I’m not sure I can see that getting the right “tools” will provide the vehicle to cross the chasm.

At the moment, I think the potholes in the road across the chasm arise from the entire environment around learning and teaching within universities. The over emphasis on research in promotion, fear of failure, top-down edicts around L&T, a focus on fads (e-portfolios, LMS, Web 2.0…) and a lack of focus on contextual needs….. all create the chasm. I think you pick this up a bit with the policy/resources/framework point.

My trouble is – apart from perhaps being overly pessimistic/realistic – that the mindsets and expectations of the people creating that environment are also held back by the environment within higher education. Short-term contracts for senior management which encourage them to focus on short-term gains, or at least the perspective of gains, at the expense of long-term improvement. A focus on re-arranging the deck chairs, rather than removing the iceberg.

Need to give some more thought to all this and see if I can capture it in a post.

To some extent, this is the point I tried to argue in the herding cats, loosing weight talk

Thanks for the comment, got me thinking again.

David.

Thanks for picking up the discussion again. As it happens I may have the space/requirement to think more about this. Looks like I might be involved in some attempt to develop a bid for a research centre around the future of learning/universities. So restarting the conversation is timely.

Australia may have come through the GFC a bit better than others, but I’m not sure it’s finished yet. The theory is that a large part of our performance is based on China. I always get a bit worried when someone/country is relying too much on the one source. Especially given some recent suggestions that China is showing the signs of a bubble.

When/if that bubble bursts, the outcome is not likely to be good for public universities in Australia.

When it comes to learning from commercial organisations and/or large prestige universities I start from a perspective of skepticism. This doesn’t mean I think it’s impossible, I just think that it could possibly be a lot more difficult than many think and in some contexts not likely to happen. It will be interesting to see how it plays out and to theorise/predict/observe what happens.

Part of my skepticism comes from seeing what happens, at fairly close range, when a purely commercial organisation takes on the role of learning in higher education. There are two limitations I’ve seen

• Focus on profit reduces quality.
  Commercial organisations are focused on making money, even more so than many modern universities. From my observations (anecdotal but somewhat extensive) many of the attempts I’ve seen so far in the Australian context have taken this too far and the quality of L&T has suffered. In the absence of other constraining factors, I think most of the students at these institutions would have walked long ago.
• The disconnect between research and learning.
  A part of saving money is not paying staff to do research, or in some cases be aware of recent research. This in part also contributes to the quality of the learning.

That said, I’m not suggesting that commercial organisations are alone in suffering these problems. I’ve observed a number of universities or parts thereof who have suffered the same problem. Making decisions solely on money, rather than the quality of learning (trying to seek some balance seems best). And for many university staff, research is a compliance thing at best and something the ignore at worst.

However, in a purely commercial organisation I think the pressure is much greater, at least so far in Australia.

It would be interesting to see how some of the organisations in the states are going on these types of measures, how they handle it and how the students perceive it.

I think another big question is the purpose of universities and learning. Part of the support for the commercialisation of learning arises from the perspective that the purpose of learning is instrumental or utilitarian. If the purpose of learning is knowledge for its own sake, the “pure” conception (Martin and Etzkowitz, 2000) then a very different perspective arises.

I do wonder if there is ever going to be any more room for the “pure” conception when consideration is given to learning and universities.

Well, that’s gone a long way further than I thought. Martin, thank you for the spark, hope this is of some interest.

David.

Martin, B. and H. Etzkowitz (2000). “The origin and evolution of the university species.” Journal for Science and Technology Studies 13(3-4): 9-34.

Sorry – my contributions seem very sporadic at best, don’t they?

In terms of the provision of “learning”, I guess the answer could be “any of the above”, though of course it could also be the Burger King University, or similar! I do see a future for universties markeing literally tens of thousands of courses (not by any means all their own) around the world, using the strength of their brand name, reputation and distribution networks – it does sound remarkably like packaged goods, doesn’t it?

I’m sure that there will be a trend towards amalgamations in the UK, and even the permitting of HEIs to fail. There’s an interesting paper from an organisation called Policy Exchange on this matter. I’m sure that we’ll see the entry of the private sector into HEIs on a much larger scale in the next few years.

As for regions liking their own universities – I can see that’s a barrier to concentration in Australia where you have, in round terms, 1 per 100k square miles, but of course in the UK we have literally 135 universities in that same space – 100k sq m.

I think money is becoming scarily important at the moment – my understanding is that Australia has come through the crisis rather better than the UK and USA, but there’s a great deal of nervousness around the sector here.

I look forward to renewing this correspondence, hopefully more frequently!

Martin

I wanted to pick up two things. I’ve come to see that we need to find the vehicle/structure that will help the early & late majority of staff to ‘cross the chasm’. We need to employ the correct tools (be they social software/networking applications or professional development activities) to bridge the gap. We need to get people on the bus. The problem is giving them the reason or initiative to come on the ride with us.

…and that leads to my other point. If the institution isn’t providing the correct policy, resources & framework – this will be difficult, and things won’t change. There’s too much emphasis on the management system and not enough on how to improve learning.

So far it seems that wave’s problem is that people are unsure of the conventions and social ettiquette of how to form a proper wave. I believe that getitng in there and adding anything, even agreeing to another person’s observation, or a fixing a spelling mistake, or a little bit of tidy up, all add up to more collaboration and more engagement.

Probably the most limiting thing would be the static nature of a traditional presentation. What do you do when more people are focused on the backchannel than the actual speaker? Having the wave exposed as part of the presentation, or through curation by the lecturer or someone on the sidelenes, the backchannel is no longer reflective but an active shaper of the conversation.

I wonder about wave in this context. It ratchets up the level of collaboration. It’s almost a different type of interaction.

On Twitter, at least from my perspective/use, it’s essentially a reflective tool. I’m writing what I think in part to record it and in part because writing it will create additional thinking. Also because someone else might pick up and add something.

But with a Wave, you’re starting to work on a collaborative document. A much more difficult/higher order type of task. I wonder how folk will take to that sort of task? How will it scale? Twitter’s much more light weight.

But then again, that’s said with little knowledge.

David.

Another alternative is to go to a much more real-time, non-limiting format that can enhance the backchannel in almost any way the participants want: Google Wave.

We focused solely on the individual student blog as a way to make the learning visible to the staff member. I think encouraging (not necessarily requiring) student blog posts to be visible to other students would have opened up unexpected benefits. It may also have been somewhat difficult.

Sounds like that would tie into a karma system and make advances into establishing authority from within the class rather than being teacher/tutor centric.

There has been some interesting discussions into the development of authority via simple devices such as thumbs up/down on posts. The idea is to allow ANY form of participation to be expressed; some may want to dive in and write a response, some might want to sign up and follow the whole conversation, but some just want to nod in confirmation of a good idea or followup. ALL of these forms add weight to the conversation and help give a sense of contribution. Within group discussion we have these positive affirmation cues given through subtle non-verbal means that help communicate back to the speaker as well as the group about how effective their contribution has been.