Emerging Technologies Consulting

The blog inadvertantly went on hiatus thanks to a lovely trip to Monterey, CA for the New Media Consortium’s summer conference.  There, my colleagues Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Barbara Sawhill and myself presented on Fear 2.0.  We’ve been thinking about this for several years now and have presented various versions of it.  We’ve now turned the”presentation” entirely into a discussion format.  We began the conversation by asking participants to draw pictures of what the education system looks like to them.  So, we got images of ivory towers with people falling off and chipping away at it, of factories spitting out things, of funnels, and of crutches.  We then had a discussion around those images.  Because we wanted to move past the negative and on to the positive, we asked people to name a problem, either specific to their institution or related to education as a whole, and then the group was to propose solutions to it.  We ended up with a document listing the problems and proposed solutions.  The last item, the fear that higher ed will be irrelevant proposed by Bryan Alexander, came near the end and has very few bullets beneath it as proposed solutions.  But indeed, I think this is the fear that many of us in the room struggle with.  Sometimes that fear is directed toward a specific discipline and sometimes a specific institution, but I think there’s a general fear that higher ed might become a dinosaur, at least in its current form.  After contemplating that giant fear for a few minutes, we turned to thinking about an ideal form of education.  Most people came up with more collaborative models and of models that allow different ways of approaching learning.  It seems that we all felt that education now was a one-size-fits-all proposition and that wasn’t working for everyone, teacher and student alike.

Since we started talking about fear a couple of years ago, it’s morphed quite a bit.  People are no longer terrified of blogs and wikis and Twitter, but they’re anxious about them and skeptical of them.  I think many people understand that even if they don’t use any social media at all, social media has changed the landscape quite a bit.  People expect to connect, respond, interact.  They expect to have access to more information.  They expect a slightly faster pace to many things.  And that changes expectations for education.  People know this, but acting on that knowledge is hard.  There are structures in place that make it hard and even students, with their social networking prowess, come with industrial education style baggage that is hard to get rid of.  What we hope facing these anxieties does for people is allow them to take that first step to get past them or to help students or faculty get past them.  Healthy skepticism is fine; ignoring the new landscape leads to extinction.