Full Circle Associates

I'm catching up on blog reading today after being gone and am enjoying picking up links to ideas that relate to the things I've been ruminating on here. Liz Lawley brings up the connection thing for faculty, the intersections offered by tools such as blogs and the persistent role of F2F at some point in time.

Last night Seb and Jill and I were talking about how the connections we’ve formed through our blogs are actually more important to us in terms of collegiality than the connections we have to people that we work with. I “know” Jill and Seb better (at least professionally) than I know most of the people in my hallway. I think this will be increasingly the case for academics—social software tools will foster and support collaborative networks that cross disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and those networks will become the important spaces in which creativity research develop. As Jill said, these social-software-supported networks have become closer to the ideal of the faculty commons than anything on a real campus has ever been.

So, what happens to research and scholarship—what happens to the current concept of a university, in fact?—when these formerly invisible colleges become not only visible, but more important than the traditional, geographically and disciplinarily (not a word, I know, but there isn’t one for what I want) bound colleges we’re accustomed to?

Virtuality simply isn’t going to replace physicality in toto; there’s too much value in physical presence. That’s why Jill and Seb and Clay were all willing to trek to Rochester for this panel—it was worth the expense (in time and money) to be able to connect in a physical space. Location matters—I live where I live for many reasons unrelated to my job, and that’s true for most of the people I know. So how do we blend our modes? How do we get the most out of the emerging blog commons? I don’t have answers yet, just questions.