Institutional Innovation

[apologies for formatting irritation - grrrrr]

This post introduces an approach to understanding innovation in higher education institutions through the perspective of the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme (here referred to as InIn).

This is a work in progress, and draws on previous postings on synthesis.

The post is in three broad parts. The first part addresses the question, “why?” Why change? Underlying conditions place pressure on institutions from many directions and institutions respond in various ways. The second part addresses the question, “what?” What is changing in higher education? What are the broad themes that can help us see the underlying shifts not only in practice but also in the shape and purpose of higher education institutions. And finally the third part looks briefly at the question, “how?” How are we effecting – bringing about – change in higher education institutions?

This report is an attempt to explain the thinking behind the new database: http://ssbrdb.jisclab.net/ and the mindmap visualisation, from which the database and this report derive. Click the image for a big one.

The report is possible because of the great work that is being done by the 40+ projects in the programme and the efforts of the support team in trying to get behind the day-to-day to understand the real drivers for change, and the real consequences of changing. Thank you all.

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On 12 November the JISC Institutional Innovation Support & Synthesis project conducted an upbeat online programme meeting where over 70 participants addressed the pragmatics of institutional innovation. The aim of the day was for the 40 projects in the programme to consider the challenges and tensions of institutional innovation, to look at approaches and solutions to innovating in institutions, and to consider the sustainability of innovation.

The meeting, titled “Institutional Pragmatics” took, unsurprisingly, a pragmatic view.

We considered the strategic drivers for change. At the project level it is easy to lose sight of the big picture and stay focused on the details of implementation. This meeting was an opportunity to come up for air and consider how our projects might drive (or be driven by):

• Economic recovery and public funding
• Quality standards and reputation
• International responsiveness
• Social mobility, equality, democracy

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I wonder if there is a WordPress or other blogging platform plug-in that uses a mash-up to suggest tags from an underlying, emerging vocabulary formed from various social knowledge sites?

Within a social tagging system such as Diigo, Delicious, Technorati, Digg, Twine: even in your own blog, tags and categories emerge and are guided. One’s own tagging practice converges and key terms become more often used: variants (plurals, -ing forms, caps, etc) get ironed out or normalised.

However this facility doesn’t appear to extend across social tagging platforms easily.

In the Planet aggregator (http://planet.inin.jisc-ssbr.net/) of the project feeds from the 3 phases of the JISC Institutional Innovation programme, from 21 feeds (just under half the projects in the programme), there are 256 tags, of which many of the most used: “project” (11 instances), “jisc” (9 instances), “funded project” (5 instances) are useless for sorting this category: they are all JISC funded projects. Most of the tags are used only once or twice. There are many variants of what is probably the same item: “mobile” (1), “mobile app” (1), “mobile phone” (1), “mobile technology” (2), “iphone” (3), “iphone ipod touch” (1), “ipod touch” (1), “itouch” (1).

There may be some indicators of clusters: “podcasting” (15), “pedagogy” (7), “APL” (5), “learning space” (5) and “learning spaces” (2), “mashup” (4), “open content” (4), but they are weak signals amidst a lot of noise.

What to do?

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Posted via web from George’s posterous

Posted via web from George’s posterous

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.

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

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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.