Institutional Innovation

Posted via web from George’s posterous

…according to:
Franda, Marcus (2001), Governing the Internet: the emergence of an international regime. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, CO, USA p 206

Posted via email from George’s posterous

I used to be concerned in this direction when making a transition from working in industrial training and development education to working in educational development roles in higher education.

All categorisations of this sort serve to channel people and institutions into differently funded and privileged regimes. There are no essentials of this sort. Conceptual categories are constructed. These constructions do have agentive force in networks of inference or meaning (epistemologies, actor networks, discourses). They may be useful tools of development. They may also be part of a colonial apparatus of social control.

Read the rest of this entry »

via ouseful.wordpress.com

This was written about visualising the opened09 Open Education conference. But it is more widely useful as an exploration of the affordances of visualisation generally as an aid to understanding. In the Institutional innovation programme I am trying to understand the basic questions underlying visualisation of the programme: people, projects, technologies, themes and how they link. Even before you ask the question, “what does it mean” you have to ask more fundamental questions. In observing that Twitter networks were interesting Tony Hirst first did a manual filter of frequency of posts over time. What are the first questions that give shape to the Institutional Innovation visualisation?

Posted via web from George’s posterous

Let’s consider just three projects:

• STEEPLE
• ASSET
• ELTAC

STEEPLE is building a network to support university wide educational podcasting. ASSET is developing a social network for video feedback on students’ assignments. ELTAC will provide an exemplar of institutional implementation of automated lecture capture.

On one hand these three projects do share some underlying technologies: video capture, storage, streaming, linking and so on. Flash and Flex probably comes into it. They have affinities but they also have many differences. On the surface, they do not appear to be addressing the same problem space. But unless they can be seen to be addressing something other than the technological substrate there will be little real institutional innovation.

Where the real innovation lies, I suggest, in these three projects and others like them (see below) is in the challenge they pose to text and print as the medium of academic knowledge creation, valorisation and propagation. The common theme is not podcasting or vodcasting or video feedback. The common theme is something like multimedia academic discourse. And, this has the potential to be quite disruptive to institutional life as we know it.

Read the rest of this entry »

If these are the intended outcomes of the Institutional Innovation Programme, What are the questions?

• Read the rest of this entry »

In this blog we are developing the synthesis of themes for the Institutional Innovation Programme. Other components of our synthesis activity include: the Planet site of all project feeds, where all the available project feeds from the programme are aggregated and searchable; the Project directory, where all the Phase 1, 2, 3 and Benefits Realisation projects can be found with links to their contacts and websites; and our Newsletter with news and updates from across the programme.

Institutional innovation is about the connected commons gaining a purchase on the institutions of society. In the JISC context this might be expressed as 21st century learners and institutions coming to an accommodation with each other.

While this is a process that can be traced back more than a thousand years (think Chuang Tzu and Roger Bacon), it is nuanced by the particular characteristics of today’s world where globalisation, liberalisation, innovation and participation are the dynamic context. Locally we are facing disruptions to our economies, political uncertainty, reduced institutional income, increased international participation, and epistemological engineering along baroque business lines. These are reflected in HEFCE policies and the Leitch Review with their increased emphasis on employer engagement. The demise of the short-lived DIUS and the rise of BIS, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills now in charge of universities.

Universities might align themselves in two broad ways (and within departments of any university a similar process might be seen). Some universities may position themselves as global change agents. This might be how most of the older universities see themselves, but it is by no means their exclusive preserve. Other universities might position themselves as institutional improvement facilitators.

How this positioning plays out will have both emergent and given parameters. These parameters are in tension or dialogue, as are the connected commons of 21st century learners in tension with the institutions of education.