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

Now Available: Latest Core Data Report on Campus IT Environments

ecoghlan — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:50:40 -0500

The EDUCAUSE Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2006 Summary Report has just been released. This report summarizes data for the past fiscal year collected from more than 950 colleges and universities about their campus IT environments, practices, and policies. Respondents represent all enrollment sizes, Carnegie classes, and types of governance, as well as international institutions, providing a broad and deep view of the current IT environment in higher education. The full report can be viewed online free of charge.

Among the notable findings from the report are the following.

The percentage of top-level IT leaders at all reporting institutions who sit on the president’s cabinet increased nearly 2% over last year, to about 48%, but once again a higher percentage of community colleges reported this to be the case (about 63%, up from 59%).
Looking at the total number of centralized FTE IT staff this year compared to last year, there was a significant mean increase of 1.85 FTE staff for all responding institutions.
There was a significant leap in deployment of wireless security technologies since last year at all types of institutions, with an approximately 7% increase in deployment overall and about a 34% increase over the last two years.
There was an increase among all respondents in offering many kinds of support to faculty in the use of IT in teaching and learning, with “faculty training on request” the most employed support mechanism, reported by more than 94% of respondents.

IT Matters! - A Panel Discussion from the EDUCAUSE 2007 Enterprise Conference

gbayne — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:48:26 -0500

In this podcast, we present a panel discussion from the EDUCAUSE 2007 Enterprise Conference, entitled "IT Matters!". The panel is moderated by EDUCAUSE Vice President Richard Katz and includes:

David Koehler, Director of Enterprise Systems, Cornell University

James S. Roberts, Executive Vice Provost, Finance and Administration, Duke University

Susan E. Thorin, University Librarian, Dean of Libraries, Syracuse University

When we get together at a forum like Enterprise 2007, it's a wonderful opportunity to interact with our colleagues at other institutions, hear from thought leaders on various topics, and compare solutions and approaches, but sometimes we forget to consider what brings us together in the first place. We all have a tremendous impact on how our institutions are run. In this session, a panel of higher educational functional officers will explain their perspectives on the role of IT and share how IT has transformed and will transform their business practices.

Tune In September 14: Virtual Computing: A New Strategy for a New Era

cluckett — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:16:05 -0500

Tune in Sept. 14 to hear from Samuel Averitt and Mladin A. Vouk about North Carolina State University's next-generation computing strategy and architecture for the universal delivery of computing services. Unable to tune in? Visit the archives.

A New CISO's To-Do List

vvogel — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 10:25:13 -0500

Security Task Force member, Brian Nichols (LSU), shares his top “to-do” list for new CISOs in the September 2006 Campus Technology.

Survey Report Spotlights Top Campus IT Challenges

ecoghlan — Thu, 04 May 2006 11:51:36 -0500

Which IT issues have the greatest strategic importance to higher education institutions today and which ones are likely to be important in the future? Find answers to these questions and learn about other current trends in the 2006 EDUCAUSE Current IT Issues Survey report, published in the current issue of EDUCAUSE Quarterly.

The 2006 survey gathered responses from 628 primary representatives (typcially CIOs) of EDUCAUSE member institutions, representing public and private, and associate- through doctorate-granting institutions of all sizes.

Among the report's findings:

Security/identity management has replaced IT funding as the top strategic challenge
Disaster recovery/business continuity has joined the list of top ten strategic issues.
Portals are no longer among the top ten strategic issues.