Jeff McClurken’s recent post about Writing a Strategic Plan for Academic Technologies and Libraries asks a really great question: If given the task of writing a strategic plan for a small institution, what would your top academic technology goals be? After teaching several undergraduate courses, and while currently teaching a graduate course, I’ve thought about these goals at a classroom-level, but I think these goals could be applied to a broader strategic plan for a university.
1. Make sure students graduate as skilled, thoughtful consumers and producers of digital media
Several smaller goals fit into this:
- Learn how to search – Read Bill Turkel’s blog. If you’re not convinced search is important, READ IT AGAIN. There is more to search than Google, and learning how various searches work—and, more importantly, how to make search for work you—is an incredibly valuable skillset beyond college.
- Learn how to manage information flow – For better or for worse, the information age is in overdrive, and all is in flux (thanks again, Bill). But there are tools and services to help you manage that flow, and it should be one of the goals of any university to help students learn how to manage that information. If we want to encourage students to expand their learning beyond the classroom (and I really think we should), then universities need to prepare students for managing the mass of information that comes with it.
- Learn how to produce meaningful, well-composed content and share it with others – Rob Wall argues that, in the 21st century, “creativity is the new technology.” Its incredible to think of the various ways people can produce and share content for equally various purposes. Anyone with an internet connection can sign up for a weblog right now, and begin producing and sharing content, right now. Anyone with an internet connection can produce and share data visualizations. Anyone with a computer and webcam can record and share video. Anyone who can search the web can find audio content, and create a podcast with it. With all of this opportunity for new ways to create narrative and share ideas comes a real need for universities to teach students new ways to compose those narratives and share those ideas.
- Learn how to critique content and methodology – Along with providing the ability to produce content in a variety of media, universities must provide the tools and skills to help students critique content, and discern the effectiveness and usefulness of particular technologies and media. One of the tenants of Mason’s PhD in History and New Media program is “critical optimism”. So, while we are optimistic about the changes that new media can bring to the practice of history, we’re critical about the specific methods that particular media employ. This is an approach that, I think, is already common in most classrooms. In my history course, I teach students how to critically read primary and secondary sources, and how to discern other methodological approaches to a particular issue. These skills are equally important—if not more important—when using and producing digital media.
2. Use free, open-source, and/or extensible tools whenever possible, and encourage faculty, staff, and students to do the same.
Universities spend countless millions on closed, proprietary systems like Blackboard and WebCT, systems that are very overbearing in their pedagogical approaches. In contrast, signing up for a weblog like WordPress is free (and there are plenty of other free options), and the uses for blogs in classes are limitless. While a little more difficult for the average instructor, Moodle is a free, open-source alternative to other learning management systems, and boasts a significant developer community contributing plugins and modules for extended functionality. There’s more this, though, than learning management systems: web browsers, word processing, screencasting, image editing, audio/video editing, to name a few. The specific tool, of course, should be chosen based on need and goals, but opting for extensible, open-source, and free alternatives will save universities money, provide more flexibility to instructors, and encourage the university community to do with software what it already tries to do with teaching and research: Contribute knowledge and resources back to the world.
3. Foster academic use of technologies that breaks down boundaries of the classroom, and the university as a whole.
As academic departments face budget cuts and lose staff positions if their enrollments are down, this may be the most difficult, but I think the most potentially beneficial, of all the goals. At the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in January, I presented on how I use technology to break down barriers to learning in my courses. Mills Kelly has written extensively on the future of the course, and argues that positive change in learning on university campuses will happen when students take individual responsibility for their own learning. Mills is particularly keen on the ideas of an iTunes-like class, where students can choose specific bits and pieces in a course that interests them. Others have spoken of the networked learner, and of learning environments that are not isolated from the rest of the world, but rather expand through a bottom-up approach. While I really like the potential for learning in a world without walls, I think there are some uses for the “artificial community” that is the classroom; Namely, that courses bring together people who would otherwise not talk to each other, and potentially allow for more diversity in perspectives. Learning based purely on social networking brings with it the danger of learning only inside the enclaves we create for ourselves based solely on who/what we like or who/what we’re comfortable with. But I think a balance can be struck, and I think universities should employ academic technologies to find and encourage that balance between classroom and independent learning.
So, there are at least three goals I think academic institutions should try to achieve regarding academic technology. Its certain good food for thought, and I’ll continue thinking about these goals for my own teaching and research. I imagine, though, that there are plenty more goals to add. So, lets help Jeff out. What would your academic technology goals be?
Point 1 is valid and good, but why only digital content?
Digital content is only one element of wider literacy. Universities should teach people to be skilled thoughtful consumers and producers of all knowledge – not just digital content.
Point 2 is flawed, in my opinion
It reads like the author has an open source idealogical bee in their bonnet. If open source has the right cost benefit, then great – use it. But using open source software is not an end in itself – it is only one path to a best solution. IT purchasing decisions should be based on pragmatic cost benefit – not idealism. Free open source is not necessarily cheaper, when you cost in the need to have your own in house support, to operate on an organisational scale than paid for licenced software. It needs to be costed case by case.
Point 3 has good ideas, but is backwards.
The goal cites the means in the heading – fostering technologies that break down barriers while burying the ends in the text. Strategic plans are about agreeing ends – dominate the OS market, conquer russia, whatever – and then working down to set out the strategies to achieve them. This point is backwards – strategic plan – use cool software I like…why? To break down barriers…because? There is good stuff here, but it will never be heard by managers unless it can be clearly mapped to goals they can see as important.
Thanks for the comments, Robert.
It shouldn’t be only digital content, which is what I say (though, I will concede, not directly), when I discuss critiquing content and methodology in general. Universities already try to teach students how to be thoughtful producers and consumer of non-digital media: writing papers, reading books and articles, et cetera. The question involved academic technologies, and I’d argue that the vast majority of media we consume today is digital, but universities have not even begun to adequately address how to teach students to be consumers and producers of digital media. That’s why I focused the goal on digital media.
Also agree, I probably could say this more clearly than I do, but I do say that “the specific tool, of course, should be chosen based on need and goals….” I certainly don’t have an “ideological bee” in my bonnet. I use plenty of expensive, proprietary software because it serves a specific need I have. I don’t think the goal is flawed, though; I see the ends in producing open-source tools as inherently similar to the mission of higher education institution: produce knowledge and give it back for others to use. This is, for the most part, the goal when academics produce scholarship and teach that scholarship in classes.
I do, however, think the idea that “IT purchasing decisions should be based on pragmatic cost benefit” is problematic; They should be based on academic and pedagogical needs, not exclusively on cost-benefits or the convenience of in-house support. They should be based on how the tools and services benefit the instructors and students who will eventually use them. Granted, this is a critical difference in perspectives, one that has no easy solutions, and I sympathize with in-house IT office that have to provide support. I have to provide support as well. I see inflexibility among administration and IT offices, however, as one of the barriers to any kind of change, as I say briefly in a comment on Jeff’s post.
The goal doesn’t cite the means at all; That’s the goal. Maybe I could phrase it a little better, but one of my goals when I teach a class is foster an environment where students can go beyond the boundaries of my classroom to learn. The means by which I do that involve specific choices about academic technologies and the assignments that use them: Researching a topic and writing a Wikipedia article on that topic, for example, to teach about using wikis, working in a collaborative writing environment, discussing topics with community. I don’t say “use cool software I like” in my post, so I’m not sure why you say this. I don’t use “cool software” because its cool; I’ve always used specific tools and services in my classes because I have specific pedagogical end I want to achieve. So, fostering academic use of technology to take learning beyond the classroom seems like a perfectly clear and reasonable goal to me, and one I try to achieve whenever I teach a class. Its not a means, its an end, but an end that institutions and instructions must continually work on.
Great post. The only thing I might add is helping students acquire the skill of finding meaning in the information overload they are confronted with. Although this might be covered in your links to Bill Turkel’s posts on search. Then again, I think few of us appreciate the role that academic libraries could likely play in helping us to find our way through and make sense of digital content.
This is a terrific post, although I would agree in part with Robert Cosgrave. The point about pragmatism comes into play more strongly at schools that are–how shall I put this?–less technologically savvy than Mason, or that lack large numbers of grad students or undergrads who can code / offer support.
(In general, however, I agree that the idea should be to foster creative uses of the tools. Supporting faculty to play around and try new approaches is more important than rigidly shoehorning people into one solution.)
I’m in strong agreement. I teach Internet and Society in a high school. I find Howard Rheingold’s statements on what he calls network literacy to summarize the need adequately. Howard cites Reid, Castell, Watts, and Benklers’ theories on social networking and social capital.
With regard to the objections cited upon seeing what looked like open source evangelism, I would say this:
The nature of longevity is important and IT assessments of the value of MY digitized content have been inadequate. I’m sure there are university IT departments that have well developed strategies. They speak about their planning and implementation at Educause meetings. How nice for them.
Jason: Very sorry I didn’t see your comment earlier. I didn’t get a notification. I understand that pragmatism always has to come into play. Mason really isn’t that technologically savvy, though. CHNM is, though.
But you’re right that tech support is imperative.
Bob: Thanks for the comment…I’ll have to check out all those theories! I’m curious, though, about how your IT dept. has assessed the value of your digitized content. How have they assessed it, and how has it been inadequate?
Hmmm, although we can debate details, my experience w/a particular program indicates that the availability of tech may not be the only challenge. Those profs (mostly tenured) who don’t use or even forbid the use of tech (like laptops) in class will stand in the way of achieving your goals. As a “non-traditional” student whose livelihood depends on appropriate use of tech, it is tremendously frustrating to have to leave my tech at the door. *mutter mutter*