Image purchased from iStockphoto

There’s lots of debate as to what the 21st century classroom will grow to look like, and Times Higher Education picks up another story suggesting that the physical campus will become a thing of the past, as students log in when/where they want:

The traditional university model is unlikely to survive the next 50 years because teaching, examinations and student social life will be offered separately on an “a la carte” basis, the British Council’s annual Going Global conference has heard.

Opening the event in London, Ben Wildavsky, senior scholar in research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas-based educational charity, said there was a trend towards the “unbundling” of the activities that universities traditionally have performed.

“The conventional combination of activities in a single physical campus – teaching, curriculum, socialisation and networking, credentialing, and in some cases research – is increasingly being questioned,” said Mr Wildavsky, author of The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (2010).

Read full story.

A really interesting video (using the beautiful RSA Animate style), which takes Sir Ken Robinson, arguing that the education system is no longer suitable for the modern day:
The video was suggested by Clare Killen at the #jiscel11 conference.

I’m looking through @bigdaddywhale, watching Mark Zuckerberg explaining the many new changes that are coming… you think the complaints that have been bad this week?!

We are constantly reminded that we live in an age in which digital media, mobile phones and social media are profoundly influencing communication, business, entertainment and learning. Not a day goes by without some mention of Facebook, Twitter or smartphones in mainstream media. The pace of change fomented by these technologies is rapid and unrelenting, giving rise to new and emerging literacies, connections, behaviours and risks. And of course many academics wish to know how these changes will affect university life.

Clearly, technology in all its forms is playing an ever-greater role in the lives of young people. Universities therefore need to pay attention to the impact that the appropriate deployment of digital tools can have on extending, enhancing and enriching the student learning experience, both on and off campus.

Moreover, sustained exposure to such a range of digital media demands a different kind of attention than we have previously required. This is the premise of Now You See It, whose author, Cathy Davidson, may be remembered as the Duke University academic who caused a bit of a stir in 2003 when she promoted the free distribution of Apple’s brand-new iPod devices to an entire first-year population of 2,000 students. There followed an inevitable outcry from more conservative quarters of the academic community, who voiced the opinion that giving students “just another device for listening to music” was a profligate waste of money. Many argued that the iPod had no serious pedagogical application, while an editorial in TheChronicle, the Duke student newspaper, declared: “It is an unnecessarily expensive toy that does not become an academic tool simply by being thrown into a classroom.”

There were no conditions attached to the free iPods, says Davidson. Students were simply asked to think up new learning applications for the device and then to share those ideas with teaching staff. The results of this experiment suggested that Davidson was right and her detractors in the academic community were wrong, for the iPod experiment turned out to be a perfect demonstration of the power of disruptive technology. New learning applications were discovered across all disciplines, and the iPod was instrumental in “flipping” the classroom, devolving from the staff to the students power over where, when and how they could study. These findings were later exemplified in the rapid worldwide success of iTunesU.

Read the full review and purchase the book.

For those who care deeply about the future of journalism, the phone-hacking scandal could hardly have been less well timed. Professional journalism’s survival is threatened by the economic impact of digital technologies. The plurality and diversity of voice upon which representative democracy depends is in jeopardy. Needed urgently is debate about how well-resourced, professional news gathering can be sustained. Instead, tired 20th-century concerns about the ethics and ownership of popular newspapers are diverting attention from critical 21st-century realities.

The alleged hacking of Milly Dowler’s mobile telephone generated a moral panic that was seized upon instantly by a curious alliance of elite establishment and left-progressive opinion. At the same time, it diverted attention from a crucial debate that was beginning to gather momentum. That discussion, about whether professionally edited, fact-based journalism can continue to play the role of an estate, not just an industry, in the multimedia age will remain important after those responsible for phone hacking have been identified and punished.

There is a crisis in journalism that has nothing to do with hacking and relates directly to the conduct of public affairs. It started with recognition that the internet has weakened the authority of large-scale professional media organisations and progressed to predictions that the web will destroy it. Many thinkers in the field of journalism and media studies believe this and find the notion irresistible. They burble with delight at the possibility that the power of big media may be shattered by what laymen call blogging and they grace it with the oxymoronic title “citizen journalism”.

The essential difference between the two deserves definition. It is that much blogging is an amateur activity carried out by people with no understanding of journalism’s social purpose who operate with scant regard for facts. Like the activists who, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, published illegal newspapers seething with radical ideology and revolutionary zeal, they prefer opinion to evidence. Liberated by broadband from a free market in which their ideas have no traction because too few find them interesting, they bleat – and tweet – wild rumours, half-truths and conspiracies.

Read full story, which is largely an attack upon the ‘dumbing down’ of the press through the use of social networking… take this quote:

Citizens intrigued by events check in on Twitter and other social networking sites. But once alerted, many follow links to reliable news sites such as BBC News Online and newspaper sites.

Along with a global recession, Ms Mudditt also cites the challenges of “a rapid move to ebooks, the demise of independent bookstores and growing power of a few chains”.

Looking ahead, she sees a more limited trade programme, which puts less emphasis on “the research and scholarly mission of the university” and gives greater attention to “its equally important education and public service missions”.

“There is a great deal of important, relevant and potentially impactful work that takes place in academia but has a hard time connecting with the right audiences.

“Concentrating on this ‘translational’ connection would seem to be a good focus for our future trade publishing,” Ms Mudditt said.

So is all this good news for the early-career academics, particularly in the humanities, who are desperate to get their first monographs into print and have been distressed to see some university presses apparently chasing the next best-seller?

Ms Mudditt, who took up her new post in January, can offer only cautious reassurance.

“Monographs remain the primary mode of discourse in certain fields and scholars need to publish them for tenure and promotion.

“At the same time, these titles are ever more expensive to publish due to a continuing decline in sales, largely driven by dwindling library budgets – a problem that has only accelerated in recent years.

Read full story.

See ALT-C information on workshop:

Introduction

During the last few months the New Media Consortium (NMC, http://www.nmc.org/), who have for a number of years produced an annual Horizon Report in association with EDUCAUSE, have been conducting a study from the perspective of UK universities and colleges. This has been undertaken with the support of JISC and the involvement of a panel of thought leaders from our community as the Advisory Board. The Advisory Board has worked through a number of stages culminating in a vote to identify what they see as the most important trends in technology and the likely impact of these trends. This work, which is online athttp://jisc.wiki.nmc.org/, is being drawn together in a “Short List” to summarise the conclusions reached.

This workshop comprises the final stage of the project. Participants will receive a copy of the pre-release “Short List” by email during the week before the workshop. The workshop will be highly interactive and will be strongly oriented towards gathering perception and analysis from the participants.

Aims

The workshop will consider the conclusions of the Advisory Board in draft report form – the “Short List” – and seek answers to the question: “How can we maximise the ability of Higher and Further Education Institutions and their learning technology innovators to take advantage of these emerging technologies and applications?” To achieve this aim, the workshop will map out the key challenges, gaps etc and consider desirable actions – guidance, support or investment by sector bodies, collaboration, etc… – to overcome the obstacles and accelerate our exploitation of new opportunities.

I missed the start of this due to the joys of train travel/the complexities of the Leeds campus… so came in right on the first bit of interactive work. Having read the report on the train, I was about where everyone else was in the room… I collected a series of materials (probably not of the best possible quality – sorry about that)!

Further Links

• My photo set (excuse any blurring!).. exercise was place red dots where think the ‘real world’ is, and blue dots where the education sector is.
• Twitter: @NMCorg
• Facebook: NMC Horizon Project
• Set of photos from @heloukee

It is 2031 and a researcher wants to study what London’s bloggers were saying about the riots taking place in their city in 2011. Many of the relevant websites have long since disappeared, so she turns to the archives to find out what has been preserved. But she comes up against a brick wall: much of the material was never stored or has been only partially archived. It will be impossible to get the full picture.

This scenario highlights an important issue for future research – and one that has received scant attention. How can the massive number of websites on the internet – which exist for just 100 days on average before being changed or deleted – be safeguarded for future scholars to explore?

The extent to which content disappears without trace from the web is worrying, says Kath Woodward, head of the department of sociology at The Open University and a participant in the British Library’s Researchers and the UK Web Archive project, which aims to involve researchers in building special collections.

Not enough academics, she believes, are engaging with the topic. “We are taking it for granted that such material will be there, but we need to be attentive. We have a responsibility to future generations of researchers.”

Read full story, and note that the British Library’s giving it a go! In many ways this is a shift, but in others a continuity of issues that historians have battled with for years (e.g. the National Archives only archives about 3% of government papers, so we’ll never get the full story). See also Ann Mroz’s take.

There has been much jitteriness among publishers and academic authors of late as both parties grapple with the consequences of digital and cultural change.

Speaking at the Modern Language Association of America’s annual convention in Los Angeles earlier this year, Leslie Mitchner, of Rutgers University Press, pointed out that new technologies are giving scholars ever more opportunities for research. A project to digitise the entire contents of the Vatican Library, for example, will make reams of new material available to academics around the world. But, as Mitchner said in a session on “The brave new world of scholarly books”, this is no panacea. While such projects open the door to new research, paradoxically, there are fewer opportunities to get published, get a position and get tenure.

According to a recent report by the Association of American University Presses, technological and cultural shifts seen in the past decade have challenged publishers’ business models and “may even threaten many of the intellectual characteristics most valued by the scholarly enterprise itself”. It is of the essence of this enterprise to be “in it for the long haul” rather than “the next viral hit”. Yet, the report warns, traditional monographs risk becoming “largely static objects … instead of vibrant hubs for discussion and engagement”.

Read full story, and an accompanying story of particular interest as to what should/not be archived on the net.

Check out ‘Open Book Publishers‘ for an interesting model for scholarly publication in a digital age.

Is human-time running into its hourglass? Or worse, is the hourglass broken and the sand rapidly spilling out? Instead of finally facing up to what is fundamentally wrong with our global society, the picture since Copenhagen (or is it the collapse of Lehmann bros.?), seems to be one where our political and economic leaders, policy-makers and opinion-formers, are not simply bent on avoiding, side-stepping, or even denying outright the crisis of the biosphere but are ploughing all their – and hence our – remaining energies into the restoration of the old, redundant, indeed suicidal growth model. Yet equally maddening – at least for those of us operating within academe – is the way our supposedly very clever university people, not least most of the ones who run the show, continue not simply to offer themselves as collaborators, advisers and handmaidens to ‘business as usual’ but to the promotion of exactly this as the strategic way forward for UK universities plc.

So, the purpose of this dissenters’ conference is to consider whether an alternative university frame of reference can be meaningfully and practically developed. Thus, it is not interested in REF’s or research funding per se. On the contrary, it seeks to ask a fundamental question for this age of Climate Change, Peak Oil and Global Inequality: can universities radically change course, and initiate a programme of genuine ‘transition’ not simply for their own benefit but for that of the wider common weal?

A National Weekend Conference

West Downs Centre, Winchester

February 5-6 2011