The other day, over dinner at my home with friends, the question of general knowledge came up. What does one need to know today? An impromptu quiz for our guests ensued, no cell phones permitted.

First up, in the history category: when was the First World War? 1914-1918, most of us said (a few had forgotten the dates). The arrival of Jacques Cartier in North America? Um … 1500-something. Who founded Montreal? Champlain? Uh, no, it was Maisonneuve, and also Jeanne Mance. The Great Peace of Montreal? Wait a sec, I read something about that once.

Moving right along, in the science category, what’s a black hole? I drew a blank.

You'd think we were participants in one of those embarrassing vox pops where ignorance is on full display—and I include myself in the lot. Yet everyone around our table was literate, curious, well-informed, intelligent and a hyper-achiever in their field. And as soon as we reclaimed our cell phones, our ability to grasp complex concepts and ideas was soon again in evidence.

The importance of having a solid base of general knowledge, preferably acquired before entering university, should not be minimized. That said, there’s no doubt that our cognitive environment has changed a great deal since the days when, at our neighbourhood schools, we soaked up all the knowledge deemed indispensable by the education authorities. In law school, when I was a student, the most gifted among us managed to form a mental synoptic chart of the organization of Quebec's Civil Code, memorizing the numbers of its most important provisions. A few decades later, my students could find the relevant article in the Code much more quickly by typing “Ctrl+f” on their laptops, but without being able to locate the concept within the general structure of civil law.

Today, all knowledge is at our fingertips, spread out horizontally and without any conceptual or hierarchical organization, but immediately accessible. The challenge is to sort through this informational hodgepodge and extract the relevant data. There’s no need to learn it by heart.

For us academics, however, the digitization of knowledge raises some very fundamental issues.

On the one hand, it changes the game in terms of curriculum construction and reform. As is well known, academic minds get stirred up when it comes to defining the core of our discipline: what should be part of the compulsory content and in which (unchangeable?) order should each piece of information should be learned? In a world where every smartphone, tablet and computer offers quick access to verified knowledge (and also, unfortunately, to truncated, ill-founded or outdated information), how does one separate essential concepts from non-essential ones? What is the balance that should be established between skills and knowledge? And what we teach so that our students remain alert and critical in the face of such a rapidly evolving body of knowledge?

It’s likely that the digitization of knowledge also has epistemological consequences that the universities must now take into account. Above and beyond questions related to the content of our many programs, we are experiencing transformation in the very way we learn, a transformation that is likely to accelerate as digitization and artificial intelligence continue to play a greater role in our lives. Does and should Generation Z learn in the same way as baby-boomers like me? What about my children’s children: how and what will they learn?

In the wake of the pandemic, there has been much debate over where teaching should occur, whether on-site or virtual. Online courses, in-person courses, hybrid courses or co-modal courses? An entirely new vocabulary is emerging from this debate. But this shift represents only a relatively minor aspect of the transformation that is taking place, a change in the pedagogical medium rather than a real questioning of the relationship between knowledge, the person teaching and the person learning.

For my part, I still believe that, in almost all contexts, learning face-to-face and in-person is essential. But the widespread digitization of knowledge raises a more profound question. It invites us to reconsider the role that should now be given to experiential learning, to discovery and creation, to digital literacy, to the development of critical thinking, to the mobilization of collective intelligence, and to interdisciplinarity organized around the major issues facing society today. Digitization forces us to imagine what life will be like for the students who sit in our classes and how what we offer them today will meet their expectations in 10, 20 or 30 years.

Université de Montréal has already taken a first step addressing these concerns: we've adopted guiding principles in university training with our commitment to academic engagement. Now it's time we move from engagement to action on these issues everywhere learning takes place, day in, day out, in our classrooms, workshops, internships and laboratories.

As for my dinner party the other night, it ended in laughter and with everyone in a good mood, once we concluded that, together, we could at least remember the name of each of the four Beatles. And then we put the quiz aside, and our cell phones too, to talk about the things that really matter.

Daniel Jutras

If you’d like to continue the conversation, please drop me a line.