In Dealing with the Future Now: Principles for Creating a Vital Campus in a Climate of Restricted Resources, the authors propose foresee a relatively dire situation for Higher Education. They pretty convincingly argue that our current economic issues are not cyclical, but systemic. In fact the systemic problems were masked by recent economic boom years. Incremental changes, such as across the board budget cuts, reflect our widespread belieft that the good times are just around the corner — the authors warn, that they are not, and that transformational changes are needed.
I was introduced to this article as background material for an Educause workshop I’m attending this week on Leadership in Instructional Technology. Our group project is to take the ideas proposed in the article and translate them into a faculty/staff training program. Tough challenge — I’m not quite sure where we’ll end up. But I am finding it interesting how often we frame our discussion in comfortable, incremental ideas and solutions. Real transformation is painful, full of risk, and not a place most of us are comfortable in. Following are some supporting ideas that I found helped inform my own thinking on this complex issue:
Wired Campus: David Wiley: Open Teaching Multiplies the Benefit but Not the Effort – Chronicle.com
- In 2004 I began asking my students to post their homework on their personal, publicly accessible blogs. …students realized that the papers they were writing weren’t just throw-away pieces for class – they were read and discussed by their future peers out in the world. The result was a teacher’s dream — the students’ writing became a little longer, a little more thoughtful, and a little more representative of their actual intellectual abilities.
- At the same time in 2004, I began posting my syllabus on a publicly available wiki and doing my best to select only readings that were also publicly available and that I could link to from the syllabus. …As I began blogging about my online teaching materials, people from around the world began to see and make use of them in their own courses.
- In 2007 I began teaching a class that is not offered anywhere else (and still isn’t, as far as I know): “Introduction to Open Education.” I put the syllabus and all the readings online (no extra cost) and planned for all the student writing to be online (no extra cost).
Wired Campus: How to Help Digital Resources Thrive, Even in Hard Times – Chronicle.com
A just-released series of case studies takes a close look at 12 digital projects to figure out what sustainability strategies have — and haven’t — worked for them.
Ithaka :: Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability
Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today, serves as a guide to the cases, outlining the stages that successful projects undertake in developing sustainability models:
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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