Why “Liberal Arts 3.0?” Thoughts from a Summit Planner — from NITLE & Chip German

What kind of thinking underlies the NITLE Summit 2010 theme, “Advancing Towards Liberal Arts 3.0?” Here, extracted from an online discussion among the Summit’s planners, is Millersville University CIO Chip German’s exploration of the concept:

For me, Liberal Arts 3.0 is shorthand for epochal shift, with the major epoch markers for the theory of liberal arts being classical times when the liberal arts core was defined (liberal arts 1.0) and Renaissance times when the notion was expanded to include the visual arts (liberal arts 2.0). What I’m arguing here is something about the confluence of the following factors:

  1. information being abundant and nearly universally accessible,
  2. the nearly immeasurable explosion in the number of persons who can be reached through an individual’s expression (via technologies and at little cost), and
  3. the growing realization that no significant societal problems (which most folks believe to have grown complex to mind-boggling proportions and constantly become ever more so) will be solved by an individual mind in well-rounded, thoughtful reflection, if they ever were.

The notion is that epistemology itself is, or needs to be, redefined in these contexts. I’m thinking that Liberal Arts 3.0 comes up with new answers to what it means to “know,” what a well-rounded person needs to know and how the knowledge becomes meaningful in a modern world (via collaboration and the greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts capacities of network effects) … that’s why I think it is Liberal Arts 3.0, not Web 2.0 viewed through a liberal arts lens (emphasis DSC).

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My friend Gardner Campbell believes that what we’re experiencing is roughly analogous NOT to the invention of the printing press (the common comparator), but to the invention of the phonetic alphabet.  I’d really like to hear implications of something of that proportion explored.