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FrontPage

Page history last edited by Jenny Darrow 15 years, 10 months ago

June 2008 printable version of the working Academic Technology Vision:

June08_print_version_AcademicTechnologyVision.doc

NOTE: this is a 25 page document

Input on the Vision via the Wiki is now closed.

Thanks everybody that helped create the draft. The vision is currently being circulated internally by the ATSC for final signoff and approval. If you have additional comments, please forward them to Jenny Darrow at jdarrow@keene.edu.

We've left this site up because we're proud of the plan we all created, and proud of the transparent process we used to construct it. And even though we've moved into a more formal phase of plan approval, we want this conversation to continue. Please don't hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns: the plan is solidifying, but this conversation is just beginning.

-- Mike Caulfield

The Idea

We're working on an Academic Technology Vision ~~Plan~~ . We know smart people. We'd like some help. The idea is you can either post your own pass at an AT vision, or post a revision of someone else's pass, or revise a document in concert with others. (Or comment. Or lurk. It's all good.)

In other words, We'd like to use a net-enabled approach to write our Networked Learning plan.

While this wiki does has no official or institutional status, ideally the ideas and drafts here would help us write our own plan.

The password is highway61

Remember: If you have something you'd like to capture, but don't know where it fits, just make a new page and we'll see if we can find a place for it.

The current suggested structure of the document is in the sidebar. It's main focus is to show how modern trends in academic technology mesh well with our institutional goals.

The vision statement was written some time ago, and may need some revision now that we've been through this goal-alignment exercise.

Post multiple ways of doing it if you want. Post one that looks like a manifesto, and one that looks like an accountant wrote it. And if you have nothing to post, please comment!

Tag your creation with the tag 'vision', then view a list of vision statements, list of questions, or go see the list of all pages w/ authors.

--Mike Caulfield & Jenny Darrow

Great comment from Martha Burtis (University of Mary Washington):

Interesting. You still need a plan, you just need a kind of plan that is different than what we've always imagined a plan to be in the past. You need a plan that creates frameworks and opportunities rather than that dictates solutions and products. You need a plan that empowers leadership rather than merely "defining" it. You need a plan that has some ability to "self-heal" and adapt. Ultimateley, a plan like this has values and vision at it's core, not answers.

What I worry about is that if we push the conversation about the potential of technology to it's current limit, then we ultimately need to push our conversation about higher education to a similarly precipitous limit. (And I worry that we're both not doing this or we are doing it and then not knowing where to go next.)

We need to question our values, not about technology, but about education, learning, knowing, sharing, community, activism, citizenship -- and we need to find a place for higher education to occupy in that conversation that makes the use of its inherent strengths (leadership, knowledge, passionate commitment) not its weakness (administration, management, standardization). Increasingly, we play the game in higher ed. of trying to fix our weakness instead of trying to value our strengths, and in doing so we dilute ourselves and we allow a conversation to emerge around us about what we're doing (and if we're doing it well) in which we play little role.

Technology could be the transformative agent in this conversation. It could help us shift the conversation back in a rigorous (but not stifling) direction. Instead, more and more institutions seem to approach technology merely as an administrative panacea or a tool for collecting, analyzing, and regurgitating more data and information in a desperate attempt to justify our existence.

Notes:

To be clear -- While we are helping to write the AT plan for our institution, this wiki should not be considered an official Keene State workspace, but rather a scratchpad where people at Keene State are learning from other institutions
Anything posted on here will be considered to be posted under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, unless otherwise stated. If you post your institution's current vision statement, that's wonderful, but be explicit as to what copyright it is under.
I think we're looking for a vision statement that's inspiring, but also accessible to students and faculty at large.

Comments (2)

I've been through the document (is it still called a document when it's on a number of pages in a wiki) a couple of times now, and I'm impressed by the vision and approach articulated here. Great passion and insight are evident.

My question is how do we engage a campus that is so culturally wedded to a "project" approach. We merely have to look at our current IT plan or our strategic plan to see how quickly we focus on specific, concrete projects to advance our goals.

I think you've done a great job of articulating one way of doing that: "desired outcomes." We'll need to make it real for faculty and staff, but I think it keeps us outcomes focused and gives us a way to achieve our goals.

Great start and I like the direction that the conversation is moving in (vision vs. projects
& pedagogy vs. tools). However, I feel we should move it farther. The Vision process is critical – in fact I might argue that the process is more important than the outcome (vision) and we shouldn’t rush to a statement. The visioning process provides an opportunity for us to look beyond our daily pressures, current limitations and realities and think seriously about the future. Let’s not rush this process and might you consider a ‘shared’ visioning process with the campus?

Also, from my non-academician perspective, pedagogy vs. tools is one of our biggest hurdles. Over the past 10 yrs we’ve gotten sidetracked picking technology tools rather than meaningful dialogue around teaching. Let’s not get wedded to tools (LMS, Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.X, etc..) because you can be guaranteed that the tools will constantly change. As others have pointed out, the more valuable conversation is around approach rather than products/tools and technology infrastructure. How? What’s the forum for dialogue and discussion?

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