The Basic Issue

Vin(group) University, Melbourne U. and the Future of the Humanities (and Asian Studies)

Posted on by leminhkhai

Major Vietnamese property developer, Vingroup, just announced that it will build a world-class university in Vietnam with consultation from some of the world’s top universities, such as Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Vin University, or VinUni for short, “will be a private, non-profit university of Vietnam established on international standards and integrating the world’s elite models of higher education.”

What exactly are “the world’s elite models of higher education”? A recent job application for a historian of Vietnam at Melbourne University, one of the top-ranked universities in the world made me wonder about that, and what the implications of “the world’s elite models of higher education” are for the future of Humanities scholarship, the “home” of some of the key fields in Asian Studies.”

The trend in “the world’s elite models of higher education” indicates quite clearly that the future of the Humanities and Asian Studies is bleak as long as we persist on doing things the way we always have. But there is a potentially much brighter future awaiting for us if we change.

Academics Don’t Adobe. . . And That’s a Big Problem

Posted on by leminhkhai

Adobe is one of the most important and influential software companies in the world today. Whether you realize it or not, virtually everything that you see on the Internet was created by one Adobe product or another.
Academics, however, predominantly only use one Adobe product.
Adobe icons
Adobe is of course most famous for Photoshop. But to make those photographs look really good, you need to know how to use Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Bridge.
Vector graphics on web pages are produced with Adobe Illustrator.
For videos, Adobe Premiere Pro is the software of choice for millions, and Adobe After Effects makes it easy to incorporate all manner of effects and animations in videos.
For animations, however, one can also turn to more specific software programs like Adobe Animate or Adobe Character Animator.
For sound in videos or animations, there is then Adobe Audition.
And finally, to create a web page where your digital content is shared with the world, one can choose from Adobe Dreamweaver if one knows a bit about coding, or Adobe Muse for those who don’t, or Adobe Portfolio if one just wants to get a single page up on the Internet as quickly and easily as possible.
AcsDntAdbe
These tools are all essential today for producing digital content.
They are not, however, tools that are part of the everyday work of academics. For the majority of academics there is only one Adobe product that they use regularly, the Adobe Acrobat (pdf) Reader. And most academics rely on the free version of that software, which Adobe has recently discontinued its support for. . .
Like the millions of people in the world who use these tools every day to produce digital content, academics can get access to the entire suite of Adobe software programs for around $30 a month (they can actually get access for less with an educational discount).
But by and large they don’t.
And with each passing year the academic world drifts further away from the ever-evolving digital world that the rest of humankind participates in.
That’s a big problem.
new media
It’s particularly a problem because students desperately need to know how to use these tools. However, given that many academics don’t use these tools, they also don’t teach their students to use these tools either.
While an established academic might be able to “ride out” the rest of his or her career as is, the young people in their classes and seminars definitely need to be adept at communicating in the digital world.
To be fair, I have come across some people who are attempting to help students learn to communicate in the digital age, but they are far and few between, and in the world of Asian Studies, I would argue that they have largely still yet to emerge.