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The Future of Technology and Adult Education*

Presentation by David King, IHETS executive director
30th annual Richey Symposium
Indiana University School of Continuing Studies
July 14, 2006

*NOTE: This text is derived from notes and slides used by King during his presentation; it was not originally intended to appear as written content.

I.  Vision and challenges

Let’s start with the big picture and work inward to the department and faculty/staff level.

As a whole, the United States faces significant challenges as the global leader in innovation.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and best-selling author, has written an excellent and very accessible book called The World is Flat. He discusses the competitive, knowledge-based global environment and why the U.S. is being challenged at what many think is our own game.

It all began with the development of the Web browser.

According to Friedman, it all started with the Web browser Mosaic—which became Netscape—which

“...in turn set off an explosion in demand for all things digital. This led to the dot-com stock bubble and a massive overinvestment in the fiber-optic cable needed to carry all the new digital information.  This development, in turn, wired the whole world together, and, without anyone really planning it, made Bangalore a suburb of Boston.”

—The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman, pg. 57

Adopting these high-speed networking technologies enables people in far reaches of the world to work closely together. Remote collaboration radically changes what businesses do, how they do it, where they can do it, and whom they employ. Our competitors offer disruptive services from in some cases their own homes in Bangalore, or Guangdong, or soon Tegucigalpa or Tierra del Fuego.

But, as Friedman says: 

“These are just technologies. Using them does not make you modern, smart, moral, wise, fair, or decent. It just makes you able to communicate, compete, and collaborate farther and faster.”

—The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman, pg. 374

The National Academies—(Science, Engineering, Medicine, and the National Research Council)— published a joint report titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” finding that 34 percent of U.S. Ph.D. degrees in natural science are awarded to foreign-born, international students. In engineering, that figure is 56 percent.

This has not been a significant problem in the past. In fact, having many international students on American campuses has been a boon, both economically and culturally. In many cases, these newly minted doctorates remained in the U.S. and did their best work in American laboratories and research fields. 

But with fiber-optic cable circling the globe and high-speed bandwidth to their homelands now a non-issue, many of international graduates are opting—naturally—to return to their countries and do their innovating there.

II. Pursuit of a "learning society"

It is a truism, but the more educated you are, the more options you have in the flat world.

America has 4,000 colleges and universities. One percent of them are here in Indiana and Indiana University promotes itself as a leader, both in and out of the state. With all the challenges we face from around the globe, that puts you all right in the middle of the solution.

What will you need to know and do to meet the challenge? How can you lead our institutions and make us part of the one-percent Hoosier solution? How can you help in our pursuit of the learning society?

First, know your audience and their tools.

There are a few primary ground rules based on a inter-related concepts about audiences, their tools, and their power to disrupt.

Can we get them to "lean?" When making a sales pitch for an account, the goal for any advertising professional is always to get the clients around the table “leaning in,” wanting to hear every word and be involved in the discussion. 

Audiences these days are similar. With students, there are those who lean in and are active participants—whether in a classroom or those figuratively "leaning" into a computer screen from home. There are also students who lean back in their seats and are passive recipients.

A recent futuring report from IBM segments these "learning leaners" in three ways:

Why use technology for segmentation rather than standard demographics?

Marshall McLuhan was clearly on target in the late 60s when he suggested that the message is greatly impacted by the delivery medium. (As an aside, he did not actually write that the “medium is the message,” although he is regularly misrepresented the originator of that phrase.) He actually used the term “massage,” to more accurately mean that media can exercise significant impact on the acceptance of any message.

Bottom line, the future will be forged on the convergence of content and technology. But even though today more and more messages are integrated into and influenced by digital media, the core message is still critically important.  It’s like saying the sizzle is the steak—to most people, a good steak requires sizzle but we would be profoundly unfulfilled if all we got was sizzle and no steak.

So know your audience and their technological tools. But don’t mistake knowing their tools for actually knowing the audience.

Knowing your audience leads to another critical concept. The issue of whether we continue to predominately distribute new information and learning opportunities (as we have for decades) or whether students now expect to be attracted to access points for that kind of information.

Before the first Web addresses began to appear in print ads, on milk cartons, and the bumpers of cars in the 90s (well before many, if not most, people had even seen a computer able to “surf the ‘Net”), the whole paradigm of communication began to shift. At that point, even those who had never used a computer began to recognize and understand instant gratification: “You deserve what you want when you want it. No more, no less.”  And they began to believe it. 

Since then, teaching, learning, and communication has evolved to the point where we now demand personalized, customizable, instant access to the exact information we want. And if we in higher education don’t provide it, our students will go elsewhere, virtually anywhere else in the world.

Second, become a disrupter before you become disrupted. 

Clayton Christensen, a business and economic expert who writes extensively for the Harvard Business Review, describes disruptive technologies in the modern economic environment: 

“Disruptive technologies allow…people to do things previously done only by expensive specialists in centralized, inconvenient locations. In effect, they offer consumers products and services that are cheaper, better, and more convenient than ever before.”

Christensen focuses directly on higher education, warning that “...innovators are unlocking the gates to accessibility and affordability in education through disruptive innovations.” 

Our universities—Indiana University included—can be viewed as having “expensive specialists in centralized inconvenient locations.” We are a likely candidate for smaller, more nimble competitors to use disruptive innovation and technology to attract our students, learners, users, and customers.

Those of us with a history in continuing education, however, have a competitive advantage. If we pay attention, we can become disrupters before we are disrupted.

We have an opportunity to help faculty and staff engage our learners, information seekers, and decisions makers by offering solutions that compete more directly with the global disrupters, whether it’s a competitor like the University of Phoenix with a doc-in-the-box at every information superhighway off-ramp or potential partner like Ivy Tech Community College.

III. Paving the disruption highway

Dennis Haarsager, new media expert from Washington State University, has characterized the road to effective disruption as paved in the three lanes:

  1. Digitization
  2. Personalization
  3. Democratization

Digitization means shareable.

First, we need to make everything we have completely sharable among ourselves internally and others globally through the use of digital standards, like Mpeg3, Mpeg4, Jpeg, and open-source software.

Personalization means making it their own.

Second, we also need to make it so that students can acquire information in a way that makes it their own. Here’s an anecdote to illustrate:

Father to teenage son:  "We don’t download illegal music in this house."

Son (doing his best Che Guevarra impression): "Dad! That sucks!"

Father: "Be that as it may, we don’t do it." 

Son: Mumbles inaudibly under his breath as he stomps off into his room

Next day, Dad looks at the cell phone bill.

Father to son:  "Why in the world are we paying $2.50 each for ten new ring tones that resemble pop songs, yet you refuse to pay a buck for a high-quality digital download of the same song?!"

Son (rolling his eyes): "Dad, you just don’t get it. That's not music, it's my own ring tone for each of my friends. It's what makes my phone mine! It’s just my own sound!"

As any of you with teenagers might imagine, that conversation is a slice from our modern life. But although it could have happened, it is not my story. That story was told by Michael Powell, who at the time was chair of the FCC, at a luncheon in Indianapolis.

So, national leaders, decision-makers, and educators are being confronted head-on by the issue of personalization—and it is reaching a tipping point that will greatly influence how we develop communication products, like college courses.

Democratization means making it accessible.

Finally, we need to make our information and learning opportunities equally available to all—open, unfettered access to our knowledge base will be expected. As I mentioned earlier, if we don’t, users will go elsewhere. But more than that, open access provides new opportunities for teaching, learning, collaboration, and critique by students. 

“Open source is nothing more than peer review science.”

—Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat, pg. 83

IV. Foster new leaders among the digital natives

Marc Prensky, a digital gaming expert, has stereotyped those of us with grey heads (premature or not) as "digital immigrants" who are new to this digital world. As such, we probably don’t speak the language that well. And those of us who may be fluent still speak with an accent. But our progeny are "digital natives" and speak fluently in the world of digital collaboration, multi-tasking, and problem-solving.

Who are these digital natives?

Diana and James Oblinger’s research on the "network generation" says they are:

V. Mappers of the digital terrain

We may pave the road to disruption in the digital world, but our audiences draw the map and drive the roads. We forget that at our peril.

According to EDUCAUSE's 2006 "Horizon Report," which is an annual analysis of technology and learning trends, social computing facilitates an almost spontaneous development of communities of people with similar interests.

Social computing

From using Flickr for sharing photographs to MySpace for sharing just about everything, current and prospective students are using a variety of existing social computing tools for working together, sharing knowledge and information, and getting quick answers to questions.

And as these tools become safer and more commonplace, students will begin to expect their learning environments to provide this kind of access.     

Taxonomy begins to be replaced by tags applied by users. The more a tag shows up, the more it can be assumed that concept is important to an emerging learning community. 

Amazon is already following that pattern by showing some level of context within the books it sells. Concordance indicates how often a particular word shows up in the text of the book. The bigger the word in relation to other indicates the greater number of times used.

As this kind of tool becomes utilized by Amazon customers, the higher education community should recognize similar tools will soon be expected in the learning opportunities we offer.  

EDUCAUSE's Horizon Report notes “...incorporating such tools would use tags created by users to enable sophisticated non-linear browsing, searching, and finding based directly on user input and needs.  Tagging by members of a specific learning community could lead to a kind of course specific language or short-hand for complex topics that would enrich discussion and increase a feeling of community instead of isolated learning."  

One critical aspect of the trend toward social computing becoming more integrated into everyday life relates directly to knowing our audiences. Using social computing software and tools, students will begin to tell us what they want and need. Trends will begin to emerge from what students tell us they feel are their most critical needs. And as more students follow suit, the more valid—and real—these trends and needs will become.

This last part is the most important and has the most impact.  If we begin to see in real-time what people’s needs are, will we be expected to respond in real time?  That’s a scary and frightful prospect for deliberative, slow-to-change nature of the institutions we represent. But, yes, we will be expected to respond in real time. It won’t be written on a billboard somewhere, but it will be expected. And if we don’t deliver, our students and learners will go anywhere else they where they can get what they need delivered in a way they want and need it.

Personal learning environments

Lifelong learning is hardly a new concept. Workers in many occupations have engaged in continued profesional training for years, if not decades and perhaps centuries. But global issues have converged to make it more critical now than ever. As Friedman writes in The World is Flat, lifelong learning is be the only way to keep our workforce competitive in the global marketplace. And Christensen says it may be the competitive advantage we in higher education are losing. 

How can higher education remain attractive in today's access-oriented, instant gratificaiton environment? And not only attractive, but personalized, customizable, flexible, and easy-to-use and easy-to-access?

Personal learning environments…digital learning spaces…portal technology that allows users to customize their online environment…middleware that allows for federated trust relations…these are all concepts and ideas that we must embrace at the faculty and staff levels as we develop courses and learning modules. If we are not demanding our campus technology leaders offer this kind of access for teaching, interacting, and collaborating with students, students will find another institution who will.

A vast toolkit to meet learner needs

From RSS to wikis, blogs, personal broadcasting, i-Pods, telepresence video conferencing, and context-aware computer devices—these are all technological tools and opportunities that leaners will continue to find attractive. It is up to us to utilize and integrate them into educational content as the time comes to improve learner capabilities and opportunities in Indiana.

It is our role to help information technology staff understand the needs of learners and when the time is right for deployment. Too soon and we waste valuable resources, but too late and we’ll be in a position of playing catch-up.

The May/June 2006 issue of EDUCAUSE Review lists the top 10 IT issues for this year. Number nine is e-learning and distributed teaching and learning.  Hallelujah! We made the top ten! Now that we’re on the radar screen, take advantage and bring your student's needs to the table when making a case with the campus "digital carpenters" in the IT department for what you need and when.

Networking may appear cool today, but it is becoming a commodity service that anyone can offer. Your campus IT leaders and staff should look to continuing education faculty and faculty from other units for the next big thing. It won’t be networking, but more likely HOW to use the network to better interact with your learners and audiences.

Train, teach, do

We must continue to effectively teach students of all ages and backgrounds how to learn. Off-campus lifelong learning opportunities will be critical to helping the citizens of Indiana and Americans as a whole improve their ability to be successful in a global world.

We—those of us in this room today—are the ones who will help train and teach our friends, neighbors, colleagues, learners, users, decision makers—whether urban or rural, well-off or not, educated or not, digital natives or digital immigrants. We are the ones who will help them step up and provide the next phase of innovation and people-power that drives it.

Training, teaching, and doing. Continuing education leaders must lead by example, identify opportunities for moving your school, department, or academic unit and the university ahead. You can bring the needs of your learners to the forefront and create an environment that supports those who prepared to take the lead when the time is right.

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

— Mahatma Gandhi

In Indiana, we have one of the strongest foundations in the country from which to continue building local and global solutions to these challenges. I urge us to lead the charge.

 

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Last updated: July 19, 2006