PNC 2010 Closing Remarks

PNC 2010 Closing Remarks

John Lehman

Since its foundation in 1992, PNC has evolved with changing technology to deal with new issues. In the 1990’s, the focus was on access to networks. In the 2000’s, the focus was on common standards and metadata for digital content. Today, we have access and data; the question is: what do we do with it?

To show how far we have come, it is useful to compare the 1994 PNC Hong Kong meeting with this one. At that time, most of the attendees were university CIO’s and head librarians, with a few content specialists. Today, most of use are constantly checking our email, often on smart phones. Then, to check our email we needed to attaché a modem to our MSDOS laptops, plug it into an analogue telephone line (with dozens of different plug types world wide), dial a computer on which we had an account (usually internationally), log in, and run a mail program. Even Chief Information Officers checked their email at most once a day under those circumstances. In addition, there were no international cell phones, so people called the office using international direct dialing.

As the internet became more common, the problem was digitizing content. Most projects invented their own formats, so sharing information was a major issue. With the advance of technology, corporate and government sponsorship, and common standards, today we have more information than we can use.

Indeed, the average citizen of Hong Kong today has access to far more information than did the most powerful emperors of China – but without the staff to digest it. Entire libraries, thousands or university courses, lifetimes of media and the contents of many of the world’s great museums are online. Many people view this as a problem in access: how do we find things? But the real present problem is not so much location and access, as how to we use this abundance of resources?

In this regard, the key presentation at this conference was probably “The Open Influence: Towards an Ecology of Abundance” (M.S. Vijay KUMAR). On the one hand, every individual in the developed world now has access to more resources than did the most powerful people in the world 100, or even 25 years ago. But all of our institutions are based on scarcity. How does the world change when we deal with abundance rather than scarcity?

Almost all of our institutions have been developed to deal with scarcity. It is, of course, chapter one section one of basic economics. But beyond that, it is the underlying assumption of education, publishing laws (especially intellectual property), and ethics. Education, for example, is still based on an individual who has access to knowledge transmitting it to disciples. “Lecture” means reading, and is based on the practice of the teacher reading the (rare) book to transmit its content to the students. Even more modern methods of instruction such as the case method used in law and business schools date from the Roman empire. Do the “sage on the stage” and the 3-4 year curriculum (which date from the tenth century AD) make sense when students have access to the world’s libraries and thousands of courses through projects like the MIT open courseware initiative?

In other words, how Will Our Practices And Institutions Change To Deal With Abundance?How does one drink from this fire hose of knowledge? Some potential questions include:

• Are academic disciplines obsolete?
• Is the master-disciple pattern of education obsolete?
• What is still place-based?

The place-based question is of particular interest to an organization like PNC, which is a virtual neighborhood most of the time. This is, of course, one of the basic issues in e-learning: the idea that students and teachers do not need to be in the same place. However, we still take for granted that most professional interactions require collocation: how will our institutions change as we realize that this is less and less the case?

A historicalanalogy is the unanticipated revolution in education and society in China after the invention of printing. Until the Song dynasty, education and political power were highly centralized. The civil service examinations were, for all practical purposes, restricted to the children of existing officials and powerful families, and success required residence in the capital, where the stone engravings of the Confucian classics were located.

When the capital moved from Chang-an to Kaifeng, the government could no longer rely on the stone engravings of the Confucian classics to maintain control of official ideology, and so printed the classics. This meant, however, that they could be studied anywhere. Within a few generations it led to the rise of Neo Confucianism, the political dominance of the Yangzi river alley, and the growth of the much broadened examination culture which dominated Chinese society until the beginning of the 20th century. In many respects, in the examination culture’s modern incarnation as the high school and college entrance exams, its influence still dominates Chinese society.

In short, society’s challenge is how we will deal with the abundance, not only of knowledge, but of access to knowledge. Given PNC’s linkage of scholars in North America and Asia and its transdisciplinary history, this is an area where PNC may well play a significant role in the future.