Academic Freedom and Use of Social Technologies for Teaching and Learning

This is an important issue for academics everywhere, but here at Common Ground Publishing, we think it's important to highlight such articles when we publish them.  More than ever, in a time when the tenure system is under attack, when state budgets are cutting university funding, and when politicians are allowed to use the free speech of academics as fodder in the fight against Higher Education, it is a time to highlight the history of Academic Freedom, so that we may convince those who perhaps never thought too deeply on these treasured institutions of their importance.

This article, by Chris Demaske, and Colleen Carmean, (Colleen is the Assistant Chancellor of Academic Technologies and Institutional Research, University of Tacoma) is currently being offered Hybrid Open Access in the CGBookstore.

Download it for free for a limited time.  The article was published in Volume 10, Issue 3-4, of the Journal of Technologies in Knowledge Sharing.

In this increasingly shifting and volatile environment, where and how does the Academy begin to take a stand on the new social, open, and digital space? For this paper, the authors contend that freedom to engage new learners in new ways is intimately bound to the very core tenets of academic freedom. Not only should faculty be allowed—even rewarded and encouraged—to teach with new tools and new technologies in new ways, but they should be given the freedom to take risks by participating richly in the digital space.