Academic Education in Era of Digital Culture

The paper reports results of a theoretical research studying the academic education in the coming postindustrial society. The author proposes a conceptual model of a new educational system. The model represents the postindustrial academic education as a cultural space defined by three planes, which correspond to three emerging phenomena. These phenomena affecting the academic education are: a) Social Media as a new way of forming social consciousness; b) Personal Identity Online as a new way of forming personality, and c) Data Intensive Science as a new methodological paradigm. The three phenomena are considered to stem from evolution of three respective fields: knowledge acquiring, learning process, and science methodology. Relations are demonstrated between the trends and such emerging technologies as: Web 2.0, mobile computing and social computing. The postindustrial academic education, which actively uses social media, exists within abundance of various content, and stimulates the students' personal identity online - is actually a new type of education that should drastically change roles of both the teacher and the students.