Goals

The idea behind the Metaversity Project is to create a space where individuals and groups who have formed their own Metaversity can describe all of the elements of this effort. These “maps” of the terra incognita can be found in the myMetaversity section.

Mapping the Metaversity Landscape

As instances of the Metaversity are created in an ad hoc fashion to address individual or small group learning needs, the best way to make what the many Metaversities are more transparent is to allow individuals to describe the learning spaces they have created. The Metaversity Project provides general directions and a template for users to use.

Terra Incognita

These descriptions or maps of the Metaversity learning space serve several purposes. One of the most important is to allow the exploration of learning possibilities to be shared in such a way that others in a specific discipline or transdiscipline can more easily identify important resources. For instance, graduate students often are unaware of the training resources that might be available to them until late in their career as students. Early knowledge of a laboratory working on a similar problem may provide the scholar with the time necessary to establish relationships with the lab — and in turn can dramatically change the course of graduate study.

Creating a Sense of Identity

One problem facing scholars in the Metaversity environment is the lack of a specific academic identity.  Because instances of the Metaversity occupy a liminal space — that is they are often at the margin of several disciplines, but not fully situated in any of them — the researchers in this space may not even know what to call themselves.  Not having a well understood label to describe one’s work can create problems several problems – including experiencing difficulty interacting with other researchers, a desire to withdraw into one’s own primary discipline, lack of scholarly focus, and difficulty finding employment.

One of the primary goals of the Metaversity Project is to assist transdisciplinary scholars to reflect on their work in such a way as to encourage the explicit formation of a scholarly self-identity.

Fighting Academic Isolation

The highly distributed, highly specialized nature of the Metaversity lends itself to creating islands of scholars.  At its most extreme (and certainly not unusual), a Metaversity instance may be one scholar interacting remotely with faculty, colleagues, and research tools.  Coupled with a poorly formed scholarly identity, this form of the Metaversity is at the most decontextualized extreme — the work of the University is being performed entirely outside the walls of the University structure.

Scholars in this position or in less extreme settings may seek to support themselves by creating context, using listservs, social networking sites, and other resources to fill the void and create a sense of professional community.  Rather than providing this sense of community directly, one of the Goals of the Metaversity Project is to provide a forum for discussing innovative ways to address this issue.

Generating Best Practices for Transdisciplinary Research

While to many students the Metaversity concept seems natural, for others the fluid structure of this learning environment raises concerns.

• The Metaversity model may challenge the traditional Master/Student relationship found in graduate study programs.
• Benchmarks for evaluating the quality of scholarship or research in the given transdiscipline may be non-existent, nascent, or contested.

As students develop their own Metaversity instance, advising may take place from a number of sources — including from faculty at other institutions and from other disciplines.

Professor working with student

Advising. A range of obvious and more subtle problems may arise in advising relationships when a Metaversity instance is formed. For example, faculty may be concerned that the student will not adequately learn and apply the research tools of their primary discipline; if several faculty at different institutions are involved, a diffusion of responsibility toward the graduate student may occur — increasing the chances of degree completion problems; and finally, at a more subtle level, the depth of the relationship between a single advisor and advisee expected in traditional university programs may not develop.

Research Quality. Almost by definition, the Metaversity is a transdisciplinary learning space.  In these settings, those assessing educational quality — often faculty, dissertation committees, and university departments — may struggle.  Few standards for assessment in the transdiscipline may exist, faculty members from one primary discipline may not accept standards of evidence from another, and the ability to adequately evaluate a student’s performance may rest with an entire group of mentors rather than a single faculty member or committee.  Further, because each Metaversity instance is unique, there can be no prescriptive or set method for standards development or benchmarking.

Principles of Best Practice. One of the goals of the Metaversity Project is to encourage further dialogue about what a set of best practices for advising and the evaluation research quality in extra-unversity learning spaces might look like.

Who Can Contribute?

The Metaversity Project is designed by and for graduate students who are committed to transdisciplary research and scholarship. The Metaversity Project is intended to create a community of individuals who are committed to transdisciplinary research and scholarship – this includes, but is not limted to:

• Graduate students
• Faculty
• Researchers at indepedent laboratories
• Government workers
• Staff of businesses involved in academic research

Anyone who resonates with the goals of this project and participates in an extra-university learning space is welcome to contribute.

Is the Metaveristy anything New?

Yes and no. Collaborations between researchers at Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) and among IHEs and other agencies have been part of the scholarly landscape since the very beginings of the formal education process. Graduate students have often been able to tap into these collaborations by carefully selecting programs and academic advisors that were already involved in these activities. Historically, there have been constraints that often prevented graduate students from stepping outside these pre-arranged structures.

Our sense is that these constraints are either being broken, ignored, or are simply falling away — while at the same time new technologies and societal shifts are enabling students to design highly tailored graduate programs.  In the face of programs of graduate study that were designed decades ago to address problems of a different era, these extra-university learning spaces are able to evolve quickly in response to complex, contemporary problems by stepping outside the traditional disciplinary framework.