smart-creatives---google-presentation-from-oct-2014

 

From DSC:
Another slide mentioned the importance of asking:

  • What’s changed?
  • What assumptions are people making that are no longer true?
  • Why does everything feel like it’s speeding up?

People in higher ed would be wise to ask these questions.

 

15 Calif. community colleges to offer bachelor degrees — from usatoday.com by Kyle Plantz

Excerpt:

Paving the way for one of the largest community college systems in the United States to offer four-year degrees, on Sept. 28 California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that will create a pilot program for 15 community colleges across the state to fill a growing workforce demand for college-educated, skilled workers in fields such as health, science and technology.

Also see:

  • Community colleges increasingly adding bachelor’s degrees — from hechingerreport.org by Jon Marcus
    Excerpt:
    It’s St. Petersburg College, formerly St. Petersburg Junior College, one of an increasing number of community colleges around the country that have started offering four-year bachelor’s degrees in fields for which there is high job demand.

.

From DSC:
I put a similar item out there on Twitter about this same topic and someone came back with some verbiage that hit me as strange…it caught me off guard.  She mentioned the word “war” between community colleges and other colleges/universities.  I don’t think that’s the word I would use and I think the greater concern for those of us working within higher education might be the dynamics as found in this recent posting. That’s what higher ed should be far more concerned with — i.e. alternatives that keep developing because higher ed is too slow to respond to increasing costs and is not keeping up with a world that’s spinning at speeds that continue to change exponentially, not incrementally.

.

ExponentialNotLinearSparksNHoney-Spring2013

 

Amelia-computer-after-jobs-9-2014

Excerpt:

 “Amelia, on the other hand, started out not with the intention of winning Jeopardy, but with the pure intention of answering the question posed by Alan Turing in 1950 – can machines think?”

While most ‘smart machines’ require humans to adapt their behaviour in order to interact with them, Amelia is intelligent enough to interact like a human herself. She speaks more than 20 languages, and her core knowledge of a process needs only to be learned once for her to be able to communicate with customers in their language.

Amelia has already been trialled within a number of Fortune 1000 companies, in areas such as manning technology help desks, procurement processing, financial trading operations support and providing expert advice for field engineers.

In each of these environments, she has learnt not only from reading existing manuals and situational context but also by observing and working with her human colleagues and discerning for herself a map of the business processes being followed.

 

From DSC:

  • How does the trend towards more powerful, capable Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications and services affect what we should be teaching our students?
  • How should our curricula change/adapt to these trends?
  • How should employees reinvent themselves and protect their futures?

Part of me thinks, “This is some scary stuff!”   Another part of me reflects on who is controlling such powerful technologies and wondering how such technologies are going to be used.  One thing’s for sure, we better hope that the people controlling these technologies care about other human beings.  It isn’t just minds that are involved here.  Most assuredly, hearts are involved here as well.

Addendum on 10/2/14:

 

 

 

College presidents predict 4 new institutional models for higher-ed — from ecampusnews.com by Meris Stansbury
Presidents say these new models could be the future of all colleges and universities in the next decade

Excerpt:

A new think-tank-esque collection of leading college and university presidents last year came together to discuss the trends and disruptions shaping higher education thanks to new technologies and the evolving global economy. Outside of just naming trends, they also predicted four new models of higher-ed that may exist in the next 10 years.

The brainstorming made formal can be found in a new series of papers called the Presidential Innovation Lab (PIL) White Paper Series, funded as part of a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and hosted by the American Council on Education (ACE).

14 chief executive officers from a diverse group of institutions participated in two separate sessions last year (2013)—institutions such as Northeastern University, MIT, Western Governors University, etc.—with the goal of engaging in a “robust and wide-ranging conversation about the various drivers of change and potential reactions to those drivers.”

 

Ed-Tech advances poised to revolutionize higher ed from all angles — from evolllution.com by Michael Horn

Excerpt:

There’s a flip side to unbundling, however, that receives far less attention. As a service’s architecture becomes modular, its performance becomes determined by the raw performance of its subcomponents, which consequently become interdependent — or re-bundled — as the entities making these subcomponents need to wring every ounce of performance out of them. In other words, as one stage becomes modular, an adjacent stage becomes interdependent.

In education, as elements such as content become unbundled, there will exist a need for subcomponents that bundle together — coaching, mentoring, communities, personal learning plans and employer connections, for example, as these areas are critical for student success, but the ways in which they fit together are not yet well enough understood such that there can be clear standards at their various interfaces. Standalone, modular solutions in these areas will struggle to succeed. Creating standards at their interfaces before we know what the standards should be will similarly suffer.
..
Similarly, too few are thinking about how to help students make sense of and navigate this emerging, unbundled world and integrate the modular pieces together in ways that help them carve out a coherent and sensible life path. This is critical because it appears that in a personalized learning future, every single learner will have a custom-fit educational pathway.

 

Bundling and Re-bundling — from elearnspace.com by George Siemens

Excerpt:

There are a few things wrong with the idea of unbundling in education:

1. Unbundling is different in social systems than it is in a content only system. An album can be unbundled without much loss. Sure, albums like The Wall don’t unbundle well, but those are exceptions. Unbundling a social system has ripple effects that cannot always be anticipated. The parts of a social system are less than the whole of a social system. Unbundling, while possible in higher education, is not a zero sum game. The pieces on the board that get rearranged will have a real impact on learners, society, and universities.

2. When unbundling happens, it is only temporary. Unbundling leads to rebundling. And digital rebundling results in less players and less competition. What unbundling represents then is a power shift. Universities are today an integrated network of products and services. Many universities have started to work with partners like Pearson (ASU is among the most prominent) to expand capacity that is not evident in their existing system.
.
Rebundling is what happens when the pieces that are created as a sector moves online become reintegrated into a new network model. It is most fundamentally a power shift. The current integrated higher education system is being pulled apart by a range of companies and startups. Currently the university is in the drivers seat. Eventually, the unbundled pieces will be integrated into a new network model that has a new power structure. For entrepreneurs, the goal appears to be to become part of a small number of big winners like Netflix or Google. When Sebastian Thrun stated that Udacity would be one of only 10 universities in the future, he was exhibiting the mentality that has existed in other sectors that have unbundled. Unbundling is not the real story: the real issue is the rebundling and how power structures are re-architected. Going forward, rebundling will remove the university from the drivers seat and place the control into the re-integrated networks.

 

 

————

Addendums:

 

 

unbundledMBA-CNBC-Sept2014

 

Addendum on 9/17/14:
Ed tech’s next wave rolls into view — from by Roger Novak

Excerpt:

If the second wave was about the unbundling of colleges and providing learning as a service, the third wave of companies will be involved in reassembling educational component pieces from various sources to help make students’ learning portfolios more meaningful to both individuals and employers. While we are starting to see colleges taking similar steps to become more student-centered, private-sector companies can act nimbly to fill gaps and create new technologies to help accomplish these goals.

 

A10560Bachelors-Aug2014

 

 

Excerpt:

“We’re not going to see bachelor’s programs in English, math, history, sociology, chemistry and all of those fields that are traditional liberal arts fields,” said Constance Carroll, Chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, and a member of the California Community College Baccalaureate Degree Study Group. “What we will see are baccalaureate programs in workforce fields where there is high demand.”

Fields like dental hygiene, information technology, and automotive-technology management.

 

HumansNeedNotApply-cpggrey

 

With thanks to George Veletsianos and @reddit,
& Audrey Watters
for posting this item on Twitter

 

From DSC:
I don’t know much about this video in terms of who created it or what their purpose was in developing it.  Though it paints an overly bleak picture IMHO, at least in some ways, I post it here because I think it outlines some solid topics to think about and to plan for — NOW!  Not later.

Automation, algorithms, robotics, and more are with us today, but will be even more prevalent tomorrow.  It doesn’t matter what the color is of the collar that we’re currently wearing (white, blue, other), more of our jobs are being replaced by such things.   As such, we need to think about what the ramifications are concerning these trends. Societies throughout the globe are most definitely  in a game-changing environment.

Along these lines, how do such trends affect what is taught? How it’s taught? In K-12? In higher ed? In the corporate world?

How do we stay relevant/employed?

How do we reinvent ourselves and to what?

Are our vocations affected by this? How so?

Also see:

  • our new robo-reader overlords — from text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com by Alan Jacobs
  • Teaching Machines: The Drive to Automate Education — from teachingmachin.es by Audrey Watters
  • AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs — from pewinternet.org by Aaron Smith and Janna Anderson
    Excerpt:
    The vast majority of respondents to the 2014 Future of the Internet canvassing anticipate that robotics and artificial intelligence will permeate wide segments of daily life by 2025, with huge implications for a range of industries such as health care, transport and logistics, customer service, and home maintenance. But even as they are largely consistent in their predictions for the evolution of technology itself, they are deeply divided on how advances in AI and robotics will impact the economic and employment picture over the next decade.
 

DontSendKidsToIvies-July2014

 

Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League — from newrepublic.com by William Deresiewicz
The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies

Excerpts:

I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy Leaguebright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.

Look beneath the facade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.

One student told me that a friend of hers had left Yale because she found the school “stifling to the parts of yourself that you’d call a soul.”

Return on investment”: that’s the phrase you often hear today when people talk about college. What no one seems to ask is what the “return” is supposed to be. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?

But what these institutions mean by leadership is nothing more than getting to the top. Making partner at a major law firm or becoming a chief executive, climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. I don’t think it occurs to the people in charge of elite colleges that the concept of leadership ought to have a higher meaning, or, really, any meaning.

For the most selective colleges, this system is working very well indeed. Application numbers continue to swell, endowments are robust, tuition hikes bring ritual complaints but no decline in business. Whether it is working for anyone else is a different question.

Instead of service, how about service work? That’ll really give you insight into other people. How about waiting tables so that you can see how hard it is, physically and mentally? You really aren’t as smart as everyone has been telling you; you’re only smarter in a certain way. There are smart people who do not go to a prestigious college, or to any collegeoften precisely for reasons of class. There are smart people who are not “smart.”

.

From DSC:
There are so many different angles that I could write on here…but mainly I just want to say “Congratulations and thanks!” to William Deresiewicz on writing such an excellent, noble, deep, well-written article!  For stepping outside the expected norm and to speak his truth — even though it may cost him.  He writes about a topic that’s relevant to all of us living in the United States:

“This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead.”

“And so it is hardly a coincidence that income inequality is higher than it has been since before the Great Depression, or that social mobility is lower in the United States than in almost every other developed country. Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.”

The Ivies and their counterparts (including my alma mater, Northwestern) should be far less proud about how many people they reject (i.e., their low acceptance rates). Instead they should be asking themselves how they can serve much larger student bodies/audiences.  Oh, I know — that sounds (and is) idealistic.  But it sure would benefit a lot more people if they were to pursue such directions, and it might just help put some “soul” back into these institutions.  Taking steps like the the development of edX are helpful, but don’t go far enough.

 

 

How do you plan the campus of the future? Try not to. — from chronicle.com by Avi Wolfman-Arent

 

Excerpts:

“My goal as the dean is to create an environment where everything can be repurposed,” Mr. Huttenlocher says.

He and his team are in the tenuous middle stages of planning and building exactly that: the chameleon campus, a space where interchangeability permeates everything. As Cathy Dove, Cornell Tech’s founding vice president, puts it, “We want to embody the principle of iteration.”

“How do you do something that’s technologically advanced that isn’t immediately technologically dated?”

To ask it another way, how do you create a new institution in an age where everything—office design, intelligent infrastructure, cloud computing, classroom technology—presents some opportunity to break with the past? What do you build? What do you wire? What kind of interactions do you encourage? Some institutions might create committees to try to anticipate specific changes. Cornell Tech is determined to do the opposite. Those responsible for building the campus of the future won’t pretend to know what the future holds. They only hope they’re building something malleable enough to handle it.

 

Everyone needs to be a futurist — from innovationexcellence.co by Reuven Gorsht

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

While most of us work on the day-to-day operational details and focus on hitting the metrics, we often assume that there must be someone in the company that is thinking about the future. Whether we assume it’s the board, senior executives or perhaps the corporate strategy team, we somewhat believe that somewhere above our level, both the foresight and plans exist to stave disruption, capitalize on new opportunities and figure out exactly how the company needs to change to either survive or achieve the next paradigm of growth.

This, however, is a fallacy that lands organizations and individuals in a lot of hot water. While most of us are in roles where we are focused on exploiting the current business model, nowadays, everyone’s job, regardless of level, is to be somewhat of a futurist who is able to foresee where the business is going and internalize the change by creating and executing their individual plans.

Everyone needs to be a futurist.

Yes, we all have full-time jobs and enough on our plates to keep us busy, but without an investment in gaining the foresight and our own personal meaning on where our company, industry and roles are going, how might we proactively keep ourselves relevant? Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and most of us prefer to be in our comfort zones, but we’ve all seen the recent wake-up calls from companies such as Nokia, New York Times and Blackberry.

When it gets to a point that senior leadership has to write a manifesto that calls for drastic change, it is likely too late to start shifting yourself to adjust to the new realities of your company. Only by being proactive, can we effectively internalize what it may mean for us individually and create the runway necessary to make the shift.

Bottom line: If you’re not spending some time understanding the future and what it means to you personally, you are effectively putting yourself in the position of being tapped on the shoulder one day and being told that you are no longer relevant to where the company is headed.

 

 

 

The July-August 2014 issue of THE FUTURIST is FREE online, as part of WorldFuture 2014: What If.

 

Excerpt:

Creating a Future Forward College: What If. … Collaborations in Transformational Learning — by Benita Budd, Magdalena de la Teja, Butch Grove, and Rick Smyre

Imagine a college classroom where the professor asks students to review the course requirements and then decide, as a group, how to meet those requirements. Imagine the lively discussions as students take ownership of their learning, and the questions to the professor when information becomes “necessary” to the projects. Imagine the professor coaching, guiding, and inspiring each student or group as they need to be uniquely inspired; imagine guest experts visiting the class to mentor and assist; imagine the shift in thinking from “receivers of knowledge” to “creators of knowledge.”

You’ve just imagined a DNA shift in education. And it’s happening now, in Wake Technical Community College’s Future Forward classrooms and at Tarrant County College, through its initiatives supporting transformational learning and its FFC Innovation Forum idea incubator.

A time of constant change always hides a developing narrative that often slips past our awareness. The trick is to find the “weak signals” of a new idea in its early stages; then we can witness its development as a force from our position on the cutting edge of thinking and action. Our challenge is to understand what may be occurring and to build collaborative networks, futures projects, and pilot programs that exist in parallel with conventional models and serve as harbingers of a world and society that do not yet exist. The narrative of an emerging Future Forward College is one of these forces pushing the change.

We are shifting from the rigid forms of hierarchies, standard answers, and predictability to an evolving society of interlocking networks, varied solutions, and the need to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. And we have no models to follow as we explore this unprecedented transformation from an Industrial to an Organic Society.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of education. It is as if we are stepping off the cliff of a comfortable past and falling into an unknown abyss, full of false expectations, failing students, accelerating dropout rates, and paths leading to dead ends. And if we ask for guides to help us with direction, we often hear, “look in the literature,” or “this must occur for your college to be accredited.” Somehow, in this time of exponential change, it makes little sense to look to the past for direction in order to be accredited in increasingly obsolete ideas and methods.

 

 

…the following principles are core to the idea of a Future Forward College:

  • Trans-disciplinary Thinking
  • Complex Adaptive Systems
  • Adaptive Planning
  • And/both parallel processes
  • Identifying Emerging Weak Signals
  • Master Capacity Builders
  • Resilience Centered
 

CanDisruptionSaveHigherEducation-June2014

 

Can disruption save higher education? — from eCampus News by Meris Stansbury

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Christensen: “The question now is: ‘Is there something that can’t be displaced within a traditional university’s value offering?'”

However, Christensen outlined three ways traditional colleges and universities, like his own Harvard Business school, could survive into the future:

Focus on professors
[when recruiting faculty]…focus less on their publishing capabilities and expert knowledge of material, and more on their ability to connect to others.

Understand why technology, like online learning, is disruptive.

Don’t try to change from the inside — you will fail.  [Use offsets.]

 

 

The University of the Future: The Student Perspective — from laureate.net

 

TheUniversityOfTheFuture-Laureate-June2014

 

 Excerpt:

In the interest of changing the debate about the future of higher education to include more students’ perspectives, we commissioned Zogby Analytics, a leading international opinion research firm, to survey students at 37 Laureate network institutions in 21 countries. More than 20,800 students responded to the survey, making it the largest international survey ever of student attitudes.

In the survey, students express the belief that the “university of the future” will be accessible, flexible, innovative and job-focused. Students foresee classes being offered at a variety of times throughout the day and year, courses being affordable and online, and learning being a lifelong process through degree and certificate programs that are geared to market needs.

Some of the specific findings of the survey include…

 

Also see:

Report: Students expect future universities to be flexible, accessible, career-oriented — from campustechnology.com by Joshua Bolkan

Excerpt:

Students expect universities to be more accessible, flexible and focused on jobs, according to a new survey commissioned by Laureate International Universities and compiled by Zogby Analytics.

The “2014 Global Survey of Students” compiled responses from more than 20,800 students at 37 institutions in the Laureate network. Students from 21 countries participated in the survey, which sought student opinions on what universities would look like in 15 years.

 

TheIvoryTower-AboutTheFilm-June2014

 

 

What price will society pay if higher education cannot revolutionize college as we know it and evolve a sustainable economic model?

 

 

The Ivory Tower — description from Wikipedia.org

Excerpt:

Ivory Tower is a 2014 American documentary film written, directed and produced by Andrew Rossi.  The film premiered in competition category of U.S. Documentary Competition program at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 18, 2014.

After its premiere at Sundance Film Festival, Participant Media, Paramount Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films acquired distribution rights of the film. The film is scheduled to have a theatrical release in June 2014 in United Sates by Samuel Goldwyn Films. Paramount Pictures will handle the international release of the film, while Participant Media will handle the campaign for film’s theatrical release.

 

 

Class, Cost and College — from nyt.com by Frank Bruni

Excerpt:

Scheduled for theatrical release next month, “Ivory Tower” does an astonishingly thorough tour of the university landscape in a brisk 90 minutes, touching on the major changes and challenges, each of which could sustain its own documentary.

But as I watched it, one theme in particular kept capturing my attention. One set of questions kept coming to mind. How does our current system of higher education square with our concerns about social mobility? What place do the nation’s universities have in our intensifying debate about income inequality? What promise do they hold for lessening it?

The answers in “Ivory Tower” and beyond it aren’t reassuring. Indeed, the greatest crisis may be that while college supposedly represents one of the surest ladders to, and up through, the middle class, it’s not functioning that way, at least not very well.

 

 

ivory-tower-june2014

 

From DSC:
I graduated with a liberal arts degree. I work at a Christian liberal arts college. I believe in the liberal arts. However, I see our current business models as broken.  I, along with many others, see issues and problems that need to be dealt with — whereas many within higher education see no need to change at all.  “What’s the problem?” they ask rhetorically…not wanting their great ride of the last 20-30 years to end.

But such individuals aren’t seeing the invisible devastation that’s taking place, such as the mounting/crushing debt on our students’ backs that stays with them for YEARS after they graduate. Such debt loads affect graduates’ ability to purchase a home or to save for retirement (then there’s those who didn’t graduate but spent a great deal of $$ in the attempt to get a degree).  I’m also hearing that it’s delaying marriage in some cases.  And unlike a car or a house, you can’t realistically refinance many student loans. (Although Elizabeth Warren is seeking to change that situation, thankfully.)

So while I strongly believe in obtaining a college education, we have to get the price down!  We have to recognize that there’s an issue. Change must occur.

 

The seven habits of highly effective digital enterprises — from mckinsey.com by Tunde Olanrewaju, Kate Smaje, and Paul Willmott
To stay competitive, companies must stop experimenting with digital and commit to transforming themselves into full digital businesses. Here are seven habits that successful digital enterprises share.

Excerpt:

The age of experimentation with digital is over. In an often bleak landscape of slow economic recovery, digital continues to show healthy growth. E-commerce is growing at double-digit rates in the United States and most European countries, and it is booming across Asia. To take advantage of this momentum, companies need to move beyond experiments with digital and transform themselves into digital businesses. Yet many companies are stumbling as they try to turn their digital agendas into new business and operating models. The reason, we believe, is that digital transformation is uniquely challenging, touching every function and business unit while also demanding the rapid development of new skills and investments that are very different from business as usual. To succeed, management teams need to move beyond vague statements of intent and focus on “hard wiring” digital into their organization’s structures, processes, systems, and incentives.

 

From DSC:
“The age of experimentation with digital is over.  …  To take advantage of this momentum, companies need to move beyond experiments with digital and transform themselves into digital businesses.”

Though this may be true for the corporate world (the audience for whom this piece was written), the experimentation within higher education is just beginning.  With that said, I still couldn’t help but wonder if some of these same habits might apply to the world of higher education. For example, three habits that the article mentioned jumped out at me as being highly relevant to those of us working within higher education:

1. Be unreasonably aspirational

4. Challenge everything

7. Be obsessed with the customer
Rising customer expectations continue to push businesses to improve the customer experience across all channels. Excellence in one channel is no longer sufficient; customers expect the same frictionless experience in a retail store as they do when shopping online, and vice versa.

 

 

A potentially-related item, at least from the perspective of the higher ed student of the near future:

  • Accelerating the digitization of business processes — from by Shahar Markovitch and Paul Willmott
    Customers want a quick and seamless digital experience, and they want it now.
    Excerpt:
    Customers have been spoiled. Thanks to companies such as Amazon and Apple, they now expect every organization to deliver products and services swiftly, with a seamless user experience.
 
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