Professor Gary Hall (University of Coventry)
The Virtual University
In my recent monograph, Digitize This Book!, I argued that the movement
toward the open access publishing of academic research has the
potential to transform ‘papercentric’ humanities scholarship in the
twenty-first century. By unsettling previously established processes
and categories of scholarship, open access raises broader questions
about the role of the university as a whole, forcefully challenging
both its established identity as the site of an elite cultural training
and reproduction of a national culture, and its more recent reinvention
under the tenets of neoliberalism as knowledge factory and profit
centre.
The project I want to focus on during my time at CRASSH is ‘The Virtual
University’. It proposes a future idea of the university which draws on
the multi-user-generated nature of much Web 2.0 culture and technology
to develop what I term a ‘virtual university’.
This university will be ‘virtual’ in at least three senses:
• in that it will rely on the internet and the web for its identity and operations;
• in the sense Gilles Deleuze uses the term to refer to that which it is possible to produce in the future;
• in that virtual can also be used also refers to the insubstantial,
the spectral, the ghostly – that which is already haunting our
‘traditional’ , ‘brick-and-mortar’ universities.
Fittingly, given the globally networked nature of many corporations,
institutions and people in the twenty-first century, the Virtual
University project will be ‘siteless’. This means it will be an online
project that will not have a presence on the web entirely of its own.
Instead, the Virtual University will mimic the web in being itself
decentred, distributed, interactive and user-generated, relying on
other websites for its functions and features. By spreading the normal
operationality of a website – and hence that of the Virtual University
itself - around through YouTube, Wikipedia, Google Books etc., it will
provide a model for the new interconnected forms and organisations of
knowledge, and new modes of its transmission, that much Web 2.0 culture
and technology makes possible.
Although borderless, the Virtual University will not be without limits.
Inspired by the continental philosophy of thinkers such as Jacques
Derrida, Samuel Weber and Bill Readings, it will rather be concerned
with acknowledging the necessity of limits, and thinking about how to
assume such limits, and with what authority and legitimacy.
Outcomes will include:
• the distributed website of the Virtual University itself, with
Facebook being used to recruit Virtual University faculty and students,
Connexions to put together Virtual University courses, syllabi, lesson
plans and study guides, a range of open access repositories to
establish a Virtual University library, BitTorrent to construct a
Virtual University bookshop, PBwiki to create a Virtual University
press
• a refereed journal article
• in the longer term an academic monograph entitled The Virtual University and the Academic Gift Economy.
