Final Sessions

Friday morning started with a panel session - 4 CIOs of major US Universities discussing their IT strategies, and in particular whether they were betting on clouds, collaboration or contracts.
An interesting session, I didn't take too many notes, but the general consecus was that the future would be a mixture of all three, and the exact combination would depend on what sort of institution you want to be, bearing in mind that our biggest  expense is people and we need to make sure that our  human capital (their phrase, certainly not mine), should deliver the greatest value. Some interesting nuggets such as Indiana University had saved millions ($15m I think) by implementing Kuali Financials instead of Peoplesoft Financials.

The final session was delivered by the President of Indiana University, who was definitely pushing the benefits of open source. his opening statement was that Universities have three missions:

• The Creation of Knowledge, (research)
• The Dissemination of Knowledge, (teaching and learning)
• The Preservation of Knowledge.

Universities are some of oldest institutions in the world. The biggest technology companies may not be here in 100 years, but most universities will be.
One big challenge facing us in the preservation of knowledge is data storage. Researchers are not very good at the long term preservation and curation of data. If data is important and not replicable, long term storage is a significant challenge. The experts in this area are in Information Systems and we need to work with our researchers to address it.

The recession causing severe pressures all over world, and all forms of income are under pressure. This is the new normal for HE - it's not going to get better. We will be under pressure to be more productive, and in other sectors most improvements in productivity have been due to technology. We will need to do this in education. On-line education however is still expensive, when that changes it will have a significant impact on economics of HE. Open source software will and should have an impact on the cost of running a university, either through savings or cost avoidance.  They have saved millons of dollars through the implementaion of open source software, and there is much now to choose from including Kuali, Sakai and Moodle.   At this point the twitter stream was asking whether these savings counted the cost of  development, deployment and maintenance of open source.

He was a believer in the centralisation of IT where appropriate. The basic arguements are economics and security, as well as improvements in service. It's happened in the private sector and we're not that different in terms of basic infrastructure, there are no arguements to sustain uniqueness and the savings can be immense.

He talked about risk and how to manage them, and I was interested that all elements of security in Indiana have been brought together into the Office of Public Safety. It includes campus security, information and data security and emergency planning. They have a good web site here.

Finally, in a closing statement about the importance of people, he said that we are the partners of teachers and researchers in our institutions, not the servants.  Rather a good note to end the conference on I thought!

All in all a good trip - a lovely city, some very useful presentations and as always good company leading to some great networking.

We the people...

It's not all hard work and sessions at EDUCAUSE, although on full conference days the first session is always at 8am, and the last finishes at 6pm, so long days. On two nights there's usually some sort of party, one organised by vendors, and one by the conference. Not for the first night I chose (along with almost the entire British contingent) to go to the Google party - its always good. Held in the Academy of Natural Science, we got up close and personal to some fantastic butterflies in their butterfly house:

and saw lots of other exhibits including some dinosaur skeletons. The party element was great - a magician who fooled me completely with some very good card tricks. I know it's sleight of hand, but really annoys me when I cant work out how its been done. We could make android images of ourselves and have them made into badges - can you recognise me?

And  - the best of all -  we could ecord a 7 second video in front of a green screen with your choice of props, and have it turned into a flip book with the aid of some very clever printers. Of course, most of us chose the boxing glove to hit somebody with. On the way back we managed to get a quick picture of TeamBrit under the LOVE sculpture that Philadelphia is famous for (being the city of brotherly love and all that.

On the last night of the conference there's usually something organised to do with the city we're in, and this time we went to the National Constitution Centre, Philadelphia being the place the Declaration of Independence and the  Constitution were signed. Interesting place, and we were able to wander in amongst bronze statutes of all those who'd signed the constitution, including Benjamin Franklin.

I must say, I was very impressed with Philadelphia. It's a city with a real nice feel about it. Easy to walk round, and lots of people walking (and you can't say that about all US cities). very flat, lots of parks, murals and public art everywhere, and lots of history.

As Learning Goes Mobile

Last session today was from Lee Raine of the Pew Internet projects out mobility.

He started with the questions he couln't answer:
Who'll do the ebooks thing best
Are students attention spans shorter now
Are students brains being rewired
Are students more indifferent to privacy
What's the matter the kids today?

He then went on to give us some figure. All of them relate to US adults:

65% are social networking site users
55% share photos
26% post comments on sits and blogs
15% have personal web site
14% blog
13% use twitter
9% allow location awareness from social media

Blogging and twitter low percentages, but big in influence.

People getting more information, from more sources.  More filters being set up so they get what they want and regulate information flows.

50% of US adults and 80% of teenagers use social media. Not just a young people thing anymore.
Social networks and social media are becoming more important in people's learning strategies.
Social networks are more influential and are differently  segmented and layered. For example, people don't pay as much attention to news, as news which is important will find its way to them through networks.
People have trusted networks, and question their network about validity of information.
Social networks are the audience for the things they are creating.

More phone subscribers in US than people.
56% own laptops
12% own ebook readers
9% have iPads and rising. Early adopters, elite cohort.

Distinction between tablets and ebook readers getting blurred eg in kindle fire. Trend will continue

35% of US adults have smart phones. Higher percentage in younger groups. Majority connect to Internet wirelessly.

25% of smart phone users use it as their primary device for accessing the Internet.

17% have bumped into something or someone whilst paying more attention to the mobile device than their physical environment

1 in 4 adults use apps. Predict that both apps and web services will survive but for different things. Segmented applications for different needs.

Top apps functions:
Info updates
Communication
Learn about interests
Destinations

Text messaging integral part of the mobile story. Primary way young adults communicate with each other. Going up. Everything else going down.
Average is 109 texts a day for 18 to 24 yr olds


Mobile connectivity is changing social and information spaces by enhancing and enabling:

1 New access points to knowledge. Ebooks and the cloud. Sharing information.
Real time information sharing. Opportunism and pain avoidance. Eg hit a traffic jam and figure out alternative. Hyper coordination of group activities.

2 Just in time searches. Settle arguments. New cognition? Some evidence that this is emerging.

3 Augmented reality. Merger of real world and data. Esp in apps environment. Can simulate environments.

4 Perpetual, pervasive  awareness/access to social networks. Deeper connection and consultation. Can share more stuff and participate. Networks getting bigger and more diverse.

Ubiquitous small screens are changing attention and media zones. Continuous partial attention. All gadgets on. People live in information streams. Don't read in depth. Dip in and out of stream. Not linear or structured.
Info snacking. Quick doses of info.

Mobile connectivity is changing public and private space/time continuum.  Any device any time etc. Public life has invaded private life. "Alone together" New social norms are developing.

New kinds of learners are emerging.
Learning used to be a transaction, now its a process

What will future university look like in 10 years time?  They are looking at differnet scenarios, and you can vote on them here.
Http://survey.fs.elon.edu/surveys/

Virtual Lab

Sometimes it's good to go to a session just because you think you might enjoy it, rather than you might learn something from it. That's why I've just been to one on teaching chemistry and microbiology in a virtual lab in Second Life. The University of Aalto in Finland have created LabLife3D, a virtual building with clean rooms, laboratories and a lobby area where students can discuss things.

Students are taught to use equipment before entering the real lab, and have to pass certain tasks relating to lab safety, especially for the clean room. They can also perform experiments, including being able to fast forward time for cell cultures etc. It enables larger classes to be taught more cheaply, and the students to learn at their own pace and in their own time. The students rate it positively. Downsides are that it requires a lot of specialist skills to build the virtual reality, and currently mistakes or accidents in the experiments have no consequences. This is currently being developed.

A good presentation, delivered entirely from Second Life, with some current students in Finland taking part through their avatars. My main criticism is that the Second Life interface seems so clunky, especially when compared to modern gaming environments. Not at all intuitive.

OpenClass

Just had an interesting presentation and discussion about a new VLE just launched by Pearson. It's called OpenClass, and is free! It's totally cloud based and integrates seamlessly with Google apps. It looks very interesting. Easy to use interface, content looks easy to create and upload, and from the student perspective you can create communities, collaborations and share stuff very simply. You can get to your gmail from within it, see your google calendar, Skype students directly and chat. It's available on the Google market place, and in the 48 hours since launch has been downloaded by 500 schools and colleges already using Google apps.

It's attracting a lot of attention, and there's a lot of buzz about it here.

Privacy and Publicity

The keynote today was from Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, and was about privacy issues faced by young people using social media. Excellent thought provoking talk. The following are notes of the main points, haven't got time to turn it into a proper post.

Privacy is a complex issue to young people, especially around social media. Its about the freedom to control a situation.

Why do young people participate in social media?. It becomes an absolute social necessity. The equivalent of the mall. You go to see and be seen. Failure to participate means you're excluded from a lot of social culture. Facebook the dominant player. Ynd people tell you that you're expected to be on Facebook. If not, you'll be asked why and you'd better have a good reason.

Facebook, text messaging are the main ones at he moment, but will change. There will be shifts and transitions. Already are niche sites eg tumblr, twitter. But what drives particpation is the ability to be there because everyone else is there. Theres a constant flow of information.

Concept of the networked public. Spaces that are constructed through networked technologies as well as the imagined communities formed by people coming together.
People want to be in a public, but don't want everything they've said to be public for the world to see.

Teens recognise that a fundamental change is happening. Things are becoming public by default, private by effort.
Need to make choices over what to make private. It's easier to make things public than private. Eg post all photos, tag, wait for people to complain before remove them. Share first, take down later.

But there's still private communication in all of these networks. People choose what to make private. Most is public. Why bother hiding it?

Password sharing very high, probably about 50%. Yng people say it's a way of feeling connected. Very difficult for us to understand!

Young people are learning about different audiences. Eg employers. They're learning, put things up, take them down. Unexpected audiences are a real challenge to them.
Quotes from teenager: " I wouldn't go to my teachers page and look at their stuff, so why should they look at mine"
"Facebook is for friends, not for my mum, why doesn't she understand that"
"Everyone disappears after the mom post".
They need parents to understand social boundaries - Just because it's accessible doesn't mean you're welcome.

Interesting strategies that young people use to achieve privacy:
Asserting social norms. Eg status updates directed at different people. Get cross when the wrong people comment. Use different type of language when addressing different audiences.
Use technology. Eg block certain people from seeing certain things.
White walling. Log in everyday and remove posts from day before. Make Facebook real time.
Deactivate accounts when not being used. When not logged in, can't see anything. Becomes synchronous.
Hide the meaning of things by usingg references eg song lyrics that your friends will understand but your family won't. Access to meaning separated from access to content.

Social media has made things more visible. Lot of experimentation with how to make things private. Kids are not inherently digital natives. Not born knowing how to handle these issues.

We need to know about these issues so that we can help them navigate the complexity.
We can ask the critical questions to make people think and reflect and see things from a different perspective. Not judgemental ones.

Huge challenges we have to deal with in terms of giving students opportunities, but deal with privacy issues. Can't just expose them. We have to put down frameworks to help them. We have to understand the complexities of privacy and publicity in order to help them.

Innovation

There's a lot of sessions on innovation this year. Been to a couple, both very different.
Yesterday it was the CIO of NASA, and she talked mainly about the ecosystem you need to foster and encourage innovation. She suggested that innovation was far likelier to come from being disciplined than from being creative, and was not about creating a hot new product but more about using things in a different way. Innovation is not the same as inventing. Things get invented, and you innovate with them.

Inovators: Believe that anything is possible, ignore ridicule and focus on outcomes, bridge the finite world of the possible with the infinite, are resilient, take risks, are inspired to change the status quo and more importantly, are little bit crazy.

Good example of an invention which caused massive innovation - the telephone. When it was invented people thought it was an amazing invention but who would ever want to use one. A scientific toy. No practical need for it.
Now more phones than people in the US. Invention of the phone has had a social impact. Revolutionised business, banking, journalism. Changed society and infrastructure. Similar to what's happening now with social media.

The ecosystem for innovation needs to be diverse. For any problem there exists a perspective that makes it easy to grasp a solution. There's no perspective that's better than another
Teams of problem solvers do better when the diversity of perspectives is great than  the overall ability of individual team members. Diversity trumps ability

What do you do about people who try and block innovation? Remember that the brakes on a car were invented to make it go faster, not slower. We need to use the brakes in our organisations to speed up innovation by bringing extremes together to solve problems. Analyse the driving forces, both pros and cons for a situation.

Technology is increasingly being seen as a strategic asset, not just an operational one, and in an increasingly competitive business environment, innovation will be key to survival.


The second innovation talk was by the US CTO and special adviser to President Obama. A tiny bit evangelical, he shouted at us for an hour, about how great the US was, and how much better it could be with more innovation. He suggested that technical trends are enabling us to be more innovative. Cloud computing and mobility are unlocking the potential for innovation. Nearly all major Internet breakthroughs have come from college campuses, and we now need to find those new killer apps. There was a lot more, but mainly about the US Education system.

Edupunks

Next session was Anya Kamenetz, the author of the Edupunks Guide, and was about a DIY approach to education, and the challenges that presents. She postulated that the rising cost of higher education, plus the decreasing relevance of it as so many graduates are unemployed was causing a radical change in higher education.

The future is open. Open learning materials, such as the MIT initiative, Open courseware consortium, TED, the Khan academy.
But, Education not just about content. Interaction, socialisation and support are critical.
Look at the Music industry. Not much paid for content anymore. But people will pay for concerts to get the Live experience. Education will have to provide that Rock concert feeling. Needs to be exciting.

Socialisation doesn't always happen in person. Open socialisation. Can be on line peer learning. Students will do it spontaneously, sharing and collaborating on notes using Dropbox or Facebook threads of questions and discussions. Peer learning can lower costs. Biggest example. Stanford university's massively open on line course.
100,000+ students from 175 countries taking part. Uses google moderator and an AI tool.

Open accreditation is the most challenging aspect of open education and DIY education as students follow personal learning paths
Portfolio based assessment may be the way forward.

Professional networks can bypass diplomas.professionals. The Behance network is a website for creative to upload their work, which is voted on, and some employers,including Apple, hire straight from it. No college attendance, no diplomas or degrees awarded.
Won't replace, but will be complimentary to.

Badges are another way of assessing for real world learning. See the story of Eduardo here.

In the future there'll be no single vision of what a university should be. The new way will be based on diversity.

Futurists and mindsets

The second session I went to today was delivered by a futurist, and was supposed to tell us what IT leaders need to know about the future. Very entertaining, and delivered in a very energetic style, and he got us to do some small group work, looking at the years 1987 to 2017 and diving them into computational eras. Interestingly most groups came up with the move from mainframe, to internet, to social, but very few groups did anything about the years up to 2017 which is a very long time away in technological terms. Smugly I can say that our group did, thinking that it would be the era of human augmentation. We also worked on what technologies we would stop offering to make way for the new ones, I think he meant services not technologies which led not some debate in our group. Apparently, sustainable successful organisations manage 3 interconnecting technology portfolios. Now, next (3-5 yrs), and later (more than 5yrs). Later is 5 years plus. Most people focus on Now, dream about Later and forget Next. Big data, social media, mobility, and cloud are the four big changes we should be concentrating on when we move our horizons out to 3 years away. Quite entertaining, but not an awful lot I didn't know already.

Next session was the winner of the EDUCAUSE leadership award, Marilyn McMillan, from New York university. She talked about the issues facing IT departments in connecting clients to "sun never sets" services, and especially the introduction of service management. Very relevant to us as we're on that journey as well. These days our customers expect services to be available all the time, just to work, to be able to access them easily but securely, to know what's changed, and how to report a problem and get it fixed.
Requires great deal of process maturity to get provide all of those expectations. To demonstrate customer expectations, Marilyn referred to the Beloit college mindset list, which I'd never heard of, but you can see here, together with past lists so you can see how things have changed.

She finished with her thoughts on leadership, RAISE:
Results with others, for others.
Alignment of purpose and vision
Interdependence needs fostering, can't work on our own.
Sway, and be swayable. Influence, and be influenced
Enthusiasm. Renew your own energies, and uplift the energies of others

Good session.

Ignore the Lizard Brain

Opening session of the conference was Seth Godin, described in the programme as an author, blogger and entrepreneur. He was excellent, with a very good presentation style. He apparently writes one of most popular blogs in world, so will be interesting to take a look.

Some of the main points from his talk:

His normal audience is marketers. Mass marketing is based on the concept of average stuff for average people. But, things are changing. There's more clutter, more stuff, but more importantly, there's been an explosion in the range of communication channels and ways to reach people. The mass marketing paradigm is broken, students will choose not to read emails, read brochures etc.
Revolutions change things. Look at the record indusrty. In 1996 it was perfect. Now there's more music than ever before, but the record industry is dead.

The revolution of our time is cheap connectivity. People to other people, and people to information.

The means of production has shifted. It used to be that the person who owned the means of production got to keep the money.
Now all of our students own a connected device. Now they own the means of production.

Competence is no longer a scarce commodity.
Access to information is now irrelevant. You can look anything up.

Also, the normal distribution of people is changing. The world is getting weirder because we can now find and connect to people who have the same wierdness as us.  The notion of average is no longer practical.

Becuase of the ubiquitous access to information, teachers will now longer get paid for telling students stuff. What is important is taching them how to solve complexx problems, and work things out for themselves.

Need to start to ignore our lizard brain, that voice that tells us that to be careful - Seth's written about it here.
It's the lizard brain that makes everyone check their smart phone every few minutes, we're only doing it to check that everything's OK, then we put it back in our pocket...


Ignore the voice!
Choose to be the one they'll miss when you're not there. Make a difference.
We have to do art, scary things that no human being has done before.
It's all about gifts, not favours. Don't have to pay the artist to see the painting, or hear the music. Make a change, make a connection and spread it.
Don't need authority or money, you just need to care and want to make a difference. For example, there's someone who when he learned how many healthy cats and dogs were killed in the US in shelters everyday decided to change it, and has already changed shelters to have a no kill policy in many major cities. With no money, and no authority, just passion.

Don't have a job, have a platform. A platform to fail, to change, to make a difference.

When you get home and someone asks "How was your day?", if your answer is "Fine", then you're a manager, listening to your lizard brain, checking boxes and having meetings.
OR you could tell a story about things that broke, changes you'd made, things you had leant which had surprised you. Then you'd be a leader.

EDUCAUSE in Philly

So, I'm in Philadelphia at the moment for the EDUCAUSE conference. Normally I'd try and blog most of the sessions, but I'm a bit stuck at the moment as I accidentally upgraded my iPad to iOS5 the night before I came away and it's broken the two blogging apps I use! This is a bit of an experimental post as I try an alternative. If you can read it, then it worked, but it's a bit cumbersome and I won't be able to use it to post quickly as I normally do.

The highlight of the trip so far has to be a trip on a Segway. An hour and a half in the late afternoon sun cruising round Philadelphia's parks, just 3 of us and a tour guide. Brilliant, I absolutely love them, so easy to ride, and great fun. I would love one, but they are quite expensive, although the patent runs out in a couple of years so some competition should reduce that, and in the UK you can only use them on private property - so far behind many other places in getting them licensed. Oh well, maybe one day I'll have one!

The Exhibition here is as usual huge. About 300 stands, and it takes a good couple of hours to walk round. I've had a good look at it today, and spent quite a bit of time talking to existing suppliers, and looking at new products. Lots of ways of attracting you to the stand, my favourite was a machine where you strapped something to your head, clipped something else to your ear, and tried to move a floating ball by concentrating on it!

Lots of stands with "cloud" solutions, and a big emphasis on mobility in delivering solutions, especially in teaching and learning.