ABSTRACT: Popular, policy, and academic attention paid to new communication technologies has exploded in recent years. This level of focus is mirrored in colleges and universities, where the stream of research, teaching and publications on new media is now rapidly expanding in all areas of the academy. Simultaneously, the role of the university has also been called into question with arguments that network technologies offer ways to easily overcome time and distance, to break down the physical walls and social barriers that excluded many from higher education, and to improve the quality of education will lowering its cost.

With this expansion of activity have also come efforts to organize perspectives, findings, and curricula. Although this field is still being formed, it is possible to identify a number of shared concepts, assumptions, and research problems within the literature. Even a cursory survey would suggest that a number of terms -- including "interactivity," "convergence," "users," "connectivity," and "information superhighway" -- are forming a core set of concepts or themes that guide investigation in this area. The major research problems that are posed concern business strategies, the.identification and development of new services or new markets, or public policy responses to technical change and globalization. The concepts and problems orienting academic literature are often set uncritically in the attitudinal frame of popular press accounts.

Aspects of the popular and conventional accounts of technical change and the role of new technology of coverage of information and communication technology have been incorporated in the way in which questions and issues are framed about the role of universities in the media environment. Rather than posing these challenges to the role of the university as social choices, the new technologies are seen as presenting necessities to which educational institutions must respond.

The paper begins by outlining the elements of what is being constituted as an academic discipline (new information and communication technology), and some of its key coverage, problems, debates, and claims. The paper argues that these concepts have preconditioned the debate on the role of the university. Rather, the paper proposes, these debates should begin with an examination of the purposes of higher education, the broader social role of universities, and the design and deployment and use of technologies to achieve these purposes.

Specifically, this paper argues that the inadequacies of the mainstream field of new information and communication technology can best be addressed, and the debate recast, by making use of the concept of "public knowledge". It proposes that the goal of creating usable public knowledge - knowledge, and institutions for knowledge creation, which address questions of importance to a democratic polity, and which presuppose the existence of and seek to enhance a meaningful public sphere - offers a useful way to reorient research and in the area of new information and communication technology, and discussions about the role of the university.