Editorial Perspective - Squids, University 3.0 and Activism

For me specifically, one of the essential tools in our survival chest is the ability to bring forward a progressive version of the cultural turn, a substantive shift in society and the economy to accommodate creative co-creation and co-production processes that support a collectively experienced progress, one that prioritises ethics, social responsibility and environmental sustainability. It is the move of power back to the collective and a more healthy and sustainable balancing of the needs of the individual with society in general.

For learning organisations, this means that we need to see ourselves as communities of practice which co-create these environments where learning takes place, rather than the industrially conceptualised mass-production houses of knowledge transfer from those who have it to those who don’t. I feel this to be crucial to allow us as individual learners in a collective learning community to not accept a lesser world hurtling towards its own demise but to rebel against our own human tendency to normalise this situation and become activist enough to pave the way towards becoming much more responsible collaborative citizens of the world. But there are tensions for universities at the heart of how and what we do for learners; the way we create, develop, transmit, acquire and verify the validity of knowledge; who the individuals are that create or co-create; who claims ownership and how we measure its value. (Boehm, 2019)

This introductory editorial perspective used the lense of co-production, or Culture 3.0, to reflect on the eight contributions and two further editorial pieces on academic activism. It is timely in providing a significant addition to the critical mass of literature that will allow us to imagine different university futures, some of which – I personally would hope - will not only have clear characteristics of University 3.0, but also allow those nooks and crannies where academic activism continues to push forward our relationship with each other and the knowledge of this world.