NGLC releases profiles of latest grantees — from nextgenerationlearning.com by Carie Page

Excerpt:

When we launched our RFP, we had a handful of names that we could use to exemplify breakthrough approaches in K-12 and higher education. Today, however, after announcing the last group of grantees for this wave in October, we aren’t just guessing at what a breakthrough model might look like. We now have 30 grantees actively developing and launching truly breakthrough approaches to education.

Explore the Portfolio

 

 

Excerpt:

With the public’s continued focus on value and affordability, higher education finds itself at a critical juncture. Cost pressures and increased global demand for access have given rise to innovations that have unleashed new delivery models into the education marketplace. Such innovation is required if universities are to thrive, compete, and bring new relevance and meaning to the value of college in the 21st century.

Also see:

  • Americans believe higher education must innovate — from Northeastern News
  • President: Witt must adapt to survive — from springfieldnewssun.com by Tom Stafford
    Excerpt:
    Liberal arts colleges that ignore market realities “absolutely won’t exist in the next decade,” Wittenberg University President Laurie M. Joyner told Springfield Rotarians on Monday.  But the practical or applied liberal arts education that she predicts can sustain Wittenberg will encourage deeper connections with Springfield, she said while speaking at the Hollenbeck-Bayley Conference Center, because “our students learn better when dealing with real-world problems.” A shrinking pool of price-sensitive high school graduates has combined with a bad economy to produce “the equivalent of a perfect storm for some of us,” said Joyner, who succeeded Mark Erickson on July 1.
  • Surviving disruption — from hbr.og by Maxwell Wessel and Clayton M. Christensen
    Excerpt:
    …to meet disrupters with disruption of their own, but also to guide their legacy businesses toward as healthy a future as possible.
  • Sanjay Sarma appointed as MIT’s first director of digital learning — from MIT by Steve Bradt
    Mechanical engineering professor will shepherd efforts to integrate elements of online education into traditional MIT courses.

From DSC:
Experimentation. Innovation. Experimentation. Innovation. Fail. Fail. Succeed. Fail. Succeed. Fail. 

 

How to disrupt yourself — from innovationexcellence.com by Greg Satell

Excerpts:

However, disruptive innovation happens in the face of no such threat, but when things are going great. Operations are profitable, the needs of the most demanding customers are being met and the business press applauds the company’s thoughtful and visionary leadership.

Then comes along something like Google or Netflix or social media and everything is turned upside down.

That’s what makes disruptive innovation so dangerous and so interesting. It upends an existing order that seems to be working well. The reality is that incumbent firms tend to get better and [better] at things people care less about. Eventually, the basis of competition will change and old metrics of success become useless.

The biggest innovation pitfall is falling into the myth of the mad scientist. People often assume it comes from the work of a lone genius – a Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison – who works behind closed doors and then one day comes out and shouts “Eureka!”

In actuality, innovation is combination. It most often arises through active collaboration among people with diverse skills and perspectives. That’s why so few enterprises can do it effectively. Large organizations breed conformity, strong leaders encourage a singular vision and don’t like to incorporate ideas that are off-script.

 

Reflecting on the Top IT Issues of 2012 — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser

  1. Updating IT professionals’ skills and roles to accommodate new technologies and changing IT delivery models
  2. Supporting IT consumerization and bring-your-own device programs
  3. Developing a cloud strategy
  4. Improving the institution’s operational efficiency through IT
  5. Integrating IT into institutional decision-making
  6. Using analytics to support the important institutional outcomes
  7. Funding IT initiatives
  8. Transforming the institution’s business with IT
  9. Supporting research with high-performance computing, large data, and analytics
  10. Establishing and implementing IT governance throughout the institution

 

Also see:

Involving students in IT — — from campustechnology.com by Keith Norbury
IT shops are turning to students to staff help desks, troubleshoot, and more. For schools, it’s a way to cut costs; for students, it’s a learning experience and a pathway to employment.

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To students studying Business, Economics, Religion, Political Science, and Philosophy:

 


Please consider — and research/define where necessary — the following items occurring in the United States today. 

The fiscal cliff.
The U.S. debt limit.
Federal spending vs. revenue.
Printing money and it’s potential impact on inflation.
Recent election results.
A global economy; global competition.
The place/role of money.
Race against the machine; also see this posting.
Matthew 6:19-34.

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Then, please discuss/answer the following questions:


  1. What makes our debt risky? On a national level? On the money and banking level? On a personal level?
  2. What are your thoughts about the following items:
  3. What implications do you see in these items? Will they be impacting you and/or your future?
    • Are there political ramifications for this?
    • Are there spiritual ramifications for this?
  4. Could the U.S. be heading for trouble? If you say yes, what support do you have for this assertion? If you say no, what do you support your argument with?
  5. Do you think we are a divided nation? What support do you have for this perspective?
  6. What characteristics of leadership would you most like to see at this point in time?
  7. After reading Matthew 6:19-34:
    • If you, personally, lost everything you had, what would that do to you emotionally? Physically? Spiritually? That is, if our savings completely dried up, what would life be like for us as a society? What would that do to our hearts?  To our perspectives/worldviews/priorities? How we choose to spend our time? What would it do to our view of God?  To our view of ourselves?

 


Some other resources to consider:


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fiscal cliff

 

 

 

Could we use social media/tools to get input from all constituencies in order to set future strategic directions?

 

 

From DSC:
.
Could we use social media/tools in order to get input from all of the constituencies of a
college or university? Such input could be used to create innovative ideas,
establish buy-in, and build future strategic direction/vision.
What would that look like? Work like?

I wasn’t sure where to put the workplace here…but certainly that is also a key piece of our future.

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Why is American Higher Education so averse to change? — from Jeff Selingo

Excerpt:

In my 15 years of reporting on higher education—and especially in the last year as I have reported for my forthcoming book on the future of higher education—colleges and universities have come to remind me of other American content industries that have been disrupted in the last decade: newspapers and magazines, music, and book publishing. In many ways, colleges and universities are following the same playbook:

 

From DSC:
I hope that higher education learns from what the Internet did to other industries.  I hope we can reinvent ourselves, stay relevant, and ride the wave to create WIN-WIN situations…and not get crushed by it.

 

 

The future of English higher education: two scenarios on the changing landscape -- May 2012 by Huisman, de Boer, and Pimentel Botas

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From DSC:
Whether one agrees or not with the scenarios…what’s important here is to promote discussions of the future of higher education across the world. Developing scenarios is an excellent way to jump start such conversations, contribute to strategic plans/visions, and develop responses to the changing higher education landscape.

Inter-Organizational Task Force on Online Learning: Recommendations| September 20, 2012

From DSC:
What caught my eye:

  • The new “traditional” student: the adult learner
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A leadership job description [Myatt]

A leadership job description — from forbes.com by Mike Myatt; with thanks going out to Mr. Joseph Byerwalter for this resource/find

Excerpt (bolding from Mike, not DSC):

There is no perfect leader; only the right leader for a given situation. Great leaders have the innate ability to call on the right skills in a contextually and environmentally appropriate fashion. No single leader can possess every needed attribute. It’s not the traits you possess as a leader, but what you do with them that matters. If I were successful in my genetic engineering exercise I would no doubt have created a leader who would be driven crazy by emotional and intellectual conflicts.

So, what is real leadership? Leadership is about giving credit not taking it, breaking down barriers not building them, destroying bureaucracies not creating them, bridging positional and philosophical gaps not setting boundaries, thinking big and acting bigger, being able to focus on short-term objectives without losing sight of long-term value, not focusing on the volume of outputs but the impact of said outputs, surrender not control, and most of all, leadership is about truly caring for those whom you serve.

When it comes to leadership, it’s not enough to be all you can be, you must focus on helping others become all that they can be.

 

Mike’s definition of leadership (bolding from Mike, not DSC):

“Leadership is the professed desire and commitment to serve others by subordinating personal interests to the needs of those being led through effectively demonstrating the character, experience, humility, wisdom and discernment necessary to create the trust & influence to cause the right things, to happen for the right reasons, at the right times.”

The changing face of the campus CIO - University Business September 2012

 

 

Addendums:

  • On 9/27/12 which regards the business/corporate world:
    CIO must become Chief Innovation Officer
    — from innovationexcellence.com by Linda Bernardi
    .
  • On 10/1/12:
    The question CIO’s must really ask — from cnn.com by Jeanne G. Harris, Allan E. Alter and Aarohi Sen
    Asking whether CIOs will play a strategic or supporting role is indulging in a stale debate. The more important question is whether CIOs are prepared to lead their organizations into a future environment that could be completely unlike today.
    .
  • On 10/16/12 — but moreso on the corporate side
    The New Chief Connected Officer
    — from by Gregg Garrett

Joining the brave CIO, who takes a step forward while many other IT leaders are standing still, is the motivated CEO. The adage that “it is lonely at the top” couldn’t be more true during this transition period. Most major advisors for top leadership, many of whom are part of well-recognized strategy consulting firms, understand the promise of the connected world, but aren’t pushing this advice yet.

They are putting their toes in the water with social-media practices and CMO-to-CIO forums. However, very few of them are actually broaching the sacred space of product-to-service conversations that could potentially reposition the chief information and chief technology officers to fulfill much more critical and senior roles within the organization.

The last time IT grew to such prominence in the corporate structure was the Y2K scare or the “ecommerce” movement (“brick and mortar” to “virtual”). As already discussed, “connected” is on a similar scale, if not more grandiose. A connected world both overlays a layer of relevant information-fed services on top of today’s processes, and also reformulates entire industries through disruptive innovation.

Stanford assigns Vice Provost of Online Learning — from technapex.com by Molly Gerth

Excerpt:

This week, Stanford University announced the appointment of John Mitchell to serve as Vice Provost for Online Learning. This signifies the university is getting serious about the Stanford Online initiative to reach more students around the world and to address the transforming 21st century education system.

Digital Learning Now!

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