EDUCAUSE | Higher Education Transformation

Podcast: Challenging IT Leaders to Mashup, Twitter, Tag, and Poke: New IT Strategies for a Digital Society

gbayne — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:03:29 -0500

This 57 minute podcast features the opening keynote address from the EDUCAUSE 2008 Midwest Regional Conference. The speech was delivered by Susan E. Metros, Deputy CIO & Associate Vice Provost at the University of Southern California, and is entitled, "Challenging IT Leaders to Mashup, Twitter, Tag, and Poke: New IT Strategies for a Digital Society".

Today's youth are digitally titillated, visually stimulated, and socially connected. To educate and engage this new breed of learners, institutions of higher education are revisiting and revising the basic tenants of a general education by asking, What does it means to be literate in today's society? As educators transform the way they teach and conduct research, IT leaders also must alter their institution's IT strategy to best support a mobile, global digital citizenry.

EDUCAUSE Now - Show #1 - Premiere Episode

gbayne — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:46:49 -0500

Welcome to the premiere episode of EDUCAUSE Now!

EDUCAUSE Now is a monthly podcast, focusing on the intelligent use of information technology in higher education. Each episode features a variety of stories, interviews, and views that relate to IT in higher education. EDUCAUSE Now will also inform you about upcoming events, report on past events, and feature the movers and shakers in policy, teaching and learning, security, and a whole host of other important topics for our members. Let us know what you would like to hear at podcast@educause.edu.

This episode of EDUCAUSE Now features:

The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) Study entitled, "Service on the Front Line: The IT Help Desk in Higher Education"
We talk about some of the surprising findings with ECAR Fellow and author of the study, Mark Sheehan.
ELI in Conversation: Future Learning
A conversation between George Siemens, director of the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba, and Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. This conversation was recorded at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative 2008 Annual Meeting. George Siemens is the author of "Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age", and - Michael Wesch has produced two important videos on Web 2.0, "Information R/evolution" and "The Machine is Us/ing Us." You can listen to the full length podcast of this conversation.
A Commentary from EDUCAUSE President Diana Oblinger.
Diana introduces herself as the new president of EDUCAUSE and provides some background information on her career path. She also speaks about her vision for the future of EDUCAUSE.
The EDUCAUSE Policy Office: Update
We check in with EDUCAUSE Vice President Mark Luker regarding current hot topics -- federal broadband policy, net neutrality, and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. You can read the EDUCAUSE report, "A Blueprint for Big Broadband", and visit the talking points for P2P filesharing issues.
Music for EDUCAUSE Now:
- "Groove IT" by Denis Kitchen
- "Lorge" by El Ten Eleven
- "Guitar Suite I, Movement I" by Dan Tharp

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.

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 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.

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".

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.

2007 EDUCAUSE Western Regional Conference to Focus on Next-Generation Information Technology

cluckett — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 10:29:32 -0600

The 2007 EDUCAUSE Western Regional Conference, “Next-Gen IT: New Leaders, New Students, New Directions, and Expectations,” will be held May 7–9, in San Francisco, California. View the program and register by April 16 to save money with low, early-bird rates. The conference will focus on the following topic areas:

Cultivating the Learning Landscape
Leading from Where You Are
Making IT Work: The Confluence of Technology, People, and Expectations
Corporate and Campus Solutions

In-depth, half-day preconference seminars will spotlight project management, emerging technologies, and campus IT security.

Latest EDUCAUSE Quarterly Now Available

cluckett — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 12:33:35 -0500

The lastest EDUCAUSE Quarterly is now online, featuring articles on using video games in the classroom, alternative engines for improving searches, podcasting class lectures, and training students for computer-based exams.

July/August EDUCAUSE Review Now Available

cluckett — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 16:18:58 -0500

The current issue of EDUCAUSE Review includes articles by Michael M. Roberts on learning from the past for future Internet development and Sandra Braman on theagenda for research and IT; an interview with Shimizu Yasutaka, president of Japan's National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME); and research results from Ali Jafari, Patricia McGee, and Colleen Carmean on learning/course management systems. View the July/August EDUCAUSE Review.

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.