10 Tips for Injecting New Technology into Your Campus

This article, on the Campus Technology web site, gives ten such tips. It's based on the example of an actual project to introduce classroom clickers to faculty and students. It's a useful outline of how to address the all-too-common issues of "too busy" and "why learn another tool". The ten tips are:

1. Move quickly, before preferences are staked out;
2. Make the selection process inclusive of students, faculty and staff;
3. Do the product research;
4. Save time by skipping the pilot if you can;
5. Get creative to gather feedback;
6. Take your input to the vendor;
7. Remember integration issues;
8. Keep the initial group of adopters small;
9. Be ready to transition support when you reach a tipping point in adoption; and
10. Remember your goal.

7 things you should know about Google Apps

This is one of the "7 things you should know ..." series from Educause. The 7 things are:

• What it is - "a collection of web-based programs and file storage that run in a web browser, without requiring users to buy or install software";
• Who's doing it - especially higher ed students and institutions;
• How it works - via a web browser, with the ability to set permissions, see different versions of the documents, and much of the functionality is available on mobile devices;
• Why it's significant - saves costs (the institution doesn't need to provide IT support) and it's shareable;
• The downsides - loss of control, security ...;
• Where it's going - "increased integration across the family of Google companies"; and
• Implications for teaching and learning - facilitates building a more collaborative environment.

Facebook and the 'social graph'

An article published in the March/April 08 issue of Technology Review and titled Between Friends discusses the concept of the social graph and how sites like Facebook are proving the value of this concept.
This article is best viewed in colour as the colour graphics help in understanding what is meant by 'social graph'. It's about links between users and blogs (based on subject(s) in common), comments (one user commenting on content in another's online presence, eg MySpace), Twitter, IBM's Atlas (social networks in the workplace), and viral marketing (using consumers' social connections for marketing).

Facebook 101

This article, by Thomas Krivak is subtitled 'Ten Things You Need to Know About Facebook'. It gives a succinct overview of Facebook. The ten things are:

1. Who is using Facebook? Numbers and %ages by age group, rate of joining, how much time is spent per day there;
2. What can you find on Facebook? People's interests.
3. Why are people using Facebook? It's an easy icebreaker, you can upload and share photos.
4. What kinds of third-party programs can you add?
5. What are advertisers doing there? Advertising - to quote one, they find it 'invaluable'.
6. Who else is joining the Facebook network? It's not just college students, and political figures are there too.
7. What groups are now on Facebook? Lots, including professional organisations.
8. Why is Facebook so popular for sharing photos? Easy to upload. More photos than Flickr.
9. How do you find old friends and new colleagues? It sounds easy.
10. What about privacy? There are ways to avoid being visible to the whole world, but it's up to the user to implement them.

The Wirearchy versus the Heirarchy

An article by Beverley Head titled 'Go with the Flow' and published on pages 34-36 of the November 2007 AFR Boss magazine discusses how knowledge within organisations is far more easily shared, so leading to a wider spread of power across and through these organisations.

The article quotes Jon Husband's definition of wirearchy: "a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowedge, trust and credibility, which is enabled by interconnected people and technology". An organisation's staff, suppliers and clients, now "easily connected by the internet", can "freely share information and opinions using a variety of tools from simple email to blogs or wikis."

Maybe there's nothing really new about this, given that organisations have long had both an official framework, usually an heirarchy, and an unofficial network of the "hubs, gatekeepers and enablers" who actually get things done. New tools just make it quicker and enable more people to have a say.

The Horizon Report 2008

The New Media Consortiumand the Educause Learning Initiative collaborated to produce the 2008 Horizon Report. The report "seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations."
This report describes 6 emerging technologies or practices that are likely to become mainstream in such organizations over the next 1 to 5 years. For each technology/practice there is an overview, a discussion on its relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression, examples, and links to further reading. The last includes a link to resources tagged on del.icio.us by the Horizon Advisory Board for the technology/practice, and readers are invited to add their own, appropriately tagged links. Also described are a set of challenges and trends that will probably influence us within the above time frame. The precise research methodology used to compile the report is described. So, on to the technologies ...

Time to adoption horizon: 1 year or less
1. Grassroots video, easily produced, edited and made available on the Web by anyone with the right hardware, software, and ideas.
2. Collaboration webs, using free or inexpensive web-based tools to set up collaborative workspaces, allow users to easily work, share resources and capture ideas.
Time to adoption horizon: 2 to 3 years
3. Mobile broadband, perhaps best illustrated by the statement that "mobiles are increasingly about networking on the go", with an ever-expanding variety of content.
4. Data mashups, web applications that combine data from a number of sources
Time to adoption horizon: 4 to 5 years
5. Collective intelligence can be explicit (such as Wikipedia) or tacit, resulting "from the data generated by the activities of many people over time", eg Google's PageRank system.
6. Social operating systems, of which Facebook and MySpace are precursors. Such systems recognise webs of links, both actual and potential between people.

The critical challenges identified by the Horizon Advisory Board members include:
- Significant shifts in scholarship, research, and creative expression leading to a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy;
- Higher education facing a growing expectatin to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices;
- The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning that is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment; and
- The academy being faced with a need to provide formal instruction in information, visual and technological literacy as well as in how to create meaningful content with today's tools.
The significant trends identified include:
- The growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking, combined with collective intelligence and mass amateurization is gradually but inexorably changing the practice of scholarship;
- The way we work, collaborate, and communicate is evolving as boundaries become more fluid and globalization increases;
- Access to and portability of content is increasing as smaller, more powerful devices are produced; and
- The gap between students' perception of technology and that of faculty continues to widen.

Also in the Report is a reflection on the first five years of the Horizon Report. The topics identified each year have proved without exception to be "worthy of our attention". Three metatrends are becoming clear:
- The collective sharing and generation of knowledge;
- Connecting people throug the network; and
- Moving the computer into three dimensions.

The Report concludes by listing the 36 members of the 2008 Horizon Project Advisory Board. They come from higher education institutions around the world (including two from Australia), representatives of the New Media Consortium and Educause, and people from a number of private and public sector organisations.

The 2008 Horizon Report is well worth reading.

Post-script
The Horizon Report Australia-New Zealand Edition for 2008 was published subsequently. This report follows the same format as The Horizon Report 2008. It's "the first in a new series of regional reports and examines emerging technologies as they appear in and affect higher education in Australia and New Zealand in particular."

Key trends include production of mobile phones "driving innovation and adoption of ever more capable portable devices", "an increasingly important set of influences from the workplace that are impacting how learning is designed and conducted", the increasing connectedness of people is continuing to reduce collaboration costs, and the set of technologies available to educators increases as both computers and the network increase in connectedness and capability.

Critical challenges include protectionism limiting "access to materials, ideas and collaborative opportunities", teachers lacking skills needed to make use of emerging technologies and teach their students how to do so, need for assessment before adoption, and poor quality broadband limiting options.

Technologies to watch include:
A. Time to adoption horizon one year or less:
1. virtual worlds and other immersive digital environments;
2. cloud-based applications;
B. Time to adoption horizon two to three years:
3. geolocation;
4. alternative input devices;
C. Time to adoption horizon four to five years:
5. deep tagging; and
6. next-generation mobile.

As with the original 2008 report, or each technology there is an overview, a discussion on its relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression, examples, and links to further reading. The last includes a del.icio.us-tagged resources and readers may add to these.

Finally, the methodology is described and the members of the ANZ advisory board are listed.

Again, this report is well worth reading.