I rarely talk to any researcher who doesn’t want to have an impact at the classroom level. Those same researchers express frustration at how the current system in academia restricts them from having that impact. But rare is a researcher who expresses the belief that they have the power to change the system, and it’s a cruel irony how intelligent scholars can spend a career discovering ways to improve educational systems other than the one they work in.

Higher education prices increased 440% over the last 25 years – four times the rate of inflation, and twice as bad as health care. Elementary and secondary ed prices have skyrocketed, too, with not even adequate outcomes.

On the other side of the ledger is the Moore’s law ecosystem, the most ruthless force in technology and the world economy. Last quarter Netflix streamed two billion hours worth of video – or 228,000 years worth in three months. In just the last week of December, smartphone and tablet owners gobbled up 1.2 billion apps – 43% by Americans. Twenty years ago, a terabyte hard drive, if such a thing had existed, might have cost $5 million. Today, you can pick one up for $69.

The price of information plummets. Yet the price of education soars. These two trends cannot both continue. Guess which will crack first.

the easy part of tweeting is publishing content; the difficult side is actually committing to active public engagement

In a digital age, we have less need for division, for we can rely on digital tools to provide us greater connection instead, allowing for increased knowledge of both subject areas and those working within them.  We no longer need the restrictions of "field."  In fact, we should be promoting just the opposite, a revolutionary approach to academia, one that dispenses with disciplinary boundaries rather than creating more of them.  None of us needs to be in a department any longer, not if we are willing to rely on our digital tools for keeping track of who is doing what, where, and when.  In terms of our scholarship, digital tools allow us to evaluate ourselves and each other, and to see how even people across the world view the work, in a matter of moments.

...

We can "unfence" our academic fields today but, too often, we do not, but continue to follow patterns that, though they might have once been necessary, are no longer needed in this digital world.

There is a real danger of a technology gap becoming a wedge issue between faculty members—in the same way standards of promotion and tenure, the job market, and salary compression have been divisive issues—at a time when professors need to be more united than ever in addressing the challenges of higher education.

Furthermore, a tech gap may well be increasing in an age of social-media revolution. A 2009 faculty survey at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, conducted by the university's office of information technology, found that faculty attitudes toward technology differed significantly by age group, and that those differences had grown sharper over time.

Minnesota's IT office concluded: "When compared to their younger colleagues, older faculty members perceive greater barriers to their use of technology and are, in general, less attracted to using technology to enhance their teaching. In particular, older faculty members perceive themselves to be less technically skilled than their younger colleagues. This self-perception may explain why they feel more pressured by the time needed to learn about technology, by keeping up with technological changes, and by lack of standardization. And it may explain why older faculty members enjoy working with technology less than their younger colleagues do and are less inclined to use multimedia materials."

Steve [Jobs] devoted his professional life to giving us (you, me and a billion other people) the most powerful device ever available to an ordinary person. Everything in our world is different because of the device you're reading this on.

What are we going to do with it?

Apparently in P-12 and higher ed classrooms we're mostly going to ignore it...

HR in academia still operates primarilly with an industrial-age mindset: employees are resources to be managed, controled, manipulated, rather than individuals who should be inspired and led. That mindset favors rigid policies, and fears new approaches to work.

The mechanisms for sharing academic discourse are broken. They barely even function as systems for connecting interested parties within existing disciplines. Ask just about anyone who spends their time writing or consuming scholarly work and you will hear a litany of complaints about how poorly suited the academic publishing industry is to modern day collaboration.

Student respondents in a Clemson University study of the campus’s lecture-capture use gave the recording technology rave reviews, but among the minor critiques was concern that simply watching a lecture online wouldn’t let students academically preen like they do in class.

Also, 7 in 10 students said that watching lectures online was as effective as traditional in-class lectures.

Most educators I talk with are unaware of the degree of change necessary today or of the degree to which deep change will continue over the coming decades. And so, the dominant emphasis on teaching remains.

There is no requirement that faculty in higher education understand learning theory. Even saying that, and knowing it is true, seems astonishing. How is it possible to make the turn from teaching to learning without knowing what that means? This is the 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the room. Faculty members in higher education are researchers. The focus of their research has traditionally been on disciplinary knowledge and not on how humans learn.

The open digital environment already offers substantial advantages to scholars who are seeking greater reach and impact for their work. As the benefits of traditional publication decline because of some publishers' fearful attack on fair use, the benefits of open access will loom larger. Universities, too, are likely to discover that the status quo is unsustainable and move more quickly to adapt promotion-and-tenure processes to the new reality of direct online publication.

When it comes to information:

• Free trumps cost.
• Open trumps firewalled.
• Easy trumps intricate.
• Fast sufficiency trumps clumsy quality.
• Integrated/linked trumps siloed.
• Findable trumps precise.
• Recommended trumps available.
• Updateable trumps static.

[Educators] must teach students how to effectively use the information that fills their lives - how to better access it, critically evaluate it, store it, analyze and share it. 

Students are adrift in a sea of text without context. As the barriers to content creation have dropped, old media (for all its flaws) has been replaced by pointless mashups, self-promoting pundits, and manufactured celebrity. The web may have given us access and convenience, but it's an artificial world where rants draws more attention than thoughtful discouse. Responsible general interest media are being replaced by a balkanized web where civil discourse is rapidly becoming less civil. 

Schools can become thoughtfully-designed learning environments where students can investigate information and be given a chance to reflect (with their peers) on what they learned and how they see themselves progressing as learners. . . .

Teachers shouldn't feel in competition with all information permeating their students lives. Instead, they should realize that they can help their students become more skillful curators of their unique digital worlds. Most importantly, they can assist students in becoming more purposeful in their information choices. Despite their claims of multi-tasking, students will someday realize that infinite amounts of information competes for their finite attention. Their ability to critically filter out unwanted "informational noise" may eventually emerge as the most important new literacy.

That still leaves the problem of credit. Public libraries were the original OER [open educational resource], yet people can't demand a diploma just because they've learned from a book. But here, too, new developments are under way. The latest and most sophisticated open educational resources have tests embedded within them because assessment is a fundamental element of learning. Feedback-based, assessment-driven "cognitive tutors" developed by learning scientists at Carnegie Mellon are woven into science, engineering, and philosophy courses produced by the university's Open Learning Initiative. For example, studies have shown that their online statistics course produces equal or better learning results than do traditional lectures. The same Carnegie Mellon experts will be helping the federal-grant recipients design their educational tools. Assessments create evidence. And that's all a credit is, in the end: credible evidence of learning.

staying away from social media doesn’t protect your business. It increases the exposure because mistakes happen online and off. When something happens offline to a social customer, it can become a trending topic very quickly. If your company doesn’t have a social presence, who will rally to your defense? You can quickly create a user account to respond, but who will hear you if you don’t have fans and followers?

A better approach is to create your presence and build your community before there is a crisis.

"If you want to read Plato you can't do it on a cellphone," says Barmak Nassirian, of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "You've got to have a little focus."

It used to be that 'multimedia literacy' meant that you just needed to be able to understand graphics or images. Now there's a sea change, and it means you have to be able to actually make them.

As pace of change increases, the heritage-preserving aspect of literature reviews becomes a liability. Of necessity, a review is a backward-facing, historical-contextualizing activity. What happens when the very thing we are trying to change (i.e. the higher education system) serves as the foundation for enacting change? Obviously, we don’t get very far as the pull of the past and existing mindsets is instantiated in any attempt at a new vision.

DIGITAL LITERACIES

• Using online sources to network, knowledge-outreach, publicize content, collaborate and innovate
• Collecting, managing, and interpreting multimedia and online data and/or content
• Appreciating the complex ethics surrounding online practices
• Engaging successfully in an “Innovation Challenge,” an exercise in simultaneous multi-user, real-time distance collaboration, on deadline
• Developing a diversity of writing styles and modes of communication to best reach, address, and accommodate multiple audiences across multiple online platforms
• Demonstrating technical and media skills: Web video, Wordpress, blogging, Google Docs, Livechat, Twitter, Facebook Groups, Wikipedia editing
• Participating successfully in peer leadership (without an authority figure as the leader to police, guide, or protect the collaborators), peer assessment, peer self-evaluation; making contributions to a group on a coherent and innovative project
• Cultivating strategies for managing the line between personal and professional life in visible, online communities
• Understanding how to transform complicated ideas and gut reactions about technology into flexible technology policy
• Learning how to champion the importance of the open Web and 'Net Neutrality
• Collaborating across disciplines, working with people from different backgrounds and fields, including across liberal arts and engineering
• Understanding the complexity of copyright and intellectual property and the relationship between “open source” and “profitability” or “sustainability”
• Excelling in collaborative online publishing skills and expertise, from conception to execution to implementation to dissemination
• Incorporating technology efficiently and wisely into a specific classroom or work environment
• Leading peers in discussing the implications and ethics of intellectual collaborative discourse and engagement online and beyond
• Using the superior expertise of a peer to extend my own knowledge

a really brave Vice Chancellor or President would say, right we are going to have all of our content as open courseware in five years time and the first thing we are going to do is allow every member of the university, staff and student, to be able to see the content in every course. Not sensitive data but just the learning content itself. We’re going to identify and reward the staff members working on the best courses so that everyone can see good practice. Finally we are going to provide course development resources to help you transition your content to an engaging online format and to ensure it is only made available when it has been through an appropriate QA process to meet some mutually agreed standards.

Such academic leaders are few and far between. Many (most) senior academic managers don’t understand online learning at all. I remember being at a meeting of Deans of Faculty who all thought that uploading Powerpoint files was the same as blended learning.

A few years ago, professors noticed that fewer students were taking notes. Instead, if they needed to recall information, they were looking it up online. "Students were basically saying, 'There is nothing you're telling me that I perceive to be of value,’" says George Saltsman, executive director of ACU’s Adams Center for Teaching and Learning. He says the conventional method of teaching — basically, professors telling the students the answers to the upcoming tests — is badly outmoded in the digital age. "In today's world,” he said, “students can look that up any time they want" — including in the middle of a lecture.

"If a student can Facebook through your whole class and still make an A, whose problem is that?" Saltsman says.

Everyone is yelling and screaming about doing what we currently do better, not fundamentally changing what we do.

who will be the bearer of truth in the digital age — the professor or the processor?

our system of faculty creating their own lectures is a bit like having every instructor write his or her own textbook. If faculty wrote all of their own textbooks, most textbooks would be terrible. Why not just use the best lectures that have been posted on iTunesU, TED, etc. for content?

I tell faculty that their real value is not the information stored in their head. After all, nearly all of that information is publicly available in books or journals. A faculty member’s real value is in their interaction with students. The back and forth with students in discussion, or commentary on their assignments to improve their writing, for example, is what gives them value. Faculty should focus on this aspect of their teaching and automate as much as possible the simple content delivery part. Yet most faculty have it backwards—clinging to their lectures as their most important function.

Hat tip to John Nash: http://twitter.com/jnash/statuses/9772624779419648

even when the newest, fastest, coolest computers have been purchased, heads promptly sit down to draw up policy statements that effectively cripple the machines before they have even been booted up.

Now that we have finally built the Library of Alexandria — now that, thanks to Google, our students really do have access to all the world's knowledge in a curated and useful context, why would we want to limit their access?

We block Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. We denigrate Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks. We ban mobile phones and digicams. We even make our students write by hand. No wonder they think we're all closet Luddites. We're cutting off our noses to spite our faces.

there’s a sort of orthodoxy emerging around social media and work: they’re powerful “novelty aggregators”, and they’re good at helping people make connections with others in their fields.

Probably because of the novelty-aggregator function, services like Twitter and Facebook aren’t associated with getting work done. Michael Sippey calls the experience of clicking around in your Facebook or Twitter feed “social surfing”, and notes how easily time slides away. Merlin Mann sums this view up well: “Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.”

we can now deliver on-demand content to any student for nearly zero incremental cost. The video content can be paused and repeated as needed. Content producers can get real-time data on use, including student attention and efficacy. Students can focus on exactly what they need to know. They don't have to be embarrassed to fill in remedial gaps. They don't need to take notes. Crucially, the lectures can be given by superb communicators, with a deep, intuitive understanding of the material.

Why aren't students watching lectures on their own, at their own pace, in their dorms? Why aren't we using the 300-person gathering at 10 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday as an opportunity for active peer-to-peer instruction rather than a passive, one-size-fits-all lecture?

The only argument I've seen made in favor of the 30- to 300-person lecture today is that it gives students an opportunity to ask questions of a live professor. The reality, however, is that the great majority of students are too self-conscious or considerate of their peers' time to raise their hands. Those who are bold enough to do so are often more likely to derail the professor's pacing than to ask something relevant to more than 5 or 10 percent of the students in the room. With on-demand video, however, the very act of watching a 10-minute video is equivalent to the student's saying, "I don't understand this, tell me more about it" without fear of being judged by peers or the professor, or of wasting everyone's time. Being able to directly learn from the professor actually becomes much more likely when the lecture happens on the student's own time, with on-demand video. Then the professor is freed to be an active participant in an interactive, peer-to-peer problem-solving powwow in the classroom.