Why IT Innovation is Essential in Education

via Campus Technology So who cares if the people who patch the servers disappear from campus? Honestly, even IT people don’t care that much about these mundane operational tasks. That’s not the concern. The larger issue is that IT departments in general, and CIOs in particular, can and should be playing a strategic role in the future of universities for the next decade if universities themselves are to meet their own missions.

It’s a cliché to say that technology is changing our lives, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Many of us believe GPS, Google, and a strong cell signal are basic human needs. Our personal lives have been transformed by social media (if you don’t believe it just ask any politician)). And many of us require constant assistance from our Android or iPhones just to navigate our daily professional commitments.

Despite this, the ways in which we create and distribute knowledge at the university utilizes tools that would have been familiar to scholars in the Middle Ages. Classroom lectures, books, and printed journals are still the dominant tools of our trade. [Continue Reading at Campus Technology]

Is College (Finally) Ready For Its Innovation Revolution?

via The Atlantic If a college student today stepped into a time machine and traveled back to Plato’s Academy of ancient Athens, she would recognize quite a bit. Sure, it might take some time to master ancient Greek and the use of stylus on wax, but she would eventually settle into a familiar academic routine. Senior scholars across a range of subjects like astronomy and political theory would lecture, pose questions, and press answers to a small group of attendants. Junior attendants would listen, answer, and defend responses.

That a class in 2011 resembles a lecture from 2,300 years ago suggests that two millennia of technological upheaval have only brushed the world of academics. Some professors use PowerPoint, and many schools manage their classes with online software. But even these changes don’t fully embrace the potential of Web, mobile, and interactive technology.

“The present resistance to innovation [in education] is breathtaking,” Joel Klein writes in The Atlantic this month. The former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education was writing about public high schools, but he might as well have been talking about universities. Despite college costs rising faster in college than any institution in the country including health care, we have the technology to disrupt education, turn brick and mortar lecture halls into global classrooms, and dramatically bring down the cost of a high quality education.

Entrepreneurs like to say there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Is education innovation that next big idea? [Continue Reading at The Atlantic]

Higher Education and the New Media Reality

via Campus Technology As a cultural anthropologist and researcher in the modern discipline of digital ethnography, Michael Wesch likes to ask the big, complex questions: How do we find meaning and significance in the digital age? How is technology affecting society and culture? How are social media changing teaching and learning practices? But as a teacher, an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, he likes to ask his students one small, simple question at the start of each year.

“I ask, How many of you do not actually like school?” he said. “Almost invariably almost half raise their hands. Then I vary the question slightly. I ask, How many of you do not like learning? And I get no hands. These are people who like learning, but they don’t like it to be institutionally created for them. Clearly something’s wrong here.” [Continue Reading at Campus Technology]