their pretty digital facelifts!) LMSs.  How does a personal cyberinfrastructure play into this?  For me, it is essential to look at the notion again primarily through the lens of increased communication and connectivity.   If this personal cyberinfrastructure is “more specific than a network” but “more general than a tool,” what space does it occupy?  An in-between space, the spaces where an individual’s presence (their own domain, work, and so on) can reach out into different areas in the larger network.  Wherever the personal cyberinfrastructure can connect with other infrastructures is potentially a place for the two to form and inform each other’s work and learning.  What is even more exciting is that these connections can occur beyond just the scope of one classroom or one university.

With the freedom to make decisions and play an active role in one’s own learning comes a more full sense of engagement, and a sense of engagement is essential.  It is all too easy to approach the internet as a passive consumer of information and entertainment.  It takes much more work to engage in Gardner’s “narrating, curating, and sharing” model, but promises to be much more rewarding.  It’s still only the start of the semester, but I’m sold.  And excited to see where this adventure will lead.

For posterity, and for any non-ds106 internet explorers who may stumble across this: Gardner Campbell writing and speaking on a personal cyberinfrastructure.