When excellence is just a click away....

Opening session this morning is from Emer Coleman.
When excellence is just a click away, Average just won't cut it

Students have changed rapidly. They are not the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Three things universities do best:
Discovery
Memory
Mentoring

Which can be delivered on line, and which need traditional methods?
We're now in the conceptual age, following on from:
The Agricultural Age
The Industrial Age
The Information Age
The Conceptual age

What can be done by machine, will be done by machine
3m packages from Amazon could be delivered by drones.
All in the near future.
Benefits, fewer cars etc. But, fewer jobs.

Kodak had 179,000 employees. They invented the digital camera. But fearful of what it would do to their traditional model, so didn't iterate it. Company folded.

Questions to answer about future of jobs:
Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
Can a computer do it faster?
Is what I offer in demand in the age of abundance?

Are our institutions ready for the next disruption?
Often our technology at home is better than what people have at work.

What does a truly digital institution look like?
Don't fear failure. Fail. Fail fast and learn
Collaboration not silos.
Rely heavily on collaboration tools, email relegated to only when necessary. Access information quickly, through a simple search.
Open by design. Use open products like Google. Only lock down when necessary. Expect to work from home.
Valued by outcomes.
Staff value more what their customers say about them than their managers.

The future is here, just not evenly distributed.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Tuesday continued

I was lucky to have two one-to-one sessions with Gartner analysts during the afternoon. First was to discuss mobile support - particularly how to support the multitude of devices students have, and how to support staff who have to travel abroad and therefore have relatively special needs. The latter is especially a problem in areas where data coverage isn't good or where our carriers don't have agreements with network providers. Lots of good ideas for a strategy which I hadn't thuought of before. The next was to discuss matters relating to higher education, and we spent a lot of time discussing the future of eLearning systems. This was prompted by the merger of Blackboard and WebCT, and the increasing number of institutions looking at open source eLearning products - especially Moodle.

Final couple of sessions of the day were on Unified Communications - bringing together your voice platform with email, IM, video conferencing etc. Again, a lot of importance being placed on context and intelligent notification systems.

It would be difficult to get away with a whole day without a mention of Digital Natives, and I went to a session on how the current generation of students will affect the workforce and how organisations might need to change. It's a commonly held assumption that this generation understand technology more than us - but they don't, they just use it more. They see technology as just stuff - they happily play with it and don't need to read manuals, and will make it work for them, but they don't know how it works, and can't fix it if it breaks. This session was intended to educate people about the sorts of technology in use - social networking Web2.0 type stuff, but in Universities we're fairly familiar with it, and I didn't particularly learn anything.

More about Digital Natives

A couple of people have asked me to expand on the concept of Digital Natives, referred to in last night's post.

The phrase was coined by Mark Prensky in 2005 to differentiate between those who have grown up with technology (the digital natives), and those who have adopted it (the digital immigrants). A good way of telling the difference is that digital natives will rarely use the word "digital". They will for example buy a new camera. We (the immigrants) will buy a new digital camera - because we know there used to be another kind.

It is a concept being used a lot in discussions about education and how different types of people learn, and whether the types of instruction we use are appropriate for this new generation. Does it matter for instance that most teachers are digital immigrants, and most schoolchildren and new students are digital natives. The differences in the two are summarised below (and I've lost the reference for this information, but will insert it later).


The differences between digital native learners and digital immigrant teachers.

Digital Native Learners	Digital Immigrant Teachers
Prefer receiving information quickly from multiple multimedia sources.	Prefer slow and controlled release of information from limited sources.
Prefer parallel processing and multitasking.	Prefer singular processing and single or limited tasking.
Prefer processing pictures, sounds and video before text.	Prefer to provide text before pictures, sounds and video.
Prefer random access to hyperlinked multimedia information.	Prefer to provide information linearly, logically and sequentially.
Prefer to interact/network simultaneously with many others.	Prefer students to work independently rather than network and interact.
Prefer to learn “just-in-time.”	Prefer to teach “just-in-case” (it’s on the exam).
Prefer instant gratification and instant rewards.	Prefer deferred gratification and deferred rewards.
Prefer learning that is relevant, instantly useful and fun.	Prefer to teach to the curriculum guide and standardized tests.

Something we need to bear in mind when designing learning spaces and educational technology?

Reboots, Leopards and Digital Natives...

A bad start to the day as I'm phoned at home in the morning as we've lost some portal services. I am lucky (unlucky?) enough to live about 2 minutes from work so am often the first person people call when they can't get anyone else. I'm good at passing messages on, but can't actually fix anything! Perhaps I should learn. I'm told all of our technical information is in a wiki which anyone can follow. Maybe I'll test it next time something needs restarting - can't be too difficult turning something on and off again can it? Just joking guys - I know it's much more complex than that!

Day got a bit worse when I went to a meeting and tried connecting my laptop to the wireless network. For some time I've been refusing to print huge piles of paper out to take to meetings, and I just take my laptop instead - we print far too much paper. More than we've ever done, and we need to stop. Unfortunately I made the mistake of upgrading the operating system on my laptop last night from Tiger to Leopard (it's a mac, before windows users think I've gone mad). Worked perfectly, until I tried to use it wirelessly. Basically, it doesn't work now. Pretty useless for a laptop really. I had 3 of the best brains in the department working on it during the afternoon (anyone want to guess who?) but still it doesn't work. However, I have every hope that a fix will be found tomorrow....

Went to a very interesting meeting about how we in the Professional Services - including the Library, LeTS, Careers Services, Student Services, CiCS - could communicate better to the University about the development work we're doing in support of learning and teaching. We also talked about how we communicate with the digital natives - our prospective and current students who don't use email because it's "old fashioned", who think that instant messaging is old hat, and for whom social networking is the way they communicate with each other, but they don't necessarily want us to use it.

I'm going to a workshop soon on exploiting the potential of blogs and social networks which I hope will help me understand some of the issues. I certainly think it's something we in CiCS need to address fairly urgently.