Technology and the Future of Academic Work
Had an interesting email arrive this morning from the Times Higher Education Supplement who are asking delegates of the forthcoming OnlineEduca conference the following question:
"What new technology [do you] imagine will change the lives of academics within the next decade and what the implications of that might be for universities"
This is my answwer:
"The relentless evolution of portable information and communication devices until they become as ubiquitous as cellphones and as convenient as wearing glasses is the technology that I think will have the biggest impact. Our systems of university education will then finally have to evolve from their current medieval form into something that suits a fluid and efficient model of work and knowledge creation. Academics will need to build and facilitate the use of learning environments and tasks that encourage collaboration and purposeful information use rather than assessing recall. Universities will have to extend the concept of campus to embrace a more decentralised sense of where learning occurs and consider their relevance as partners in workplaces and communities engaging in continuous learning."
We'll see if the Times agrees or not...
However other than the potential 15 minutes of fame in print, it was an interesting question. Setting aside whether or not universities will ever actually change, which is a rant for another day, it did get me thinking about which technologies will genuinely result in significant change, as opposed to merely enhancing current approaches. I think that for technology to have any substantive impact on learning and teaching its going to have to challenge some of the key assumptions of academics and universities as institutions. One key assumption is that knowing things is a useful part of sophisticated understanding - memory.
I've been long fascinated by the potential of technology to augment cognitive skills such as memory. My personal dream, interestingly shared with Ray Kurzweil, is to have a virtual overlay of the world provide important information such as the name of the person I'm talking to. Researchers in Cambridge have already demonstrated how similar augmented reality overlays could work and I can't see that some form of mobile search function - a mobile google is you like - won't be a killer app in the future. Imagine being able to get detailed information on any event, person, concept etc. simply by speaking it out loud. The potential for contextual, real time information searching is huge - asking for "jaguar" at the zoo vs asking at a car yard for example.
Larry Niven wrote about the potential for a similar system years ago in his novel "Oath of Fealty" and ever since I read it I've lusted for a similar system myself. He noted that the impact on individual capability is so significant it starts to call into question whether using it makes people something other than human. Its this level of enhancement that universities will struggle to cope with, something that changes the underlying environment as fundamentally as books changed society.
My real contribution to the conference will be to report on the evolution of a model aimed at supporting institutions undertaking a strategic assessment of their ability to engage in sustainable and effective e-learning. Called the e-learning maturity model, or eMM, it uses the well established process maturity model concept to frame a form of benchmarking of e-learning performance at the institutional, rather than individual level. The model is technologically and pedagogically neutral, focusing rather on the quality and effectiveness of key processes.
The intention is to provide institutional leaders with an assessment of their institutions overall strengths and weaknesses as an e-learning provider so as to support strategic and operational investment decisions. It also supports the identification of systemic weaknesses in a sector and is intended to facilitate the collaborative remediation of those weaknesses. We have piloted the model in New Zealand and the UK and found that the results provide useful guidance to the institutions and also to a sector as a whole.
More information on the eMM can be found at the project website (http://http://emm.nz/), I'm also happy to elaborate further and answer any questions you might have.