STICHWEH, Rudolf, 2008. „Information and Communication Technologies“ und ihr Einfluß auf Lehre und Forschung in den Jahren 2008 bis 2018, [online]. 2008. [Zugriff am: 29 Juli 2021]. Verfügbar unter: academia.edu 
# The ubiquity of technology and the traditional core of the university Many observers of the university notice that technology – especially ICT – has not attained the self-evident ubiquity in universities that it has in many respects attained in everyday life.
See e.g. White 2007, 840; Selwyn 2007, 83-5.
Students, but also trained professors and academics, have integrated devices such as mobile phones, iPods, etc. into their everyday lives in a seamless and often creative way that many of them are not willing or able to do the same with notebooks, databases, e-learning, etc. in everyday university life.
It is interesting to ask why this is so, if this question can only be discussed here in a first approach. Part of the explanation can be sought in the available technologies themselves. The PC, the office programmes, the databases, the spreadsheets, were first and foremost "solutions" – solutions, moreover, that emerged outside the academic world – for which the associated "problems" had yet to be found.
See Reffell and Whitworth 2002, esp. 427-8; generally on the inversion of "solution" and "problem" Weick 1976.
It is an open question whether these "problems" specific to the academic world have already been sufficiently identified. In this respect, it must always be examined whether the technologies that the university is trying to adapt possess the intuitive simplicity that was often the prerequisite for the success of technologies in everyday life. And, of course, it must be considered whether the technologies are adequate for the realities of the university-scientific world.
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A second reason for the delayed uptake of technologies by the university can be seen in very fundamental structural decisions made by the university. The university has been a "face-to-face" institution since its inception some 800 years ago. The central communications and actions that can be attributed to the university, the lecture, the seminar discussion, the examination, the student working group, the faculty consultation, the appointment process as a procedure for the university's self-renewal, take place today as they did 800 years ago in the "interaction among those present".
Theoretical foundations in Goffman 1961; Luhmann 1975. These well-established conceptual foundations have not yet been used for a theory of the university.
It is further impressive that the university is the only global institution for which it is still true today that most of the world's universities are still concentrated in a single location, i.e. in a single city, and sometimes even on a single campus, i.e. in a spatially interconnected sequence of buildings.
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The university has already integrated earlier technological innovations in a relatively structurally conservative way. The printing of books is a good example, since it could have been understood as an opportunity to switch from learning in interaction (in lectures and disputations) to self-learning (at home and in the study room) with occasional interactive verification.
See an interesting proposal of a self-taught university from the 18th century Springer 1769, pp. 125- 136.
But this did not happen; instead, the university library emerged in the wake of the printing of books: similar to the laboratory and the archive as classic places of research, a place of work to be used individually, where work takes place under the gaze of the other and in constant facilitation of interactive contact.
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→ VON FOERSTER, Heinz, 1985. Bibliothekare und Technik: eine Mesalliance? In: Heinz VON FOERSTER (Hrsg.), Sicht und Einsicht: Versuche zu einer operativen Erkenntnistheorie [online]. Wiesbaden: Vieweg+Teubner Verlag. S. 43–62. Wissenschaftstheorie Wissenschaft und Philosophie. [Zugriff am: 31 Oktober 2019]. ISBN 978-3-663-13942-3. Verfügbar unter: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-13942-3_4
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Interestingly, the Bologna reform of European and Swiss universities has once again intensified the interaction dependency of the university. The length of time students spend at the university is increasing; larger portions of studies are being shifted from self-study to forms of interaction among those present; the scope of examinations is increasing several times over in some cases. These examinations are also to a large extent group examinations in a large room.
# The notebook as a core technology of the university
The preliminary considerations just outlined lead to the perhaps unsurprising, but therefore no less important conclusion that in the period from 2008 to 2018, and increasingly in this period, the notebook will be the core technology of the university's ICT sector.
Cf. an earlier description of the situation at the end of the 1980s - still focussed on the PC as a workplace computer - Stichweh 1989.
The reason for this diagnosis emerges immediately from the preceding considerations. In the university and in science, the notebook functions as the technology that easily allows us to create unity in the difference between interaction and globality, i.e. it deals with the paradoxical tension that, on the one hand, the university (and to some extent science) is surprisingly dependent on interaction (far more so than other modern organisations and communication systems) and, on the other hand, is dependent on and embedded in global knowledge and contact contexts with a degree of self-evidence that once again exceeds that of many other global system contexts.
This abstract consideration is easy to reformulate vividly. On the one hand, the notebook is largely interaction-compatible. It can be taken into practically all interaction contexts and work contexts of the university and academia and used there without the reciprocity of perception of the participants, the concentration and calmness of the situation, the responsiveness of the other in the situation, but also the withdrawal of the other into one's own work and reflections being endangered or called into question by the presence of this technology.
This applies to seminar, lecture, working group; the meeting of university committees; the manifold examination situations and finally the central supra-individual working places of the university: library, laboratory and archive. Everywhere, presence, responsiveness and concentration are not endangered – and at the same time, the notebook perfectly reflects the global relevance of education and science in the respective situations. Let us first take a brief look at this in order to then discuss some of the aspects in a little more detail.
The notebook is suitable for - taking notes and transcripts in a variety of work situations
- accessing e-learning platforms and the resources available there
- continuing global communicative contacts in any situation (e-mail and other forms)
- accessing literature from databases (bibliographies, full texts)
- presenting contributions in interaction situations (Power Point etc.)
- writing examination papers (exams etc.)
- archiving and search access to any factual content
- linking with news contexts in the world
- carrying out all kinds of calculation processes
- acoustic recordings
- and many other processes of knowledge processing, information and communication
The text will return to some of these functions. At this point, we will only note the conclusions that can be drawn from this initial diagnosis. It is immediately obvious that the quality of the university's WLANs is of great importance. These must be accessible without any problems; guest access must be available quickly and actually work. The networks must be absolutely stable and all functions must be accessible.
On the basis of the considerations outlined above, it seems imperative that the individual university obliges all its members, especially its students, to own a notebook and to use it in their work on an ongoing basis. The best solution is probably for the university to conclude contracts with several manufacturers, so that each student acquires a notebook at special conditions upon enrolment, which also fulfils certain technical standards resulting from the functions to be used in the university. Another infrastructural premise is that the university equips all its teaching rooms, workrooms and lounges with a sufficient number of electrical connections so that it is possible to continue working in any place in the university.
# Teaching: Presence university vs. distance university
From the considerations so far, it will be clear that this scenario assumes that the dominant form of university education will remain the face-to-face university. Distance learning and other forms of distance education embody an alternative option, but experience shows that this alternative option is everywhere perceived as only a second-best option. It is taken when professional and/or family commitments do not permit face-to-face study, or financial restrictions do not allow long-term residence in a place of study …
See interesting example of American community colleges Hale 2007.
… or the quantitative overload of a university system suggests offering distance learning.
See the example of the Philippines Librero 2004.
The predominant form of academic learning and teaching, however, will remain face-to-face teaching, enriched with e-learning and other virtual formats. Empirical studies show that the regularity of use of these virtual resources by participants in the courses also leads to more frequent attendance of the face-to-face lectures and that this coupling in turn leads to better examination results.
See Grabe and Christopherson 2007, who show that in a given course, 61% of students accessed the lecture plans and summaries available in a course management system. However, only 3% of these students listen to the audio recordings of the lectures already given, which are provided in the same system.
Only when students have already attended the lecture course for a certain time do they occasionally substitute the study of online resources for actual participation in the course.
Note-taking
And at the same time, there is much to suggest that online notes (Power Point; other forms of summaries) provided by the university instructor can compensate for the weaknesses that occur when students are left to take notes on their own.
See the literature review on note-taking in Kiewra 1989; see also Beard 1997.
→ Kiewra, K. 1989. A Review of Note-Taking: The Encoding-storage Paradigm and Beyond. Educational Psychology Review 1: 147-172.
→ Beard, Robert. 1997. The Noteless Classroom archive
Three forms of lecture
In principle, three forms of lecture can be distinguished
- the face-to-face lecture, - the "e-lecture" (electronic notes plus acoustic recording) and - the "virtual lecture" (the electronic course that is detached from the lecture form and equipped with possibilities for electronic interaction).
The institutional preference of the university and the personal preferences of the students will probably remain on the side of the face-to-face lecture. But all parties involved are aware of the potential performance gains of integrating one of these forms with the other two and will seek solutions for this that remain compatible with available time budgets.
See comparatively Stephenson, Brown, and Griffin 2008; see also Park, Lee, and Cheong 2007.
There continues to be a correlation in university teaching between group size and the benefits that the addition of computer-mediated forms of communication can bring. One can partially compensate for exceeding critical size thresholds for face-to-face teaching by more fully integrating computer-mediated forms of communication.
See Lowry 2006.
This is a strategy that can be useful for the differential organisation of lectures as opposed to seminars, and it shows that the combinatorics of forms of university teaching have to do with the size of student numbers. But this strategy quickly reaches the limits of the university staff's capacity, and it demonstrates once again that distance learning is often a second-best solution when resources are scarce.
See again Hale 2007, who discusses reward systems at American community colleges where each group of 20 students added to a course results in an additional salary payment.
# Examinations according to Bologna Since the implementation of the so-called Bologna model at continental European universities, the examination that accompanies every teaching unit has also become a defining part of the role obligation of every university teacher. Examination is subject to quality expectations, it must be appropriate and fair, and it must provide students with the information that will improve their learning processes; at the same time, it is an enormous burden on the academic who is both a researcher and a teacher. This points to the question of the use of ICT: "The biggest time constraint on an academic who's involved in teaching [is] assessment, ... a real high priority that the technology can be used to underpin assessment, so that we can use computer-aided assessment."
White 2007, 847, quoting from an interview with a university lecturer.
This hope or expectation of ICT support is linked to another problem. Examinations are often group examinations for relatively large numbers of participants. As far as text production or arithmetic is concerned, this is now mainly done by handwriting and this raises at least two problems. One is not sure whether handwriting does not demand a competence from students that they no longer actually possess, and university teachers are occupied with deciphering texts that are normally illegible, which leads to them having to give the benefit of the doubt to the scribe and defer expectations of the intellectual structure of the text as long as something has only been written.
Powers et al. 1994 and Russell and Tao 2004 have conducted experiments showing that handwritten essays are judged more leniently than the same text written on a computer. The fact that the handwritten text gives the appearance of being a longer text also plays a role.
In this respect, there is much to be said for moving towards writing all kinds of exams with computers. This is convenient for students, provided they have learned a ten-finger system at school. And, as a welcome side-effect, it improves the quality of the university, since texts written with a computer are judged more rigorously and students have to adapt to them.
See also for a good discussion of the main points Mogey 2008.
For this purpose, the best technical solution seems to be for students to use the notebooks they acquire when they begin their affiliation with the university. The necessary software that can be used for this and which, during use, locks the computer for any other programmes and for wireless networks, seems to be available in principle.
And, from a technical point of view, the point of view that students can also make drawings and do calculations with the computer must be taken into account.
# The internationalisation of the teaching organisation
Since its beginning 800 years ago, the university has been a global organisation both in the world-related universalism of the bodies of knowledge it considers to belong to it and in the recruitment of its teachers and students. Although a temporary nationalisation of the university population took place between the 16th and 19th centuries, the 20th century reversed this trend, and since 1950 at the latest we have observed a rapidly increasing international migration of students (between 1950 and 2008 a growth from 100,000 to 2,725,000 students residing in another country at any given time).
See Stichweh 2004; good current data in Isserstedt and Link 2008.
This migration of students corresponds to an intensifying competition between individual universities and national higher education systems over the last ten to twenty years for the mobile population of Master's and Ph.D. students. field. This competition is at the same time competition for the talents that one hopes to retain in one place for a longer period of time.
The most important point about this development for our purposes is that these quantitatively increasing migrations are integrated into the university in a structurally conservative way. They do not establish the university as a distributed or virtual organisation. The migration is a one-time decision and is then made permanent for a few semesters or years. Students are present at the destination of their migration decision for a longer period of time, and they intensify the character of the university as an interactional event and organisation that knows how to represent the intellectual and interpersonal complexity of the world in a limited place. For the connection between ICT and the internationalisation of the university – at the level of its student population – this means that no ICT needs specific to it arise from this process. Needs arise in terms of linguistic diversification of the university (e.g. English-language teaching), cultural and social integration of immigrant students, but these do not seem to be processes that raise specific ICT needs to any significant extent.
# Research between local ties and global cooperation contexts
In research, the university was never a presence organisation to the same extent as in teaching. Since the beginning of the university in the High Middle Ages (and of course also before), research …
Instead of "research", it would be more correct to speak here of the "search for knowledge", since the concept of research was only a product of the 18th/19th century. The same applies to the term "internationality".
… was dependent on international communication contexts and in this respect closely linked to the respective contemporary transport and communication technologies. Research, however, also gains an element of presence as soon as it becomes more dependent on technology and books and the university consequently has to offer its members places of work and workplaces for the purpose of research. The most important of these workplaces are the laboratory and the library - and to the extent that they are enforced as indispensable workplaces, new kinds of attendance constraints can arise.
Attendance constraints
These new attendance constraints differentiate between the humanities and the natural sciences. While a humanities scholar can in many cases (but not all) do his or her work in the library of another university (and, as a consequence of the Digitisation of texts, perhaps in any other place in the future), a much more restrictive location constraint arises for the natural and technical scientist in the form of attachment to "his or her" laboratory. One can easily see this in the fact that the "Centres of Advanced Studies" that are emerging worldwide are predominantly institutions of the humanities and social sciences, because only in these disciplines are the necessary mobilities possible.
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A large part of the university's ICT needs results from the equipment of the research workplaces in the laboratory, library, archive and office. Forecasts in this area are almost only possible on a discipline-specific basis. The requirements then depend, for example, on the extent to which a discipline will use simulations in the future or will calculate with large amounts of data and will need correspondingly powerful computers, etc. Because of the discipline-specificity, I am only registering this fact here without being able to deal with it.
A second fact that is central for our purposes is that parallel to the binding of research to local, often technically elaborately equipped, places of work, a historically new translocal and increasingly global dependence is emerging. The other participants in the scientific process are no longer needed only because they function as the scientific community as addressees of the scientific results and because the value of these results ultimately depends on their judgement. They are now increasingly needed because the research work that is the prerequisite for these results can no longer be done without the other scientists. Especially in the case of research that is dependent on technologies, the adequacy expectations for each individual aspect of the required technological competences are increasing. If this becomes the norm, however, research will only be possible with a division of labour, and the necessary others, who have the theoretical, mathematical, instrumental and interdisciplinary competences that cannot be found in one's own laboratory because of its specialisation, will be working in any other place in the world. Spatial distance is now only to a small extent a selection criterion in the search for cooperation partners.
See on the growth of coauthorship Guimerà et al. 2005.
With the increase in collaborations in research and the resulting increase in co-authorship, the extension of the global contact contexts in which every research is integrated from the outset grows. And this connection applies even more acutely in the elite segments of research, where publication in "high impact" journals is at stake, and with the hope of publication in a place of this kind, the performance expectation to be fulfilled in advance also increases for each individual technical aspect of the project. This also increases the pressure on a principally global recruitment of cooperation partners.
These remarks are based on numerous interviews in a research project „Wissenschaft in der Weltgesellschaft: Globalisierung von Forschung im akademischen Kernsektor und in den Organisationen des Wissenschaftssystems“ (Science in the World Society: Globalisation of Research in the Academic Core Sector and in the Organisations of the Scientific System) (DFG, 2003-5), which has not yet been finally published. See provisionally Stichweh 2003.
The university's ICT infrastructure is naturally involved in all of the above-mentioned aspects: It must be required to support all service expectations resulting from global cooperation and co-authorship with regard to the technologies of cross-location cooperation without disruptions. Once again, the specification of detailed service expectations can only be done with sufficient precision from the perspective of the individual disciplines. In the next step, but this is not the goal in this text, the service expectations resulting from the research dynamics of the individual disciplines are thus to be outlined.
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