The Tower and the Cloud

Bullet points from Richard N Katz's keynote presentation - Vice President of Educause

• Powershift in Higher Ed- 1100-? (popes>princes>professors>people)
• Stanley Katz - don't mistake a tool for a goal
• Martin Trow - information technology is embedded in, and used by, institutions that have a history.
• Higher Ed shift from public good to private investment
• We are in the information age and we are in the information business
• The cloud is big! How is the cloud growing to envelop our Universities? How is the University using the cloud to extend it's presence? How might the cloud alter the form of our social institutions?
• google search of "professor" takes you to wikipedia and ratemyprofessor.com
• Emergence of the Collective - wikipedia, citizen journalism, seti
• Exponential growth looks like nothing is happening until it explodes - Ray Kurzwell
• We live in a knowledge revolution, but colleges are not at the center of that revolution.
• Increasing access to knowledge does not equal increasing literacy or numeracy.
• The context of IT does not equal the context of higher ed (we do not serve all who can learn, we have not made higher ed more efficient, we have not yet transformed learning)
• Really Neat IT does not equal student engagement and success ( high rates of attrition, evidence of declining engagement, high need of remediation, the vanishing student)
• Everything digital, everyone online, does not equal privatizing of knowledge
• YET Great IT = Great Research
• Open Education is surprising us!
• Cloudy Future: School of Athens?
• We are now a consumer goods.
  
  
  
• Since technology is so high quality, the time is now to ask what is the "idea" of the university? What is the university trying to do? what does the institution really need to do well to manifest its intent? What are the information infrastructure, environment, and services that will enable(or drive) this?
• Do we have a strategy and an infrastructure to: discover, engage, attract, and develop talent? Re-think scholarly communications? Promote scholarly literacy, engagement, and global citizenship? Make the institution influential on local, regional, national, or world affairs.
• Universities are aggregaters of talent.
• Do our policies and incentives reinforce what our infrastructure, services and resources enable?
• Summing it up -- IT has gotten better. So good in fact, it allows us to change things. Profoundly. IT allows others to change things as well, making our task more urgent and more complex. Our challenge is less technical and more one of institutional purpose, adaptability, and will. The needs of our stakeholders are changing. Soon virtual environments to support learning and discovery will rival and surpass "built" ones, in certain cases. The successful university of the future will know its values, have clarity of purpose, and an IT capacity to reflect and extend those values and purposes globally.

I'm Presenting at the 2009 Sloan-C/Moodle Moot Conference

Just a quick update to let you know that I am presenting at the Sloan-C/MoodleMoot 2009 Conference in San Francisco, CA.  I am in San Francisco right now and enjoying the area.  This is my first time in California. It's a bit chillier than I thought it would be ( high 60's) compared to Ohio (80's).  I'm looking forward to the conference as there are quite a few presentations that interest me.   Here is info about my presentation. Feel free to contact me if you are at the conference.

TITLE: 
University 2.0: Open source as a cornerstone

PRESENTERS:
Amanda Rondeau, Director, Emerging Academic Technologies Distributed Education and Instructional Technology Office of the Senior Vice President & Provost, University of Minnesota
Terence Armentano, Assistant Director, Center for Online and Blended Learning, Bowling Green State University
Marc Oehlman, Interim Director, Center for Academic Technology, CSU Monterey Bay
Andrew Roderick, Technology Development Manager, Academic Technology, San Francisco State University

DESCRIPTION:
As budgets decrease, the use of open source software for enterprise-level applications has increased within higher education. This session will examine current open-source development and integration projects at four different campuses and strategies each campus has implemented related to teaching and learning, technology management, and organizational administration.

Predicting the future of online learning

Predicting the future is tough business because often times unpredictable things happen, which change the course of life. [i.e. Movable Type, The Internet, Google (the search), etc.].

So the question is: What is the future of online learning?

The following are ideas that surfaced at the Sloan-C Conference from a presentation on this topic. I don't endorse all these ideas, however many of them make sense and are worthy of discussion. What are your thoughts?

• More mobile
  
• More modular
  
• Student expectations will rise
  
• More inter-insitutional collaboration
  
• Expansion of informal learning context
  
• Faculty development will be on demand
  
• People will aggregate there own learning spaces
  
• People will learn through YouTube (and other video web-sites)
  
• Re-evaluation about what it means to be an expert
  
• The rise of open source learning
  
• More visualization
  
• Everyone will be teaching with tech
  
• Learning will be more ad-hoc
  
• More fantasy-based learning
  
• Things will be more un-bundled just like in banking, publishing, music, dvd’s.
  

More terms associated with the future of online learning (some were repeated)

• modular
  
• synchronous
  
• asynchronous
  
• collaborative
  
• consumer driven
  
• media rich
  
• competency based
  
• visual
  
• networked
  
• accountable
  
• flexible
  
• audio enabled
  
• learning on the go
  
• gaming
  
• social networking
  
• student-created content
  
• blogs
  
• podcasting
  
• cross platform learning
  
• bricolage
  
• diverse organization and delivery
  
• just in time learning
  
• external certification
  
• more faculty issues
  
• second life

Open Education and Free Public Domain E-Books

I was at the Sloan-C Conference this past week and I attended a presentation about Open Education Resources and more specifically the WikiEducator Project. The idea is that with the use of free networks, technology, and open educational resources, we can turn the digital divide into digital dividends. It was a very thought provoking presentation and one that every educator should know about. You can view Wayne Macintosh's online version of the presentation here. WikiEducator Presentation. After viewing the presentation and you begin to get inspired by open content, check out this link to 20+ places to download free public domain e-books. Let us know your reaction to the WikiEducator Project by leaving a comment. I think the WikiEducator project combined with the 1 laptop per child project can provide a good framework for the bridge that stands over the digital and educational divide.