Good Luck Adrian

We are starting to see the new wave of digital content that foretells the impending digital transformation of higher education. My EdTech team now understands that the trend for these digital materials is moving toward more sophisticated web based packages and of course E-Textbooks represent the most rapid transition. As our university’s president has been trying to convey to our community, we the academic institution is no longer the source for information, we must learn to be the mentor for the information that our students now have access to. We will no longer discount the value of public or commercial sources for information because we can no longer compete with their quality.

Possibly a significant milestone for this transition is the announcement of my higher education IT colleague, Adrian Sannier, becoming the Vice President of Product Marketing for Pearson eCollege. Adrian has been the UTO of Arizona State University for the last five years. In that time many of his accomplishments are representative of the transition of higher education. Outsourcing, ERP efficiency, business collaboration such as for the delivery of communication services. However, what Adrian may be most known for is his statement that we should just burn down the libraries and quit wasting money air conditioning all of those books. Well you know, Adrian is now in a position where he can actually influence this change that he has spoken about. I can't think of a better person to be at the creative helm for one of the companies that will help lead that charge.

Educational Leadership Summit

I participated in a valuable Apple Educational Leadership Summit complete with Adrian Sannier proclaiming that we should quit air conditioning books and just burn down our University Libraries. Alan Kay reconfirming how learning is really accomplished. Some GenYes high school kids scaring us with their open minds. Oh, and I loved a reference by one of the students referring to the copier as the "Paper Machine". And a couple of English professors from Rutgers who have shown how to teach communications skills in this age of rich multimedia. Great stuff, good networking amongst the many CIOs, but I think I will expand upon the “Rutgers Guys”; Dr. Richard Miller and Dr. Paul Hammond.



They have been given an incredible opportunity thanks to a couple of gifts to create a new Writing Center where they have been allowed to offer an English or Communications curriculum that is not afraid to embrace all forms of technology for effective teaching and learning of today’s undergraduate. No really, they have figured it out and they are off and running from the pack. Figured out as in immersing themselves into all forms of rich media so that they can properly motivate today’s learner to be a critical thinker. My major take-away though was that I saw English professors who had discovered how to leverage software applications: They figured out that you don’t try to learn the app first, let what you want to accomplish drive what you learn in the app. This has always been an advantage geeks have leveraged, we always assume the app can do what we want to do, we just have to figure out how a specific app does it. I recommend that you investigate the "Rutgers Guys".

Reflections on Second Life

If a University CTO is going to have a Blog then sooner or later there should probably be a post about Second Life, SL, or Multiuser Virtual Environments, MUVE. This Post time has come. Second Life is too good to ignore. We have been dabbling in SL for over a year with a fair amount of success. We have land that has been heavily developed below, at and above the surface. We have EdTech folks that have definitely made their mark in this virtual community. We have taught courses in SL that have proven to be effective. We can confirm all of the educationally positive feedback. But we also confirm that SL is a complicated and intimidating place where one needs extra hours to stumble around just to get to a level where these positives start to prove out.

So how will SL fit into Higher Education? First, lets remember that academia has always craved this environment. Already it is all that we dreamed it could be and it is almost free. It will probably only be used by a small percent of technologically adventurous faculty and researchers who will introduce it to willing students. But I believe that it will heavily influence Educational Technology over the next decade. Universities will have their own virtual worlds serving as 3D portals to their collaborative services. Our Learning Management Systems will probably find the most natural migration to this space, Sloodle, being a path for us. SL has proven to eliminate multimedia format barriers and is not a bad option for WebEx style conferencing.

A positive or negative observation is that we see these MUVE’s reintroducing class participation (virtual) to a net generation of students that have been shifting away from human interaction. We may agree that this should not be happening, but if so, we can’t overlook this solution.