EDUCAUSE | Future of Higher Education

E08 Podcast: Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future

gbayne — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:47:46 -0600

This fifty minute podcast features a session recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2008 Annual Conference. The presentation, "Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future," is by Sarah Robbins-Bell, PhD Candidate at Ball State University. Streaming video for this session is also available.

Today's technology enables users to form and join communities of common interest to learn and share information. In opposition to the privileged learning spaces of higher education, social media encourage learners to seek out their own answers and construct knowledge as a community rather than as individuals. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and Second Life offer new learning spaces, but how do they fit into the learning expectations of institutions?

Podcast: Today's Clash of Cultures on Campuses and the Role IT Needs to Play

gbayne — Fri, 30 May 2008 22:12:34 -0500

This 47 minute podcast features a keynote address from the EDUCAUSE 2008 Enterprise Conference. The speech, "Today's Clash of Cultures on Campuses and the Role IT Needs to Play," is by Morris W. Beverage Jr., President of Lakeland Community College.

Campuses today face a growing number of clashing cultures. Faculty struggle with traditional methods of teaching in an environment where demands for flexibility and convenience are rising. Learners increasingly treat a college degree like a commodity. Battles rage over resource allocation. Politicians are exerting influence on campus operations and outcomes. This session addresses these issues and the role IT departments need to play to help higher education not just survive, but thrive.

Podcast: Leading Ahead of the Curves

gbayne — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:37:29 -0500

In this hour-long podcast we feature the closing keynote address from the EDUCAUSE 2008 Midwest Regional Conference. The speech was delivered by Brad Wheeler, Vice President for IT, CIO, and Professor at Indiana University and is entitled, "Leading Ahead of the Curves". A PowerPoint Presentation is also available.

Three curves—technical possibility, social desirability, and economic feasibility over time—describe the forces that shape college and university IT challenges. The consumerization of technology, insourcing and outsourcing, edge or leveraged services on campus, and multi-institutional community source are timely opportunities for IT leaders who can wisely discern these curves.

Learning from the Future - EDUCAUSE Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference Opening General Session

llarsen — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 12:40:16 -0600

Summary of the EDUCAUSE Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference Opening General Session, January 15, 2008.

Learning from the Future
Malcolm B. Brown, Director of Academic Computing, Dartmouth College

Abstract: With information technology evolving at a seemingly breakneck pace, trying to predict the future of IT seems every bit as daunting as predicting movements of the stock exchange. Yet we as IT professionals must plan appropriately for new and emerging technologies that have relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression. The Horizon Report, a project of the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, is one of many tools we have to help us map the future to the present. In this presentation we will consider ways tools like the Horizon Report can help us chart our course.

This session was recorded for podcast and is available at http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/educausepodcastlearningfr/46108

A pdf of the slides are available at http://www.educause.edu/MARC08/Program/13415?PRODUCT_CODE=MARC08/GS01

The Horizon Report is available at http://www.nmc.org/horizon

Malcolm Brown began his presentation by adding a subtitle to his presentation so that it read: Learning from the Future, or how I learned to stop worrying and embrace hyperchange

And with apologies to George Santayana (Life of Reason) he revised his famous quotation to say: “Those who cannot learn from the future are condemned to miss it.”

Brown said it would be good if the topic could be characterized with just one word. In the 1960s film, The Graduate, that word was plastics. The word today with respect to change and innovations might be Google – these words indicate a boundless energy to innovate and bring new things on board.

Innovation is the way we learn from the future, by change and anticipating innovation, not just building a better mousetrap. Innovation is defined as a new method, idea, or product. A few synonyms for innovation are change, alteration, revolution, upheaval, and shake-up.

Innovation is change and change is innovation, ergo, innovation happens.

Innovation is edgy, risky enterprise, a pain, lots of fun, overrated, underrated, but – is it cool?

Brown used a photo of a Cane toad (the environmentally disastrous Australian amphibian with toxic skin and no predators) as the response face to innovation with reactions such as “what?!? We have to upgrade again!” and “you IT people always need money” to indicate that sometimes innovation is downright ugly.

But he went on to say that innovation can be “cool” and described the dimensions of innovation. Both the stapler and the electronic voting machine were innovations but it is hard to claim which is a major innovation and which is a minor innovation.

Innovation can be

Incremental (evolutionary) or sweeping (revolutionary)
Reinforcing or disruptive
Small scope or large scale
Current paradigm or emerging paradigm

Brown said context determines the dimensions of the innovations and innovations are always embedded in context.

Diffusion:

Quoting diffusion theory from The Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers, he described the elements of diffusion to be:

Innovation
Communication via channels
Time
Within a social system

He offered an illustration of diffusion which was the expansion/diffusion of courses in a course management system. The dimensions of diffusion, as Brown sees it, control the rate of propagation and are

Relative advantage of the innovation - Is this new gizmo? with a large or small advantage?
Compatibility – Is it compatible with what you are doing now?
Complexity – How complex is the innovation and it’s potential implementation?
Trialability – Can we try it out? With minimal risk?
Observability – watch what happens – has my colleague tried it out and survived –much like penguins gather at the water’s edge until one falls in and the others watch to see if it gets eaten.

Brown said that, for an innovation to be diffused, it must be sustained, nurtured, cultivated, and revised.

Paradigms

Thomas Kuhn, whose 1962 seminal work on the structure of scientific revolutions brought paradigm and paradigm shift to our common language, set out in his Kuhnian paradigms the following elements:

Set of beliefs or consensus
Coherent
Shared implying community
The paradigm gives us our agenda – the bases for research and problem solving

Brown gave an example. As we’ve asked “what is light?” over the centuries the pace at which technology increases, the pace in the change of paradigms increases

Newton in the 17th century thought it was material corpuscles
Young & Fresnel in the 19th century thought it was transverse wave motion
Einstein & Planck, in the 20th century thought it was quantum mechanical

Lord Kelvin said “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement” but Brown argues that this is within a paradigm. When observation shows disruption then we switch to a new paradigm.

Education becomes learning as it moves from transmission (publishing, big content, authority, control) to collaborative learning (participation, micro-content, cooperation)

Hyper-change can be a period of

Rapid paradigm shift or
Multiple shifts going on at the same time or
A gradual major shift or
Some combination of all three

Brown referenced The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christiansen

Sustaining innovations are incremental, established paradigm, valued by the current customer, and are predictable

Disruptive innovations under-perform, are a new paradigm or quest of a new paradigm,

appeal to a niche group, and are unpredictable.

His example was the natural ice harvesting industry that went from shipping 7 tons in 1806 to 150 tons by 1850. With ice cutting innovations they increased production and harvest and by 1870 14 firms in Boston were shipping 700 tons. As there were cost differentials in shipping to the south, ice plants were created within the South. The Boston firms only needed to harvest 200 tons by 1886 because of better shipping methods. However, the 1930s coup de grace was the invention of the electric refrigerator which caused the demise of the natural ice harvesting industry by 1945.

The lessons from this example were

Failure to recognize the implications of the ice plant innovation
Creativity was directed toward defending and enhancing existing methods
Demise was obscured by a growing market for ice
Success tends to entrench us and cause our own downfall

Sustaining innovation works within the current paradigm

Disruptive innovation works within a new paradigm

We have to be careful about putting all of our energies into the current paradigm and the business at hand. We need to put some of our energies into discovering new paradigms outside our day-to-day work.

Technology and the future

“Technology has often played a vital role in the emergence of new science” (Thomas Kuhn)
- Discover Magazine says – “Discoverà Science, Technology, and the Future”
- The Graduate (1960) said “there’s a great future in plastics” (Plastics today include light emitting polymers, rolled up screens, wearable TVs, videophones, and cars changing colors.)

Success and Failure

Brown gave examples of a number of innovations that were failures. The reasons for failures were:

Key missing technologies (or underperforming technology)
Problems in scaling production
Economic power of rivals
Timing is wrong
Prejudice - timing is wrong – why ethanol fuel is in favor now but not earlier.

Brown suggests we can foster innovation by scanning the horizon for a good model. We should be on the lookout all of the time for new developments. It helps tremendously to be in tune with technology. He described the annual Horizon Report Project that is a collaboration between the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium. The Project goal each year is to ask the questions and identify six technologies that will have significant impact on learning and creative expression over one year, 2-3 years, and 4-5 years.

The Horizon Report Project board is eclectic. It has multiple inputs/perspectives from higher education internationally, industry, museums, press, etc. They use a process timeline that keeps them on track that includes Wiki orientations (establishing a collaboratory), press clippings & research questions (research phase), review of past reports, and then they rank and vote to confirm their short list.

Brown outlined the predictions from the Horizon Reports from 2004 to 2007. The 2008 report was not available at the time of the presentation.

Each of the reports embeds the technologies within the context of the trends and challenges. They provide real-world examples and offer additional readings.

The key trends for 2007 were

Rapid change is occurring for higher education
Increasing globalization
Information literacy as a growing challenge
Agreement that the faculty reward system is out of sync
Collective intelligence is pushing scholarship
Technology divergence between faculty and students

The key challenges for 2007 were

Assessing new forms of work and expression
Leadership within the higher education to exploit rapid change
Copyright and IP issues
Skill gaps between knowing tools and knowing how to create content
New forms of assessment needed for collaborative learning
Increasing pressure to deliver content to new technology formats/devices
Faculty rewards are out of sync with the technology

Brown suggests that good ways to use the Horizon Report to your benefit your institutions are

Give copies to senior administration
Form discussion groups
Model the HR methodology on your own campus
Act on it

Step One: Scan for emerging technologies

Review the Horizon Reports
Network with folks in industry
Gartner reports
Watch your students
Watch your own kids
Data mine help desk reports
Form a local futures council
Read key publications such as the MIT tech review
Keep tabs on the Blogosphere.

Step Two: Make it an explicit priority (Are they visited on us, or stumbled upon, or is it an explicit effort.)

Consult your local paradigms – how do you think about yourself. Read your mission statements. See where you spend your dollars.
Talk to your students.
Encourage staff to be a bit risky and innovate.
Fence off space (framework) for innovation – Google Mac Developer playground - time off to look at innovation
Expect to fail - Brown quoted Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma “Failure is intrinsic to the process of finding new markets for disruptive technologies”

Points:

The first time you might fail so you need to be persistent.
Fishing expedition illustration - expect to fail but increase your chances of success by getting the right bait, location, etc.
Must be open but decide when enough is enough

====================

Q&A

Q: When do you know when to stop going down a “bad” path? When do you decide you have failed?

A: Understand why something failed - example: HPs Kittyhawk drive – 1.8inch drive for PDA market (Newtons) that didn’t take it off but had no resources to dumb it down for the video game market.

Q: How do you choose among possible innovations when you don’t have infinite resources?

A: You should focus on your target audience.

C: You can’t just present the new technologies. You need to get early adopters and get past disruptive stage.

C: Faculty rewards are out of sync with the technology – they are based on refereed citations – but now the focus is shifting to collaborative/community based content

This session was recorded for podcast and is available at http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/educausepodcastlearningfr/46108

A pdf of the slides are available at http://www.educause.edu/MARC08/Program/13415?PRODUCT_CODE=MARC08/GS01

The Horizon Report is available at http://www.nmc.org/horizon

EDUCAUSE Podcast: Learning from the Future

gbayne — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:27:45 -0600

This podcast features a keynote speech from the EDUCAUSE Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference 2008, featuring Malcolm B. Brown, Director of Academic Computing at Dartmouth College. His speech is entitled "Learning from the Future".

Malcolm Brown is Director of Academic Computing at Dartmouth College. His group supports the applications of computing in research and the curriculum. Academic Computing is also responsible for classroom technology support as well as video production. He has worked actively with the ELI, contributing chapters the the ebooks, helping to plan focus sessions, and serves on the ELI Advisory board. He is a member of the Educause Evolving Technolgies committee and is on the faculty of the Educause Learning Technology Leadership workshop. He has been on the board for the Horizon report for the past four years and served as Chair of Board of the New Medium Consortium. He is currently serving as the editor of the New Horizons column for the Educause Review. Malcolm holds a pair of BA degrees from UC Santa Cruz, studied in Freiburg, Germany, on a pair of Fulbright scholarships, and has a PhD in German Studies from Stanford University. He has taught several courses in Dartmouth’s Jewish Studies program. He is a member of the Frye Institute class of 2002.

ELI In Conversation: George Siemens and Michael Wesch Talk About Future Learning.

gbayne — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:48:53 -0600

In this podcast we feature a conversation between George Siemens, Associate Director of the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba. and Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University It was recorded at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

Michael Wesch presented a session entitled, "Human Futures for Technology and Education" at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. He also produced a video, which is referenced in this conversation, entitled "The Machine is Us/ing Us".

George Siemens presented a session entitled, "Connectivism" at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

ELI Podcast: Human Futures for Technology and Education

gbayne — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 03:42:42 -0600

In this hour long podcast we feature a speech by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, entitled, "Human Futures for Technology and Education". It was delivered at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

Digital information technologies have profound implications for education and force us to rethink how we teach, what we teach, and who we think we are teaching. Understanding these implications and rethinking education will help us prepare our students to build a more human future in an increasingly digital environment.

ELI Annual Video: Human Futures for Technology and Education

gbayne — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:51:45 -0600

The slides and video of this presentation can be found here. The speech is by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, and is entitled, "Human Futures for Technology and Education". It was delivered at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

ELI Annual Video: Connectivism

gbayne — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:33:13 -0600

Video and slides for this presentation can be found here. The speech is by George Siemens, Associate Director of the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba. This plenary session is entitled, "Connectivism".

The waves of technological and social change have eroded the effectiveness of traditional views regarding what, how, and why to educate. To effectively educate learners, fundamental assertions need to be rethought: the design of schools and curriculum, the nature of knowledge in a connected world, the relationship between educator and learner, the means and methods of authenticating information and knowledge, and, perhaps most significantly, what it means “to know” in complex, rapidly developing, and chaotic environments. This session will present connectivism as a theory of learning that can bridge the rift between traditional and new educational approaches to prepare learners for the tomorrow they will inherit.

ELI Podcast: Connectivism

gbayne — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:39:13 -0600

In this 58 minute podcast, we feature a session by George Siemens, Associate Director for the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba, entitled, "Connectivism". This speech was recorded at the ELI 2008 Meeting in San Antonio, Texas.

CNI Podcast: An Interview with Jim Neal, VP for Information Services and University Librarian, Columbia University

gbayne — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:58:49 -0600

In this 20 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Jim Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University. He provides leadership for university academic computing and network services as well as a system of twenty-five libraries. He also works with the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC) and the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL). He serves on key academic, technology, budget and policy groups at the University.

Neal has also represented the American library community in testimony on copyright matters before Congressional committees and was an advisor to the U.S. delegation at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) diplomatic conference on copyright. He has worked on copyright policy and advisory groups for universities and professional and higher education associations. He was selected the 1997 Academic/Research Librarian of the Year by ALA's Association of College and Research Libraries.

Neal has served on the Council and Executive Board of the American Library Association (ALA), on the Board and as President of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and as Chair of OCLC's Research Library Advisory Council. He currently is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and on the Board of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). He has also served on numerous international, national and state professional committees, and is an active member of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA).

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2007 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Michael Zastrocky from Gartner Inc.

gbayne — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:22:38 -0600

In this 7 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Michael Zastrocky, Vice President and Research Director of Academic Strategies for Gartner, Incorporated. He presented a session at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference entitled, "IT Leadership and the Role of the CIO: The Annual Gartner/EDUCAUSE Update".

Dr. Zastrocky has more than 30 years of diverse experience in higher education. Before joining Gartner, he was a faculty member at several universities, assistant dean, chief information officer, and served as vice president of CAUSE, the international association for managing and using information resources in higher education from 1989-1995 (now EDUCAUSE). He has served as a consultant for a number of colleges and universities and was a vice president of the Kaludis Consulting Group. He has delivered many keynote addresses around the globe and has served as a faculty member for numerous institutes and seminars. He has been widely published on a variety of technology planning and management topics. He has served as a university trustee and a board member for both non-profit and for-profit higher education organizations. Bachelor's degree from Regis University, master's degree from the University of Denver, and a doctor of education degree from the University of Northern Colorado.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with David Ward, President of the American Council on Education

gbayne — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:26:30 -0600

In this 11 minute podcast, we feature a phone interview with David Ward, President of the American Council on Education. A leading spokesperson for American higher education, David Ward became the 11th president of the American Council on Education on September 1, 2001. Ward is chancellor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin•Madison and the former Charles Kendall Adams University Professor at UW•Madison. Ward participated in a panel session at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference entitled, "The Role of Information Technology in an Age of Access, Affordability, and Accountability".

2007 Policy Conference: Why Higher Education Advocacy Matters on IT Policy

gbayne — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 12:58:28 -0500

The closing keynote speech at the 2007 Educause Policy Conference was delivered by James X. Dempsey, Policy Director at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC. The key concerns of higher education examined at the 2007 Policy Conference are also among the priorities of the Center for Democracy and Technology, which seeks to promote user empowerment, open access, and free expression. This speech, entitled "Why Higher Education Advocacy Matters on IT Policy", examines how and why the university and academic communities should continue their advocacy on these issues, with the goal of promoting innovation, trust, and access to information. This podcast has a runtime of approximately 25 minutes.

EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference 2007. Summary: School of Athens or Mr. Ford's Factory: IT & the Future of Higher Education

llarsen — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 09:58:32 -0500

Summary:

Opening General Session

2007 Midwest Regional Conference
Monday, March 12, 2007

Chicago, Illinois

Title:

School of Athens or Mr. Ford's Factory: IT and the Future of Higher Education

Speaker:

Richard N. Katz, Vice President, EDUCAUSE

Abstract:

For a millennium, universities have worked to preserve a highly personal and labor-intensive apprenticeship technique while opening their doors to ever more learners. IT is used to supplement this millennium-old tradition, but what if IT could be used in more daring ways? What might education look like in 2020?

Notes:

Opening his talk, Richard Katz mused that his remarks might appropriately "comfort the afflicted, and affict the comfortable," and then spoke on social, historical, and philosophical aspects that should inform our work in higher education.

A quick tour of the history of higher education took us to Plato and the birth of the academy in 387 BC. The first university established in the western world was in Bologna, Italy in the 11th century. Soon thereafter the University of Oxford was established in the 12th century. In the early days, roving bands of faculty would roam the countryside providing education on demand in exchange for their livelihood. This was the first form of tuition in exchange for learning. An exponential growth in the academy followed and now universities are among the longest living institutions matched only by the Republic of Iceland and the Catholic Church.

In the United States higher education has had pre-eminence status since 1936 and this may be because of the amount of money we spend on higher education which is an engine of social and economic mobility and an engine for the economic development of nations.

Referencing the Spellings’ Report (A TEST OF LEADERSHIP: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education. A Report of the Commission Appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/final-report.pdf), Katz indicated that we all know about the gathering storm facing higher education. Currently, higher education has negligible growth, impending enrollment declines, and heightening competition (including “for profits” and global competition outside the United States)

In addition, we face significant workforce challenges and increasing regulatory pressures. Some of us will be retiring in the next 5-10 years and it will be the largest workforce exit in history. Katz indicated that the circumstances will drive the costs of IT up. Increasing regulatory pressures are currently an un-formed, but threatening cloud. Indicators can be found in the Spellings’ Report and the earlier National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education report.

There were about 200 thousand students in higher education at the turn of Century and there were 16 million students in 2007. At the turn of the century most people could not afford to attend higher education. The lack of financial resources was a critical factor keeping higher education for the elite wealthy only. Using 2005 statistics, Katz noted that higher education pays off its cost in the weekly earnings increases that come with having a college degree. Referring back to the notion of US preeminence in higher education, Katz said that the US is very good at global higher education and that, at the moment, we still do the best job of it.

Going back to the history of higher education, Katz talked about the difference in higher education in Plato’s time and today. The key difference is the tension between personalization of the education process versus access to higher education. Plato did not allow writing because he felt it got in the way of learning and discourse was the way to achieve true learning. He saw academia as a craft where one learns from the knees of others; a very personalized mode of education.

However, the early personalized forms of higher education were not working for the middle class or for women. There was a movement towards access to educate those who needed to work for their living. In the US, the Morrill Act of 1862, also known as the Land Grant College Act, was the key to providing access to higher education for US citizens. The first community college opened just after the turn of the century. As our access to higher education increased it has diminished our ability to personalize education for each individual. Access has been added over the years by physically building larger spaces and adding “another row of seats” and now by technology and scalable distance education.

In Plato’s School of Athens a man required proper instruction to become civilized. The Jeffersonian ideal and take on this same thread was that ignorance and bigotry, “like other insanities,” were incapable of self-government, and education was needed to create a people who were capable of self-government. The bottom line was that education is a civilizing force that is indispensable to the ideals of democracy.

Katz then quoted Henry Ford: “If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved upon tomorrow, you get somewhere” The Ford Factory metaphor is about the assembly-line with its focus on efficiency and standardization, scale economy, measurement, throughput, and speed. There is a focus on narrow outcomes: low error rates, high output equaling productivity. Katz asks if we are trapped by this factory analogy out of our industrial mentality – or if there is another way to proceed towards the higher education we now need in the US.

He said the issue with standardization and efficiency in our higher education system is that it is replicable – and highly impersonalized to the point of massification versus personalization. It leads to graduates who are capable of doing jobs but not necessarily graduates who can be creative outside “the job.” We live in a world where the labor market is growing significantly but except for those jobs that demand face-to-face service such as nursing, can be standardized and can be off-shored. He asks “How will we be able to create a workforce that can be innovative and creative?”

Katz asked us to think about what happens in the future. What is the future ‘education factory’? Were do the key elements fit in? Will it be easily replicable? Will it commoditize our graduates? Will it create graduates who can not think? Will we have diploma mills? He referenced the current debate at Oxford University over the issue of whether or not students have to attend lectures, labs, etc. in their education process there and asked “Is the end point ‘empty classrooms’ and what does that mean?” He asked us to think about the alternatives.

Mentioning the MIT Media lab, Katz asked if we can marshal our all creativity, money, and ideas to show a new way to a sustainable and appropriate model of higher education for the future, and if we can begin to use technology to organize programs for fewer than 200 students. He also asked if the new rich-media environments will find an interesting and durable place in higher education and noted Wikiversity [http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page] as a possible model asking “How can we harness amateurs into the academy?”

Katz’s conclusions

Higher Education in the US is a magnificent success.
Educational quality and access co-exist uneasily with both broad access and elite (and expensive) education options.
But a “storm is gathering” vis-à-vis access, affordability, and accountability: Can we educate the masses without sacrificing personalization or raising costs?

The real issue is sustainability –

Depends on innovation, not imitation
Intellectual capital is THE factor of production for the 21st century
Learning to learn is essential – learning to lead is paramount
What matters is how your frame the issues and the metaphors you choose.

The road to 2020 is a long one ----

From Daedelus Fall 1997, Katz quoted Martin Trow, a pioneer in the study of higher education who noted the transition of higher education from a privilege for the elite to the massification of today. “Information technology is embedded in and used by institutions that have a history. It will cut its own channels, leading to the creation of institutions that differ from those of today; institutions where the weight of history does not condition and constrain its use.”

And from The Chronicle of Higher Education, quoted Stanley N. Katz, “In Information Technology, don’t mistake a tool for a goal” "...technology is not something that happens to us. It is something we create. ... ….

Q&A Notes:

Should we each write our own script for the future?

Comment: The 2020 reference date in the DVD is too far out ---- all this will happen sooner than 2020.

On the future of textbook middlemen: How long before we can get services from Google and others that we now provide?

Look at www.innocentive.org where researchers bid for work.

EDUCAUSE Southwest Regional Conference 2007. Summary: Collaboration and the Academy of the Future

llarsen — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 13:23:18 -0500

Summary:

Opening General Session

2007 Southwest Regional Conference

February 21, 2007

Austin, TX

Collaboration and the Academy of the Future

Brian Hawkins, President, EDUCAUSE

Abstract

This session will discuss the essential need to collaborate in the new models of higher education. Collaboration is no longer an alternative strategy—it is the only means of competitive survival. The session will identify reasons why we must collaborate, obstacles to collaboration, and new business models to facilitate this much-needed approach in the current and future higher education environment.

Summary

Quoting from “The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the 21st Century,” (http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=PUB6004) Brian Hawkins made the point that the things that have made US Higher Education strong in the past are now the barriers to the maintaining that strength in the future.

A short walk-through of history looked at the 1960-1980 as a period when we had fewer users and specialized uses of computing on college campuses. Computing was done with mainframes. People had limited use. Networking was not in the picture.

The 1980’s brought an explosion of computing with microcomputers which expanded the order of magnitude of use but still were somewhat limited. Networking was in the picture but still not a major player.

Today IT is ubiquitous and the increase in users is by two orders of magnitude. Support staff and financials have gone up 2-3 times but in comparison the user bases have grown astronomically. Much of our infrastructure and services simply can’t scale to meet the demand. We don’t have enough people and we don’t have enough resources.

Hawkins suggests that the resource problem is that we continue to have an incremental approach to our budgets. Our budgets have increased by about 3.5% per year over the past 30-35 years and that’s our budgets today. The role of the CIO is relatively new.

Issues we face include:

An inability (unwillingness) to do major reallocations
An inability (unwillingness) to ever cease ending programs
An inability (unwillingness) to refuse the desire of users – we’re not good at saying “no” which means we have too many people to serve with complexity and have a labor intensive approach.

New models are needed as we move into the future.

From the Spellings Commission report (http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/index.html)

What we have learned over the last year makes clear that American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise; increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied and unduly expensive.

Hawkins indicated that we must work together as we look for new models for the future and said that “we can’t get help from the government and there is no gravy train.”

Companies that are successful and compete successfully are agile, nimble, and flexible. Higher Education is not. Higher Education IT needs to collaboratively develop new and adaptive structures! If we don’t we won’t have critical mass and we will not have enough resources. Trying to go it alone doesn’t work. We’ll NEVER have enough resources if we do not collaborate.

Hawkins spoke of the ideas of Milton Friedman, monetary economy and policy expert (http://www.adamsmith.org/friedman/home.htm) and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the marketplace” (http://www.answers.com/topic/invisible-hand)

We are not used to collaboration and cooperation and we have excuses why we can’t

Not enough time
Competition with campus priorities
Recognition – who will get credit
Sharing/trusting/inequities
Diversity of standards and cultures.

Hawkins suggested that we talk the talk, but we don’t walk the walk. We meet at the conferences and get excited about collaborating but we forget it when we get back to the minutia of our day to day work-life.

Often we choose our collaborations by “who do we play football with” rather than by our values and circumstances.

Prejudices that hinder our moving forward in collaborations include:

Pride in “our way” (“the name-your-institution her” way”)
The “Not-Invented-Here” Syndrome -
Control: Who will be in charge? If you have a collaboration of 75 institutions they can’t all be in control.
Desire for “yesterday” when things were “simple”
“Uniqueness” of our campus
Something we do after our primary work is done.

Hawkins asks “Are these differences strategic or merely an exercise in hubris?”

Our basic services from campus to campus are essentially the same.

Mandates to collaborate include:

Finding the personnel to implement and maintain individual campus services can be a roadblock. For example, rural areas may not be able to find appropriate personnel yet a large campus may have access to many.
We have redundant/duplicative efforts even on our own campuses with our libraries and other units. We often ignore economies of scale and don’t think about how to share the little excess that we may have.

Hawkins discussed work on models of social infrastructure by Andrea Youngdahl (http://www.oaklandhumanservices.org/department/message.htm)

Cooperation – for us this is like EDUCAUSE conferences and activities behavior, informal and superficial, where we do information sharing, have committees, but fundamentally stay separate.

Coordination – for us this is where the activity lasts as long as personal relationship trust results in a mutual commitment. Differences are accommodated, we work on filling in the gaps together, and we share resources.

Collaboration – for us this is activity that leads to a new community through a shared vision and is based on a business model that is sustainable.

Hawkins described a need for classics study in small schools where each couldn’t afford to hire faculty individually. They received a grant that enabled them to split up the work and it worked as long as the grant lasted.

Another situation described was one in which the National Association of College Stores, (http://www.nacs.org/) who could not individually compete with large university bookstores, set up a separate third party, not based on a relationship, that succeeded in helping all, both small and large.

JSTOR and ARTstor efforts to make resources (periodicals / art images) available are succeeding because of having an appropriate business model. (See www.jstor.org and www.artstor.org)

ITHAKA – (http://www.ithaka.org/)

To do things not addressed by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace (we need it now)

To create new organizations to address critical needs not met by the market

To create sustainable models

The Boston Consortium – procurement and more and could get together because they were close.

Hawkins listed the following elements needed for success:

It should be run professionally
It should not be dependent on volunteerism
It should be an investment
It should have an appropriate business structure
It should be able to do business across state boundaries
It should have a Governance structure like a corporation (not yet another consortium)
It should be based on quid pro quo (not just good will)

He concluded that what’s good for one side is philanthropy, what’s good for business is good for both sides

Some illustrations included:

EDUCAUSE, which is run like a business.

Open Source

CAUSE began in 1952 as the College and University System Exchange. They shared programming, had high cooperation, and bordered on collaboration. This was essentially Open Source as it was primarily about sharing code. However, the actions to keep up the documentation, upgrades, maintenance, and ongoing support were not so good. Today a great deal of cooperation and coordination, but not yet collaboration, is happening in this space.

Ira Fuchs, who funded SAKAI and other collaborations, is now talking about EDUCORE as business. You can listen to a podcast by Ira Fuchs that includes comments about EDUCORE at http://connect.educause.edu/podcasts/ira_fuchs_cni_2006.

More characteristics needed for success include:

Help institutions avoid the tyranny of stair-step increments
Actively leverage the technology
Stay out of areas in which the market is working effectively
Draw upon existing perceived strengths and brands (great universities are a great brand)
Where saving are not just temporal as buying consortia which delay the inevitable because corporations will eventually just jack up the price to gain what they want in profit.

To combat the myth of going it alone, we should ask questions such as

Do we have the expertise to do this internally?
What can we leverage if we work together?
What price are we willing (or able) to pay?

Hawkins discussed cost reduction strategies reported in the Core Data Survey and responses to these from his perspective

Consortia/shared purchases. These only delay the inevitable price jacks.
Freezing salaries before outsourcing. We need to re-examine outsourcing and see how to better use our resources.

We have grand challenges facing us in Higher Education.

“If you aren’t part of the solution, you are part of the problem”

The process:

What are the big issues?
What role will IT play in solving them?
What are the Impediments to IT impact on Issues?
What can we do together to work on these impediments?

EDUCAUSE top ten issues are a look at our own navels.

We need to ask our Presidents and Provosts about their top ten issues.

Higher Education issues include: access, affordability, assessment/accountability, effectiveness, workforce development, economic development, and change in the social contract (we need educated people for democracy to succeed)

Is IT

a solution to the challenges?
a contributor to the needed answers or just another cost and yet another cost center in the eyes of Higher Education administration?

We need to review and rethink campus IT services.

We need to develop a business plan to under gird and provide feasibility for a significant project to demonstrate the viability of a new service delivery approach

We need to look at shared services where the “invisible hand of the marketplace” is not at work.

We need to stop thinking about collaboration as an avocational approach – it’s not something we do in our spare time but how we will survive and well support our clients.

Focus – remember Alice (in Wonderland) asking the Cheshire Cat

Alice: Which path should I take?

Cheshire Cat: Where are you going?

Alice: I really don’t know.

Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t matter.

Hawkins remarked that “whining won’t get you anywhere.” What we need our new models and to know where we are going. He said, “Where are you going, because if you don’t know, it really doesn’t matter!”

Q & A

It was suggested that this presentation should be made available to those in Higher Education administration

Hawkins suggested that we need to have demonstration projects to show Higher Education administration.

A question from the floor suggested a need to map the two lists (IT and Presidents/Provosts) and note where they are the same and where they are different. Hawkins noted the fact that IT showed up as a saving in labor costs for corporations but that is not true for us because we work in a culture where we don’t put people out of work.

Another question asked clarification on Hawkins’ statement that we stay out of areas where the market is not effective, asking where is the market not effective? Further clarification regarding demonstration projects was asked including suggestions on how EDUCAUSE members can participate? Hawkins said that Adam Smith was right and the market place does “work” but some markets are very specialized such as “Classics” for Academics. We should ask how many of our very specialized markets do we need. security? research support? etc.

Regarding, demonstration projects, Hawkins said that things are just getting started and but there should be some things in place by mid-late summer and presentation will likely be made at the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Seattle in the fall. Everything will be on the EDUCAUSE website. The EDUCAUSE executive team agreed to “under-promise and over-deliver.”

A query on policy and funding frameworks asked Hawkins to discuss the fact that education leaders are not incentivized to work together and asked how can we encourage the collaboration needed? Hawkins replied that a market place approach works better in these situations because it’s a business decision not policy or governance.

The last question asked how we can reach the heart of new faculty in these issues and use of technology. Hawkins suggested inspiration and reducing the cost so we that can keep the faculty we need. We should ask how some of these shared resources/support can help in the teaching areas. What’s the lowest hanging fruit for EDUCAUSE is important now. The core may not be in the teaching arena.

Information about Brian Hawkins is available at http://www.educause.edu/PeerDirectory/750?ID=05619.

Information about the 2007 Southwest Regional Conference is available at http://www.educause.edu/swrc07.

The perils of stargazing

catherine — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 09:29:21 -0600

Reading yesterday’s press release for the Educause 2007 Horizon Report, I was a bit nonplussed by its choice of technologies. Not for the first time, I wonder if the organizational culture and business processes that characterise higher education mean that we are doomed always to lag far behind the crest of the technological wave.

The Horizon Report is a widely read and influential publication, and its scope is clearly defined: “Each year, [it] describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact in higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years” (cf. press release, Para. 2). And according to Educause, the “significant impact” picks for 2007 are: User-Created Content; Social Networking; Mobile Phones; Virtual Worlds; The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication; Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming.

Let us recall that the Horizon Report aims to identify trends and technologies that will impact over the next one to five years. My sense is that the overwhelming mood among faculty and the educational technology community (including the collective tenor of the experiences recounted among the Educause blogging community) is that the technologies and modes identified in this years’ list have already achieved significant impact. There is one self-evident conclusion to draw from this. This year’s Horizon Report is not futurology: it is history.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t consider the Report’s perceived time-lag to be a bad thing, especially when we consider the audience for which it is designed. The Report finds a wide readership at the institutional management level. Managers of educational institutions are necessarily conservative (with a small ‘c’): conservative in the sense that it is their duty to seek to conserve and to protect their cultural values and institutional mission. Fostering technology-driven change, if we understand such change as the pursuit of innovation for its own sake (as opposed to, say, the pursuit of organizational or individual development), is not part of their mindset. Institutional leaders look to the Report for a ‘state of the art’ update on what’s happening ‘out there’. From within the safety of the institutional citadel, most managers prefer to conceive of ‘out there’ as a jungle. The message that the revolution has already occurred, that the citizens have stormed the barricades, or indeed, that the inmates are currently running the asylum, may not be a message that they are willing or able to hear.

New Book Looks at Technology's Long-Term Impact on Higher Education

cluckett — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 17:00:14 -0500

Aspen Symposium 2005 includes the 19 papers presented and discussed at the Forum for the Future of Higher Education's 2005 Aspen Symposium. Topics cover higher education's role in improving the United States' comparative position in the global economy and various approaches to improving the quality and productivity of higher education, among others. It is available in PDF and hard copy.

Join Us at EDUCAUSE 2006 in Dallas--The Year's Premier Higher Ed IT Event

cluckett — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 16:28:57 -0500

EDUCAUSE 2006 is the event to attend this year if you are involved in any area of information technology in higher education. The conference—"Spurring Innovation and Marshalling Resources," October 9–12 in Dallas, Texas—will bring together several thousand people from across the higher education IT landscape to:

Hear about trends and best practices from exemplars and innovators at all kinds of colleges and universities.
Consider the "big picture" with visionary keynote speakers like Vinton G. Cerf.
Exchange experiences and information with colleagues in small special-topic meetings.
Discover new products and services for higher education IT in the expansive exhibit hall and at vendor presentations and workshops.

Make a sound investment in the future of your career and the success of your institution—join us at EDUCAUSE 2006.

Take a look at what’s in store in the conference program.
Register for the conference and preconference seminars.
Then, view hotel options and make reservations at the hotel of your choice.

EDUCAUSE Enterprise 2006. Summary: Facing the Future:Creating a Vital Campus in a Time of Restricted Resources (Opening Session)

llarsen — Wed, 31 May 2006 11:24:15 -0500

Summary:

Facing the Future: Creating a Vital Campus in a Time of Restricted Resources

[State of Higher Education and the Future]

Alan E. Guskin, President Emeritus, Antioch University System Administration

Opening Address, Enterprise 2006,

May 24, 2006,

Chicago, Illinois

Abstract:

All indications show that the next decade will be a period of restricted fiscal resources for most colleges and universities while expenses continue to rise. Perhaps the most critical challenges we face are how we can enhance student learning and maintain or enhance the quality of faculty and staff work-lives in a time of limited resources.

Notes:

Alan Guskin described the higher education world in which we work as one experiencing demographic shifts, external accountability demands, reduced financial support, mistrust of professionals, a plethora of new technologies and the accompanying demand for its use, and the growing need to provide global perspectives to student learning.

Guskin suggested that we need to create new institutional forms to respond to the changing societal realities and find solutions for dealing with fiscal issues that focus on enhanced student learning and enhanced quality of faculty and staff work-lives. We must not simply raise tuition. And we must seriously put the needs of faculty and staff into the equation.

He related information from a study done by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

There is currently a significant decrease of 10-15% in real dollar resources for most universities. The majority of states do not have money for state education and people don’t have money to pay “outrageous” tuitions. It is expected that state resources will continue to be very tight over the next ten years which means it will be impossible to maintain our current levels of expenditures. Projects and departments will compete for available funds. You can muddle through a single year of financial constraint without making many changes.

Guskin listed assumptions and actions for times of fiscal constraint.

For longer than one year:

Faculty and staff must be educated on organizational and fiscal realities.

We can do some low level muddling through by keeping things the same and changes may not be required.

We can hire cheap faculty for a year or two only.

Unless you are in the very top tier, you can’t raise the money needed, tuition can’t be raised without changing the face of our student body, and reserves can’t be used for more than a year or two. So the quality of faculty and staff work-lives is undermined, student learning will deteriorate, and there will be an overall loss of value of higher education institutions.

Guskin quoted Charles Handy from The Age of Paradox: “The world keeps changing. It is one of the paradoxes of success that the things and ways which got you where you are, are seldom those that keep you there. If you think they are, and that you know the way to the future because it’s a continuation of where you’ve come from, you may well end up somewhere you would rather not be… [This] is a hard lesson to learn.”

We must face reality and move from muddling through to transforming our institutions. We must change basic assumptions on how students learn and refocus from faculty teaching to student learning. We must also re-conceptualize institutional productivity – from faculty productivity to student learning productivity. Guskin did not discuss faculty research at this point.

He did suggest that we need pain (or anticipatory pain) in order to get people to think about the urgency to make fundamental changes. A key is that people must believe that present fiscal realities are LONG term and not something short that we can muddle through.

As we focus on new educational assumptions for transition to the transformed institution we’ve looked only at student learning. Faculty will need to have new roles in order to maintain reasonable workload and quality of faculty work-life while they maintain academic integrity and quality standards.

Guskin suggested the following organizing principles.

1) Create a clear and coherent vision of the future focused on student learning, quality of faculty work-life and reduced cots per student. He noted that mission statements of our institutions don’t help in this regard. We should start from point zero and ask what education would look like today if we were starting fresh. We should align and transform around a coherent focus, aligned with vision, otherwise serious fundamental reform is not possible.

2) Transform the educational delivery system consistent with vision of the future as we focus on student learning. Learning productivity and the current faculty workload model requires faculty to teach more when resources are tight. The key to transformation is student learning assessment not faculty teaching loads. Student learning can happen without faculty. We need multiple instructional strategies, new instructional roles, assessment of student learning outcomes. Some innovations include outcomes based assessment, learning communities, technology as replacement of not add-on to the current models. We need curricular audits and clear decisions on why are we are teaching what.

3) Transform the organizational systems consistent with vision of the future – how we count, how we reward, how we allocate funds, who and what we support, and how we provide services. Guskin quoted from “Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change” by

Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Overdorf in the Harvard Business Review, March-April 2000.

Zero-based budgeting focuses on making clear and consistent choices about expenditure of all available resources following strategic directions. Annual budgets need to align an institution’s expenditures with the vision of the future. What’s the most important place to spend resources? These can be powerful moral choices.

Guskin said we need to audit and restructure administrative and student services systems using technology and integrated staffing arrangements to reduce costs. He suggested that we only use a portion of the functionality of our expensive ERP systems. See David Trevvett’s blog at http://connect.educause.edu/blog/davidt/erp_waste/2363.

He repeated the need to use zero-based budgeting processes to audit and redesign the budget allocation process.

The library of the future needs to be different. Guskin indicated that it was the single largest item in the budget so library budgets always get chopped in times of fiscal constraint.

Guskin indicated that we can’t get change in 4-5 years. We need our administration (presidents, chancellors, provosts, CFOs) in place 10-12 years to make real progress. He said 75 % of our current presidents coming from outside academia at this time and also, that high level personnel transitions are terrible in higher education and not built to lead to a successful role. We should not view presidents as the owner of the institution. The people who “are there” need to be the owners and need to guide their president in to the appropriate roles/actions. Guskin said it is very important to get leaders involved and to manage their leadership – they are not priests.

Guskin asked how IT can make a stronger impact in the transformation process. He believes that IT holds the key tools to educating students well and wonders how IT sits with unsophisticated technology users. Guskin thinks we are only using a portion of our ERP systems because we are used to doing the things in historical ways and not transforming to the new systems. He suggested that we quit building our own systems and/or adapting ERP systems to meet specialized/historical functions.

The program listing is located at http://www.educause.edu/ENT06/Program/9080?PRODUCT_CODE=ENT06/GS02. The presentation slides are posted at http://www.educause.edu/upload/presentations/ENT06/GS02/Facing%20the%20Future.ppt.