Greetings for the week.

If your life is like mine, you are never caught up on your professional reading. Sometimes it feels like the bane of my existence. My office has different spots where back copies of journals sit waiting to be looked at—and I am always behind by a month or so in getting things like “The Chronicle” read. I also have about six websites I follow on a daily basis…which is more reading. Books—some of which I’ll probably never get to—are stacked in different places. And then it is the same at home for Ronda and me with our personal and pleasure reading.

However, I do try to skim and scan a great deal of written material to stay on top of many different issues—and every once in awhile, something catches my eye. That is what happened recently. I generally try to follow a journal titled EDUCAUSE REVIEW which focuses heavily on the role of information technology and how it impacts higher education. The January/February 2010 edition of this journal highlights how we can innovate for the 21st-Century University.
Because I have been thinking a lot this year about moving MSU toward a future strategic imperative around innovation, I especially noted this EDUCAUSE issue. One article in that journal, titled “It’s Time!” by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, resonated for me given some of the things they were describing…and my own personal musings about where I think the postmodern university is heading.

In this week’s column, I am going to share salient portions of that article (interspersed with my own comments) as it may stimulate your own thinking as well. Block quotes from the article are shown in italics.

Researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and related fields have known for years that the most powerful learning is that which comes through discovery—in a situation where new knowledge and skills are hooked or grafted onto an existing cognitive schematic or framework that we all carry with us. Historically, much of the content for this individual production of new knowledge for learned individuals came—in a strict Cartesian sense—from college and university coursework and the professors who taught those courses. But now, the Web and other technologies give all of us myriad new avenues for our own production of knowledge.

Students need to integrate new information with the information they already have – to “construct” new knowledge structures and meaning…Today, every college and university student has at his or her fingertips the most powerful tool for discovery, for constructing knowledge, and for learning. Like Guttenberg’s printing press, the web democratizes learning. Rather than seeing the web as a threat to the old order, universities should embrace its potential and take discovery learning to the next step.

The EDUCAUSE authors anticipate a sea change from the mass production of learning with students to its mass customization—for improved learning outcomes. Many of us in postsecondary education already see this happening as the higher ed market we’ve been so used to…is now shifting beneath our feet.

Universities need an entirely new modus operandi for how the content of higher education is created. The university needs to open up, embrace collaborative knowledge production, and break down the walls that exist among institutions of higher education and between those institutions and the rest of the world. To do so, universities require deep structural changes…a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure.

This view of our future suggests the growing power of OpenCourseWare that MIT (and other renowned institutions of higher learning) are making wholly available online in the form of open source software. With Wikipedia, we’re now watching the development of the Wikiversity. The hard-copy academic journal will move away from something owned by a publishing corporation to an online collaboration of global researchers.

The combination of the Internet, the new generation of learners, the demands of the global knowledge economy, and the shock of the current economic crisis is creating a perfect storm for universities, and the storm warnings are everywhere. The seemingly hyperbolic and apocryphal predictions of Peter Drucker and others from years ago now seem less shrill, even prescient…

Professors who want to remain relevant will have to abandon the traditional lecture and start listening to and conversing with students – shifting from a broadcast style to an interactive one. In doing so, they can free themselves to be curators of learning – encouraging students to collaborate among themselves and with others outside the university. Professors should encourage students to discover for themselves and to engage in critical thinking instead of simply memorizing the professor’s store of information. Finally, professors need to tailor the style of education to their students’ individual learning styles.

None of this is to say that the university as we know it is going to become nothing more than a virtual entity or a collection of hundreds of thousands of Web pages. Faculty are always going to be needed, I believe, to provide meaning, context, examples—and counterexamples. Peer engagement is also a strong driver of learning. And better software is certainly needed to aid students in more fully interacting with content and for creating even stronger networking systems.

But when all is said and done, our world in higher education is changing. Students—traditional and nontraditional—are ever-more willing to create a customized experience at multiple universities (real and virtual) over the course of their educational “careers.” We always have to be thinking about what these changes may mean for us.

The Tapscott and Williams article—and the online version of the journal—can be accessed at www.educause.edu/er

One quick correction from last week: In my column about space changes on campus, I was not clear in communicating that the move of the Small Business Development Center out to the RBIC Building (near the RSEC) was paid for by the College of Business and other grant sources that were secured. That group creatively got the money together for the relocation of our SBDC and they should certainly get the credit for such.

Next week, MSU’s Chief Information Officer, Dr. Linda Miller, will appear in this space to talk about an exciting happening taking place in her area that will benefit the entire University.

Have a great week!

Randy Dunn