Science and knowledge transmission - the Hungarian model

As ENCOMPASS is an experiment in knowledge transmission that both in theory and in practice combines the tradition of Hungarian popular science programs, the experience of international science public relations and the use of the most up-to-date info-communications media.

By the second half of the twentieth century, the structure of knowledge that we had considered Western science since Kepler, Galilei and Descartes, was changed in crucial aspects. The financial market and the economy have gained decisive roles in defining science topics, financing research, and moreover, in setting meritocracy or reputational hierarchies. Such special issues as scientific assessment, availability to the public, and authorship are also affected by increasing medialization and copyright developments. The relative freedom of scientific and academic autonomies (academies, universities, research institutes) has been challenged by the political expansion of party-based democracies.

All of these are "outside" forces tearing apart the classic framework of science. At the same time, however, some internal trends point in the very same direction: the quantity of information, the puzzling interwovenness of various fields of science, and the increasingly common detachment of technicized and instrumentalized science from the general ethos of societal-cultural responsibility. Under the effect of mass conference-tourism which has grown into an independent business, the foray of scientific publications has been transformed. The new constraints and possibilities of publication make it impossible to keep references up-to-date in a traditional manner. The publicity of statements has been dramatically restricted by the term 'closed information networks' employed to publish research results as ordered by the government or by industry. At the same time, in the case of some large-scale development projects, rival companies create joint development platforms, or networks, which seem to create a wide array of public access to science.

The traditional framework of transmitting scientific knowledge (i.e., the napoleonic/humboldtian university and the public educational system) of the modern age has completely disintegrated. The new financiers and users of knowledge are responsive to practical skills. The national systems of knowledge organizations settled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are now challenged by the post-modern idea of mobility, and the new demands for education. Education was once unquestionably linked to a certain period in a person's life - to set places and assessment criteria - but now has broader perspectives in both place and time. This is why the first part of the well-known expression 'lifelong learning' really re-defines the word learning itself! Learning today is no longer a one-way process of rigid exams, based on a set of schoolbooks, where the whole process of learning is linked to established social roles.

The post-academic age - prominent sociologists of science coined this term to depict the disintegration of the academic-type science organizations and scientific research.

Broadening Cast

New participants and new roles have appeared on the scene of the knowledge industry: professional science mediators and business partners now represent market demands for knowledge-intensive goods and social responsibility.

While in the model of the modern age the researcher, or creative scientist, was the absolute centre, but since as early as the 1960s when the Big Sciences (physics and chemistry) emerged, the science manager, or the science- (and university) organizer, has become an equally important participant. By the 1990s, representatives of a third function became honored and institutionalized parties to all research activity: knowledge transmitters. These new roles are largely due to the spread of a monetary approach which made the spending of public and private funds liable to justification, and let the view of the audience play a crucial role in the allocation of funds. This is how the relationship between science, knowledge and society has become one of the key fields of science in the 21st century.

This process has changed not only the forms of scientific activity, but the essence of research work as well, from scientific organizations to strategic plans of research institutes and to scientific speech, the public scientific vernacular.

A decisive element in science today is the partnership of researchers and the economy. With near-immediate research and development orders, companies greatly influence the operation of scientific institutions by their organizational, leadership and communication cultures. At the dawn of the 20th century, it evolved that shareholders would successfully sue the heads of the company should they spend profit on patronage. By the second half of the century, the operation of large companies became unimaginable without socially charitable undertakings such as science, education or support for the gifted. At the turn of the millennium, the change is even more significant: in the name of Corporate Social Responsibility, not only do companies employ various means of patronage, but they tend to use their resources as responsible participants of society. Today, companies not only plan charity events that look good in the marketing plan and form a better public image, but the social dimension becomes a part of the company strategy itself. Since economic competitiveness is largely defined by the element of knowledge, it is not an accident that charitable activities are mainly focused in the areas of science and education.

Knowledge Industry

The result of these processes is that new projects were started up in the field of the 'knowledge industry' rather than in the science or education of the traditional economy. This term represents a particular branch of the economy; it is not a part of the system of education and research institutions controlled by the public sector, but is part of the open market, where the appearance of new players is a normal development. This is exactly what happened in the case of Mindentudás Egyeteme / ENCOMPASS. With the help of info-communication, conscious media-usage, and with the co-ordination of corporate funding and the highest ranking scientific prestige, The Academy, the Magyar Telekom and the T-Online formed an alliance to become a new figure in the knowledge industry.

In Hungary, the technical and access aspects of information culture have been developing through debates and despite obstacles. The radical growth in telephone coverage and the spread of cellphones clearly show that the Hungarian telecommunications company had a realization: it can only calculate on a growing market if it systematically develops Hungarian information culture. Moreover, developments in the telecom industry worldwide show that the mono-cultural, speech-oriented form of telecommunications will be replaced by a set of complex services which will offer content, access, communication, data-transfer and multimedia combined. Such movements of the globalized information market have left their mark on the innovations of the multinational open share Matáv (now Magyar Telekom) group (owned by Deutsche Telecom): Axelero (now T-Online) the internet provider, and its content provider, [Origo], the largest Hungarian portal site, have been in operation for five years, and the educational division has offered the most up-to-date internet-based knowledge-transferring solutions. All these factors make it understandable that Mindentudás Egyeteme / ENCOMPASS means a lot more to them than just a program to sponsor. It plays an integral part in the socio-economic positioning of the company group: a knowledge intensive service company taking part in a knowledge-centered program. The fact that the ENCOMPASS program itself has been realized by Matáv (now Magyar Telekom) employees, resulted in a dual interference. It is now proven possible to acquire the special requirements of the knowledge industry, which in turn has brought corporate management culture into a knowledge-transferring program.

And it was brought to the right place. In Hungary, some academic research institutions, and later the Hungarian Academy of Sciences itself, have engaged in the research of "internet and knowledge organization". Hungarian universities and businesses are not lagging behind in either the use of IT tools or their affinity towards information, however innovations in this field have not taken root, though one exception is the Ph.D. course covering the theoretical questions of knowledge transfer run by the Distance Learning Center at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

The higher education and science policy reforms of the 1990s, however, inspired researchers and research institutes of the Academy to face the information challenge and to engage in its creative interpretation. Where scientific research is the main business of the institution, changes in everyday research management and theoretical reflections go hand in hand. An all-inclusive and open perspective is a product of the multidisciplinary character of the Academy, as well as being representative of the whole of Hungarian science. Initiatives stem from the empirical research covering the relationship of the internet and scientific activity, the Academic-Philosophical Open University of the Philosophical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences that originated in the research of Kristóf Nyíri, or the concept of the Virtual Research Institute, which focuses on genomics. This is how the Academy has been able to provide well-founded answers to the theoretical and sociological questions hidden behind the organizational and media challenges of Mindentudás Egyeteme / ENCOMPASS.

Lecturers, Lectures

What Mindentudás Egyeteme / ENCOMPASS has proven is that the traditional values of scientific knowledge have remained valid for the audience of today's media market. Because of this, the adjective "academic" is rehabilitated. The knowledge base, which Mindentudás Egyeteme / ENCOMPASS transmits by national scientists, is of an international standard, genuine, and enjoyable. Mindentudás Egyeteme's web site has created a well-defined place, an accessible virtual campus. Naturally, there are similar programs that offer approaches different from the traditionally scientific ones and there is ample opportunity to come across one of these on the Internet as well as in the mass media. Mindentudás Egyeteme / ENCOMPASS wants to clearly indicate where it stands in the broad spectrum of mass media: Mindentudás Egyeteme / ENCOMPASS only offers material that can be articulated within acceptable scientific paradigms. Just as brick-and-mortar universities have rules in place to define who may lecture on what topic, and all debates and expressions of opinion should stem from a theoretical framework, the virtual medium of Mindentudás Egyeteme / ENCOMPASS is a community where all those gathering can trust to find a maintained framework of scientific discourse.

The standard of quality of the program and its values are guaranteed by creative scientists. There is no managing technique or medial innovation that could reach fruition at Mindentudás Egyeteme / ENCOMPASS without their contribution, their knowledge, and their personality. The Mindentudás Egyeteme / ENCOMPASS program proves the validity of scientific knowledge; a series of established scientific representatives have proven to be so-called media stars in a presentational culture, based on their lecturing qualities. Mindentudás Egyeteme / ENCOMPASS offers to the public the colorful spectrum of academic science in turn-of-the-millennium Hungary.