Institutional Innovation

There is a lot of work that goes into making an event happen. It is not just about moderating it on the day: online or in a conference venue there is planning, logistics, delivery and aftercare.

I will develop these ideas here shortly

Each site will have a static arrival page, with links to a set of pages with programme, registration form, joining instructions, etc

There will be a blog

[In] Today’s more complex strategic environment … a threat or opportunity can emerge from almost anywhere, there is no single point for analysts to focus on. Targets’ intentions and relationships are much more dynamic, so the context in which raw intelligence must be analyzed is far more ambiguous. Access to information is almost unrestricted, now that the world is wide open and awash in data. (http://experts.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/06/26/intel_outside)

Although this was written about national security intelligence organisations, it could have been written about the world of education just as well. It illustrates the challenge for the Institutional Innovation Programme.

Synthesis of the programme might proceed as follows.

For each project:

• What is the local, immediate object of the project?
• How is the project acting upon its local immediate object: what are the technical and cultural enabling practices employed by the project
• For and/or with whom is this being done? What are the discipline and stakeholder communities?
• When and how do emergent and given understandings (rules) operate on and between the project, its communities and its object?
• Where is the role or perspective of the project positioned? Is is other-centred (user, student, etc) or institution-centred?
• Why is this of any wider concern? What are the intended wider outcomes?

Activity theorists provide a reasonably consistent set of malleable terms with which to structure an analysis of an activity system, and in embracing the concept of contradiction (reflection, tension and recapitulation) contribute to both understanding and explanation of the system under investigation.

As a support project manager I am exhorted to “speak to the projects” or “speak to the institutions”, as if projects and institutions were agents of whatever end was sought and had a simple identity, which could be addressed. One of the principal tensions or contradictions in the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme – and I suspect this is repeated across all education research and R&D programmes – is where to locate the main agency (active force) within the system. Does it lie with individual people: project and programme managers and team members? senior management teams? policy makers? Government? Does it lie with the collective team(s) or formally constituted associations, institutions and projects?

However, neither is it possible to fall back on a simplistic notion of only-human actors. As Latour (1999),  Law (ref) and other actor-network theorists have argued, convincingly, natural and made objects and even abstractions exert agentive force on one another. People and the things of their world (including institutions) – concrete and abstract – are mutually co-constituting. So, strictly, it is appropriate to speak of projects as being the agents in a network that is the Institutional Innovation programme. But, at the same time note that people do exert significant influence as individuals in the network due to a wide range of sometimes unrelated-to-the-system factors.
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The challenge is operationalising the model. This was my concern in the last post. We may draw three dimensions as:

• what/why/how
• micro/macro/agent
• emergent/given/project
• actor/network/awareness
• observation/theory/engineering
• or even x/y/z; height/width/breadth
• etc

But, the task is to choose the elements of any model such that they either answer given questions or are productive of new and useful questions.

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