Innovating the 21st-century university
In the current issue of EDUCAUSE Review, Anthony D. Williams and I have a 6,000-word essay discussing the urgent issues facing universities, that left unresolved, would see intuitions of higher learning going into a death spiral akin to what we see happening to encyclopedias, newspapers, and music record labels.
For fifteen years, we’ve been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the university. We have not been alone. In 1997, none other than Peter Drucker predicted that big university campuses would be “relics” within thirty years.
Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. The transformation of the university is not just a good idea; It is an imperative, and evidence is mounting that the consequences of further delay may be dire.
May 16th, 2012 on
Our society is collectively creating, storing and communicating information at nearly exponential rates of growth. Most of this data is personally identifiable, and third parties control much of it. This personal data will be archived online forever and be instantly searchable, and few appreciate how many ways this data might be used to harm us.
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May 11th, 2012 on Reuters
A growing number of people argue that the notion of having a private life in which we carefully restrict what information we share with others may not be a good idea. Instead, sharing our intimate, personal information with others would benefit us individually and as a society.
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May 4th, 2012 on Reuters
Whatever happened to the “we”? We haven’t heard about it since the 2008 victory. “They built the largest online community in the history of the presidency,” says Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Media, which tracks the intersection of technology and politics. “But then they stopped talking to them and engaging them”.
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May 2nd, 2012 on The Globe and Mail
Recently, the smartest organizations have been rethinking what it means to be open. In this article I will show that there are three particular dimensions of openness that really matter in the business arena.
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March 26th, 2012 on The Huffington Post
The ‘Kony 2012′ director who was found naked in the street will remain in the hospital for several weeks. Danica Russell, Jason Russell’s wife, attributed her husband’s “reactive phsychosis” to the “sudden transition from relative anonymity to worldwide attention — both raves and ridicules, in a matter of days.”
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January 31st, 2012 on Social Media Week
The debate on the role of social media and change is over. Over the last year, many have questioned just how important social media are in helping activists achieve social change.
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