Today was one of those mornings I tell myself, “This is why I love working in academia!” In short, it’s the people. I caught the same bus to campus this morning as a friend of mine who is doing graduate studies in instructional design. As we road into town and walked across campus together, we talked about my dissertation research and I learned some interesting insights from my friend’s perspective, some things I hadn’t thought about before. I was able to share something with him he said he might be able to use in his teaching.
It’s this cross fertilization of ideas with people that’s one of my favorite parts of my work. I’ve had similar experiences talking with fellow scholars in public policy, economics, and latin american studies, as well as within the business school with friends in entrepreneurship, accounting, and information systems. I had a friend during my masters program who was interested in getting a PhD, but shied away from it because he wants to interact with people too much. I admit there’s a lot of isolated work in scholarship. But there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for productive interaction with others. We are members of an academic community and participation in the research process is more than just advancing my personal agenda. If managed correctly, research and teaching are ways to connect with others and to work together in a positive productive way.
I read some of the interesting posts and thought of sharing a view or two. Globalization and information sharing are moving at equal pace. As the world becomes truly global, knowledge repositories are becoming open and closed at the same time.
People from countries like Bangladesh are getting public domain information that are slightly old and not perhaps at the cutting edge of knowledge, creating a gap between global knowledge seekers.
Knowledge, in spite of being a public good, has become a commodity that one buys through money and the people of the poorer countries suffer from information crises, led by poor economics and global hegemony over information control by the affluent.
While this regime continues, the gap between some members of the poor countries and their counterpart citizens of the affluent countries is closing down fast, which ultimately may create a level playing field for the smaller countries of the world.
For now, we anxiously await such a transformative future.
Ziaur Rahman
IITM -iitmbd.org
Dhaka