Crowdsourcing innovation on campus — from CampusTechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser
By combining innovation management with crowdsourcing, Davenport University has found a potent formula for achieving continual improvement and encouraging organizational change.
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From DSC:
First, what prompted the questions and reflections that are listed below? For that, I turn to some recent items that I ran across involving the use of robotics and whether that may or may not be affecting employment:
The work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee; for example their book Race Against the Machine
Excerpt of description:
But digital innovation has also changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial business models, new organizational structures and different institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is not left behind by cutting-edge machines.
How to freak out responsibly about the rise of the robots — from theatlantic.com by Derek Thompson
It’s fun to imagine an economy where machines are smarter than humans. But we don’t need an artificial crisis over artificial intelligence.
Excerpt:
Let’s say it upfront: Technology can replace jobs and (at least temporarily) increase income inequality. From the spinning jenny to those massive mechanical arms flying wildly around car assembly lines, technology raises productivity by helping workers accomplish more in less time (i.e.: put a power drill in a human hand) and by replacing workers altogether (i.e.: build a power-drilling bot).
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What ails us today isn’t a surplus of robots, but a deficit of demand. Yes, we have a manufacturing industry undergoing a sensational, but job-killing, productivity revolution — very much like the one that took farm employment from 40 percent in 1900 to less than 5 percent today. But the other nine-tenths of the economy are basically going through an old-fashioned weak-but-steady recovery, the kind that hundreds of years of financial crises would predict.
America has hit “peak jobs” — from techcrunch.com by Jon Evans
Excerpt:
“The middle class is being hollowed out,” says James Altucher. “Economists are shifting their attention toward a […] crisis in the United States: the significant increase in income inequality,” reports the New York Times.
Think all those job losses over the last five years were just caused by the recession? No: “Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market,” according to an AP report on how technology is killing middle-class jobs.
Technology and the employment challenge — from project-syndicate.org by Michael Spence
Excerpt:
MILAN – New technologies of various kinds, together with globalization, are powerfully affecting the range of employment options for individuals in advanced and developing countries alike – and at various levels of education. Technological innovations are not only reducing the number of routine jobs, but also causing changes in global supply chains and networks that result in the relocation of routine jobs – and, increasingly, non-routine jobs at multiple skill levels – in the tradable sector of many economies.
Man vs. robot — from macleans.ca by Peter Nowak
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Secondly, some reflections (from DSC)
I wonder…
Again, for me, the answer lies at least partly in helping people consistently obtain the knowledge that they need — i.e. to help them build, grow, and maintain their own learning ecosystems — throughout their lifetimes. We need to help people dip their feet into the appropriate streams of content that are constantly flowing by.
Perhaps that’s one of the key new purposes that K-12, higher ed, and the corporate training departments out there will play in the future as they sift through the massive amounts of information coming at us to help individuals identify:
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The education of corporate America — from huffingtonpost.com by Brian Mitchell
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
The first step in the negotiated settlement may be for America’s business leadership to hold out the olive branch by word and action. So many of them sit on college boards of trustees and advisory councils that business leaders should be perfectly positioned to seek common ground. Many of them already live in both worlds. They now need to connect the dots.
These business leaders can speak not only to the number of engineers needed but also the types of skills needed to attract successful engineers. To meet their workforce needs, America’s business leadership should be the most articulate about the value of the education that they received, whether at public or independent colleges and universities. After all, business leaders are where they are today in large part because of what they learned and who they became in their formative years in college.
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If there is to be a new American education agenda, America’s business leadership must step forward to work with higher education to prepare a well-educated workforce. Its foundation is the liberal arts. Its pathway is access to higher education. And its future will determine where the American economy — and American society — will stand by the middle of the 21st century.
From DSC:
As a team of us have been charged with putting together a new collaborative workspace/conference room, I’ve been thinking about some ideas for a new type of interface as well as some new types of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) to be used in group collaboration/web-based collaboration. I was thinking it would be good to not only display files from various devices but also to be able to share files/URLs/other resources with each other. (Some type of storage device that processes files — and scans them for viruses would be needed in addition to a large display or an interactive multitouch surface/wall.)
People within the same room could contribute files/items to a variety of “areas” — and so could others who joined in via the Internet. Here’s what I had wanted to be able to do and I had pictured in my mind:
ADDITIONAL NOTES:
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It’s very similar to what Tidebreak has created/envisioned in their product lines.
Check out their innovative work/products/concepts!
Transforming learning spaces: 3 big ideas — from Tidebreak
Also see:
Excerpt from Beyond school choice — from Michael Horn
With the rapid growth in online and mobile learning, students everywhere at all levels are increasingly having educational choices—regardless of where they live and even regardless of the policies that regulate schools.
What’s so exciting about this movement beyond school choice is the customization that it allows students to have. Given that each student has different learning needs at different times and different passions and interests, there is likely no school, no matter how great, that can single-handedly cater to all of these needs just by using its own resources contained within the four walls of its classrooms.
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With the choices available, students increasingly don’t need to make the tradeoff between attending a large school with lots of choices but perhaps lots of anonymity or a small school with limited choices but a deeply developed personal support structure.
Excerpt from Cooperating in the open — from Harold Jarche
I think one of the problems today is that many online social networks are trying to be communities of practice. But to be a community of practice, there has to be something to practice. One social network, mine, is enough for me. How I manage the connections is also up to me. In some cases I will follow a blogger, in others I will connect via Google Plus or Twitter, but from my perspective it is one network, with varying types of connections. Jumping into someone else’s bounded social network/community only makes sense if I have an objective. If not, I’ll keep cooperating out in the open.
From DSC:
Perhaps helping folks build their own learning ecosystems — based upon one’s gifts/abilities/passions — should be an objective for teachers, professors, instructional designers, trainers, and consultants alike. No matter whether we’re talking K-12, higher ed, or corporate training, these ever-changing networks/tools/strategies will help keep us marketable and able to contribute in a variety of areas to society.
Addendum on 2/5/13:
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From DSC:
In real estate, one hear’s the mantra:
Location. Location. Location.
In higher education, I have it that we’ll be hearing this for a while:
Experimentation. Experimentation. Experimentation.
Consider the following reflections on Steve’ Kolowich’s solid article, The new intelligence (from InsideHigherEd.com)
Excerpt:
And for the largest public university in the country, it is hardly fiction. Arizona State University has become ground zero for data-driven teaching in higher education. The university has rolled out an ambitious effort to turn its classrooms into laboratories for technology-abetted “adaptive learning” — a method that purports to give instructors real-time intelligence on how well each of their students is getting each concept.
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From DSC:
Besides being used in blended learning environments…some predictions:
It’s the sort of thing I was trying to get at with this graphic from 3 years ago:
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Please don’t misunderstand me, the human mind is far beyond the complexity of an engine. But I still think that there will be more tools & technologies developed that will help the teachers/professors in their efforts to guide students into the knowledge of a discipline.
I beseech the corporate world to get involved more here — and not with the end goal of earning profits — but rather, with the aim of making the world a better place and giving a huge gift to the generations yet born.
I urge the corporate world to reach into their deep pockets (1.X trillion in cash at this point in time) and team up with our youth/teachers/professors/instructional designers/programmers/etc. to develop sophisticated, educationally-related, engaging games that are relevant to the world that our youth will be growing up in; and/or create interactive simulations that provide more choice/more control to the learners.
I urge more of the corporate world to join Knewton and Pearson and allocate some significant resources to help develop the next gen learning tools. I’ll bet that we’ll be amazed at what can be produced! Your daughters, sons, granddaughters, and grandsons will really appreciate the work that you did for them!!!
A seat at the table at last — from campustechnology.com by Andrew Barbour
One result of the Year of the MOOC is that IT is finally getting a say in the strategic direction of the institution.
Excerpt:
It’s interesting that it took an external force to propel IT into this inner circle. I can’t recall how many stories CT has run proposing strategies for how CIOs could win a place at the table. At the end of the day, though, changing an institution as hidebound as the average college is not easily tackled from within. In contrast, there’s nothing like a little existential angst to shake things up.
But MOOCs aren’t the only drivers of this change. We often think of BYOD as stripping IT of control but–on the broader stage–it may be playing its own part in elevating IT’s profile on campus. For years, faculty resisted IT recommendations on how technology could improve teaching and learning. Saying no was easy–preserving the status quo always is. That’s changing now. BYOD is a force that faculty can’t resist. It is, after all, their customers bringing the devices to school. Suddenly, faculty are faced with demands for new styles of teaching that accommodate student preferences for technology and much more. Enter IT and a host of others who see the potential of tech in education.
Also relevant/see:
UK university joins US online partnership — from bbc.co.uk by Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent
Also see:
Excerpt:
Today Udacity is thrilled to announce a partnership with San Jose State University to pilot three courses — Entry-Level Mathematics, College Algebra, and Elementary Statistics — available online at an affordable tuition rate and for college credit. To my knowledge, this is the first time a MOOC has been offered for credit and purely online. Much credit for this partnership goes to Mo Qayoumi and Ellen Junn, president and provost of SJSU, and to the five fearless SJSU professors who have chosen to work with us at Udacity to explore this new medium. The offices of Governor Brown and CSU Chancellor White have also been critically important to this partnership for their leadership and expediency. Last but not least, I want to personally thank our great Udacians who, like everyone on this list, have worked endless hours to drive innovation.
Over the past year, MOOCs have received a lot of attention in the media and education circles mostly because so many students are taking advantage of the course for free. Predictions that MOOCs would fundamentally change higher education often revolved around the fact that the courses have unprecedented reach and affordability.
From DSC:
Given that such “Walmarts of Education” (i.e. solid learning at a greatly reduced prices) continue to develop, what’s our/your plans for responding to this trend? How are we/you going to compete? What’s our/your vision and strategy? By the way, you can look all you want to for data — but at the end of the day, it’s likely with this sort of thing that you won’t find all of the data that you require to make a decision. Examples:
Moody’s gives colleges a negative grade — from the NYT by Andrew Martin
Excerpt:
The credit reporting agency Moody’s said on Wednesday that it had revised its financial outlook for colleges and universities, giving a negative grade to the entire field.
For the last two years, Moody’s Investors Service gave the nation’s most elite public and private colleges a stable forecast while assigning a negative outlook to the rest of higher education. (Moody’s assigned a negative outlook for the sector in 2009, but it upgraded the most elite ones to stable in 2011-2012.)
Nowhere to turn — from insighehighered.com by Kevin Kiley
Excerpt:
If colleges and universities thought they could ride out the current revenue challenges by becoming more like some other institution, Moody’s Investors Service has a bit of bad news for them: The grass isn’t greener on anybody else’s quad. Not even Harvard University’s.
In a report released Wednesday, the ratings agency outlines how every traditional revenue stream for colleges and universities is facing some sort of pressure, a finding Moody’s uses as grounds for giving the whole sector a negative outlook. The agency has been pessimistic about much of the sector since its annual outlook in 2009 after the economic downturn began, but Wednesday’s report contains a downward shift in how analysts view even market leaders, the elite institutions with high demand and brand recognition.
Originally saw thes graphic below on the Education Stormfront blog (thanks Andrew) — also see Will Hanlon Pop the Higher Ed Bubble?
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From DSC:
As you know if you are a regular reader of this blog, I believe the higher ed bubble has already popped — but I have it that it will pop at different times for different institutions.
Addendum on 1/22/13:
Addendum on 1/24/13:
Also from Campus Technology re: the elements in a collaborative classroom:
