Educause10

I have spent two intense days at Educause 2010 in Anheim. I guess it is hard to summarize all the impressions but I can at least provide a few observations.

1.       Change! Change! Change!
There is a lot of change going on, and more is coming. To all sectors, industries and none are spared. And if you believe Gary Hamel, the change to Higher Education is coming and most likely sooner than later. Likely sooner than most want.

I attended a presentation where the presenter showed a TV-clip from CBS where a few "experts" questioned the value of Higher Education from a strictly economical perspective. The investment in form of tuition fees etc did not match the future income. The ROI was simply not good enough. And if that is true or becoming true HighEd institutions around the globe need to reinvent education, much like Hamel was talking about.

I also had an interesting discussion with a colleague about the largest cost saving aspect in HigherEd, streamlining the education. Most business has evolved, and when questioned in an economical perspective, streamlined/standardized. Neil Gershenfeld touched on this in his presentation.

2.       Ipads - There are Ipads everywhere. Apple is doing something right… but curiously enough Apple as not present in the Exhibit hall. Is Apple abandoning HighEd or are they simply content with the market share?

3.       The economic downturn is over? The economics are stretched for most, but if you simply count the number of exhibitors in the Exhibit hall the downturn seems to be over.

4.       Exhibit hall - Why are there so many companies selling network stuff? Or hardware? If the future lies in the cloud, the exhibit hall in the future should consist of vendors selling services and functionality rather than physical hardware.

5.       Gershenfeld also talked about FabLab. I must admit it is a very interesting initiative. But most interesting was his comment about teaching kids to use new technology, ie to bypass all the education we often instill on our students. The normal case is often that we start to explain why something works, why it is soo complicated. And not, as Gershenfeld exemplified, to simply show how to use "advanced" technology to build something even more advanced. In all honesty, you don't have to know how to build a computer when you are using it, you don't have to know how to do advanced Java programming when you are using a cloud-service.

6.       The Secret Sauce - I have attended a few presentations where the sauce recipe has been discussed. The sauce is supposed to a few different things but often it is all about governance of IT. Well, I can give you my secret sauce too - IT should never be governed differently from any other part of a university. If we as IT professionals expect a President or CFO to get IT, we can't respond with ITIL, COBIT or weird looking Scorecards. We must allow IT to be a part of the university. I argue this is true in any organization, but I'll spare you that for now.