DE Oracle @ UMUC

EDUCAUSE 2006 Conference - "Spurring Innovation and Marshalling Resources"
Gary Kidney

The keynote address was Vint Cerf, the true father of the Internet. He made some points which were noteworthy:

1. The current growth of the Net is all based upon mobile devices. To stay current with that shift, we should focus on designing sites for smaller screen views rather than full-screen views.
2. Asia recently passed both North America and Europe in Internet usage. Such a drastic shift in Net demography will have many unanticipated consequences.
3. We will need to conceive of the Web as a set of user-centric services to be successful in the future. The days in which one uses the Web to provide information are gone. 
4. We need to develop a 360 degree full-circle feedback loop to insure that Web sites meet user needs.

Duke University presented on the growth of the iPod project into the Duke Digital Initiative. They offered two really profound ideas:

1. Traditionally, we have found an instructional need and then thought of ways that technology could address it. We have shied away from the concept of technology for its own sake. Duke noted that their iPod initiative was an example of the latter and not the former - on purpose. They envisioned what technologies were already widely adopted by students and then found instructional uses for them. This reversal has worked so well that they have reworded their university's technology strategic initiative to be "fostering student-driven experimentation with learning technology."
2. Duke laid out a three-phased plan for institutionalizing technology.
   • Phase 1: experimentation that they encourage with both departmental funds as well as university money to seed innovative projects.
   • Phase 2: extension and transition, when local and seed money are removed and the innovation falls into normal university budget processes, support needs are outlined and structured, and a critical mass of users are brought into the project.
   • Phase 3: support and integration, where the innovation is now institutionalized into regular practices. I thought this model had some promise for how we think about the relation between pilot technology projects and the new IT governance structure.

The vendor booths at EDUCAUSE are a barometer of where the higher education with technology industry is headed. This year, more vendors were showing devices for automatically recording lectures into podcasts and presenting them on the Web than any other category of technology – more than student information systems, more than IT consulting firms, and more than course management systems. I listened to an intriguing presentation on a Brown University study of undergraduate learning. In courses designed for the same material to be presented online in audio, video, and text, 80% of the students selected audio, 15% selected video, and only 5% of the students selected text. The generation of "non-reader" undergraduates may already be upon us.