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Opinion
Survey Said ...
5/10/2007
Context: Other Annual Measures and Indices
Since my employer’s report, Trends to Watch in Higher Education, is among them, I am happy to note this year that the report includes summary listing of issues from 19 other measures and indices from throughout higher education and from the information technology world outside of higher education.
Some Thoughts
Altogether, you could spend hours looking through this document, making connections and speculations. It’s quite thought-provoking.
I found one of the most interesting things in this year’s report to be the inclusion of a new “Commercial/External Online Services” issues choice in the listings. Ever since an NLII (now ELI) Focus Workshop on Learning Space Design a few years ago, I’ve been constantly thinking about the phrase “accommodate what they bring with them”; initially in terms of physical things (make room for the backpacks) but, obviously, in terms of technology functionalities and expectations, as well.
This category includes something I have been doing a lot of thinking about: that is, “educating students about risks of social networking services.” I happen to think that, as an issue, this particular one may be solving itself as the students’ attitudes and behaviors adjust to longer term use of such services. But who knows, we may be in for another year or two of related “horror stories.”
It also includes recommending or even leveraging the use of commercial services (often supported by advertising), such as blogs, wikis, survey engines, and the like, as well as the parallels to the recommending and leveraging issues that can be found when an institution adopts and embeds such services within its own infrastructure, such as Skype.
One of the reasons I find the latter group to be of special interest is that I think I can discern a smoothing out of the recurrent waves of “let’s build our own version of this on our own campus” mentality. Open source collaborative initiatives aside, and as much as I, too, like building my own stuff, it’s a fact that that the commercial world is developing functionalities for consumers at such a pace that no single campus IT staff could possibly keep up. We simply must face the need to accommodate the “stuff” that students bring with them, and that’s especially true of information technology functionalities, even if they are commercially oriented.
Among the findings (and it’s probably because of the part of my employer’s constituency that includes designers of technology and the built environment, as well as those who pay for such, and manage it) the move into the “top 10” of issues categorized as “Electronic Classrooms/Technology Buildings/Commons Facilities” intrigues me the most.
It intrigues me because I wonder whether the rise is due to a broader (and needed) understanding that such things are too important to be built without the closest of connections to, and fully informed by, the learning mission of our campuses or whether it is due to the costs of such things. I hope it is the former, but I fear it is the latter, especially since the issue category “Funding IT” took back its traditional first place this year.
I have not yet had the time to analyze the survey’s results with the lists of issues delivered from the viewpoints of those 19 other organizations, but I know that will provide me with some entertaining and stimulating reading and thinking.
Oh, by the way, “portals” appear to be dropping out of sight as an issue. Good.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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