Speed Kills

Within knowledge communities the "knowledge" being constructed can move (grow??) forward at a rapid pace. If you stand still it passes you buy. The leading edge is constantly moving forward and you, therefore, face a dilemma.  Do I jump to the front, leaving gaps in my understanding that I hope are either superfluous, or will be filled in later? Or, do I lag behind to have a fuller understanding of the transitions, the evolution of the thought, and to look for alternative outcomes ? 

I see this at work in my personal use of technology. I have used Macs for around twenty years, but I don't take advantage of the Mac communities, read Mac World, or any of the various electronic resources available to help me keep pace with the newest innovations.  Instead, I jump in when I need a new computer, peripheral, software, or application. On the downside, I never take full advantage of the available options. On the plus side, I don't spend as much money or time on my computers.  I see time as the only irreplaceable commodity in life and have chosen to invest it elsewhere. Still, there is a trade-off. The negatives of ignoring rapidly changing information are limited when we are talking about entertainment or consumer choices, but what about politics, trends within one's profession, or more closely related to our class, academics? In these activities, where the stakes are higher, completeness should probably trump currentness.

Extending this idea of high speed accretion (is that an oxymoron?) to the work of scholarship, what are the implications of a wired, "spoiler," knowledge community focused on any of the areas we study; i.e. writing, pedagogy, multi-media, technological literacy, digital-divides, etc.? For example, a network of in-class educators doing less than rigorous "teacher research" and sharing their findings over the web.  Because of the speed, I see these knowledge communities as vulnerable to privileging the "new" over the best.  There is already this temptation in the academy, and epistemology in general. New ideas are exciting. Scholars want to make their bones. New approaches are a pathway to academic success. Traditional journals provide a cooling off function. Through them ideas are vetted, scrutinized, and advanced in a measured, informed, manner. It is a very conservative approach. The differential pace of an online open-source collaboration and traditional scholarship has an impact on outcomes. Are those outcomes useful to scholarship? In what ways?

Questions arise involving institutional memory, power, privilege, control, access, gatekeeping, rigor, validity, relevance and more. Our discipline sees knowledge as constructive and collaborative, but that doesn't mean slipshod, random or undisciplined. Can the research, knowledge building, arm of the academy ever be as "democratic" as the idealized "knowledge communities" convergence is creating?