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.

Part 1: WHY

The question of the reasons for change are complex. We address these at three levels, which might be called “political”, “pragmatic” and “programmatic”:

· “Political” – Institutional Strategy and Policy

· “Pragmatic” – Institutional ICT Concerns

· “Programmatic” – Intended Outcomes of the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme

WHY: “Political” – Institutional Strategy and Policy

WHY, from the perspective of senior management, government and other similarly positioned stakeholders are projects being funded? These are the external drivers for change: the grand narratives of economic turbulence, globalisation, reputation management and democratisation. Although top-down and external sometimes can seem distant and irrelevant from day to day practice, this “big picture” provides a very important piece of the context within which projects operate.

We take there to be five key drivers for institutional innovation: the “real reasons”, according to some, that projects undertake their work. These drivers emerge from conversations between JISC programme managers and members of institutional senior management teams, and there appears to be some consensus emerging around these as being the principal planks of institutional policies.

Economic recovery and public funding

Institutions are in receipt of public funds for teaching and research. There are two big pressures that arise from this. They are related. First, in the light of the economic downturn there are increased pressures on institutions, for example, to make 10% year on year savings. Cost saving and/or revenue raising will always be there in the background. But, second, is the related political discourse about the further marketisation of education. This is a complex political arena where student fees meets target culture and the so-called employer/demand-led funding models that are becoming so prevalent in the lifelong learning and skills sectors.

Although one of the key factors shaping the public discourses surrounding higher education, it is not yet apparent that the projects in the Institutional Innovation Programme are principally driven by this concern for economic recovery and public funding.

Quality, standards and reputation

This is a broad area of institutional concern and most projects within the Institutional Innovation Programme have at least part of their attention focussed here. Maintaining quality standards and reputation is related, in part, to the question of being in receipt of public money. But it also concerns such things as the environment, league tables, student satisfaction, and even the question of a professionalised workforce. At the very local level, professional reputations may be at stake. Most projects in the programme see themselves as addressing quality issues in one way or another.

International responsiveness

Often expressed as international competitiveness, many institutions, and the whole enterprise of higher education in the UK, are shaped in part by a competitive team-UK approach to understanding international relations. However globalisation is far more complex than the winner/loser sports metaphor allows. There are issues of working abroad for British students and studying in the UK for people from overseas. But international responsiveness also includes questions of immigration policy and open borders: student advisers are being asked to play a monitoring role on behalf of the British borders authority, for example, where interim course results and formative assessment are standing as proxy for attendance. The internationalised university has also to respond to issues raised by the market-based assumptions of GATS, Kyoto, as well as considering international emergency management and resilience not only in the curriculum but in the institution’s own planning.

Social mobility, equality, democracy

Finally, the social mission of universities includes human capital development element to increase participation in higher education.

WHY: “Pragmatic” – Institutional ICT Concerns

WHY, perhaps more pragmatically, are projects engaged in their work. These are the local, ground-level drivers of innovation: the petits recits set against the grand narratives of global, economic drivers; regardless of the big picture, for example, there will be 10,000 undergraduates enrolled at our institution, expecting to be taught and logging into the VLE next week.

Learning, teaching and assessment

· design, pedagogies, delivery, assessment, evaluation, feedback, mentoring

Research and development

· distributed collaboration, large data sets, visualisation, eresearch

Business and community engagement

· Local and regional agendas given equal weight to national and international agendas

Learning resources

· Repositories, databases, electronic libraries, IP, pre/post-print access, citation, reference management, social bookmarking, personal learning resources

Eadministration

· Records, work-flows, architectures, registration, examination management, certification, transcripts, lifelong learning records

Institutional ICT services

· data storage, access, use, representation, link to the physical network, transmission, signalling, operating systems, protocols

Estates

· Buildings and grounds, facilities, transport services, HVAC, physical resource management, energy management

Mobile, location-aware, ambient, pervasive computing (MLAPC)

· Mobile, Location-aware, Ambient, Pervasive Computing services (MLAPC) are entering the mainstream and increasingly students and staff are using mobile devices to access information, education and leisure services

· Access to a wide variety of data on a smart mobile device (such as iPhone, Android, Blackberry etc).

Green ICT

· Environmental footprint mitigation: energy requirement, cooling, space use

WHY: “Programmatic” – Intended Outcomes of the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme

WHY, programatically is the JISC funding projects? These are, categorically, the outcomes that are sought for projects, expressed in the call and by which the programme’s effect might be understood and evaluated.

Efficiency, effectiveness and quality

· Efficiency gains, effectiveness and quality; useable and used; it works, it impacts on resource use and is felt to be valuable

Sustainable technological solutions

· Sustainable technological solutions; aligned with physical/natural world, holistic, large systems thinking; guidelines, how-tos, technical specifications (QOS, WAN, rss, etc)

Enhanced community networks

· Enhanced community networks: pre-formal and formal (what Duton, 2007 calls “pro-social” networks); regular meetings of groups of people at conferences, assemblies, seminars, community and professional associations, working groups, committees; business groups, professional institutes; processes, institutional change processes; developing community in particular ways to facilitate change management. Expectation management.

Strategic leadership

· Strategic leadership: best practice exemplars, models, guides, sustained innovation

Technical development services

· Access to practical advice, technical services, demonstrators and detailed guidance; information, workshops, case studies, consultancy, skills provision

Part 2: What

Innovation Themes

WHAT is changing? What is really new? What are the consequences of responding to the strategic, pragmatic and programmatic drivers of change? There are new and unexpected re-aggregations of institutions, of practices, of epistemologies, of the built environment, and there are new kinds of learners

Portals and personal learning environments

· Portals and personal portals

· Views into novel multi institutional or disaggregated institutional programmes

· eportfolios and PLEs, for CPD and LLL

· New ways in to reconfigurable clusters, networks, disciplines or communities of participation involving multiple individual and institutional relationships: people, universities, colleges, schools, employers, regulatory bodies

Flexible frameworks for accreditation

· Frameworks marry employer and employee needs with recognition of achievement leading to an HE level course and the possibility of a degree or post graduate qualification.

· Providing a consistent framework for credit across an institution might lead the way for a more regional/national framework.

· Part of flexible frameworks for accreditation includes the whole APL spectrum: APL, APEL, APCL, APPL, etc.

New learning skills and digital literacy

· Evolving multimedia, new learning skills, problem solving, innovation management;

· Digital literacy: Literacy debate may go beyond skills into knowledge and semantics but needs to be grounded in skills: how to do things like learn and teach. Note particularly the rise of participatory multi-media and its importance to cultural sense making reflected in podcasting, lecture capture and audio-video feedback.

New knowledge: post-text epistemology

· New multimedia, post-text epistemologies impact on validation, assessment, marking criteria, professional regulation, membership of formal associations

· discipline underpinned not by text but by multimedia and hyper-media linked representations and a connected (digital) commons; epistemological chaos

Physical/digital convergence

· Aware physical/digital environments;

· Reconfigurable spaces for learning, stability/mutability of the physical estate;

· Sustainability, reusability, personalisation of space: education commons, access grid, quality of service, VOIP, distributed collaborative space, cones of silence;

· Learning landscapes

Formal semantics and standards

· Web standards: rdf, micro-formats, identity, profiles, ontologies, metadata, dbWiki, tags, key words, controlled vocabularies, rss, opml, doi, etc;

· AND physical building standards and regs (plumbing, heating, lighting, energy management)

Widening participation

The social capital reciprocal and response to the policy driver of “Social mobility, equality, democracy”:

· New kinds of learners

· Access, openness, progression, retention, mentoring, CPD, communities of…,

· professional standards, graduate attributes, licences to practice, professional indemnity

· Creative Commons

· Peer-to-peer participatory culture

· Free flowing and strategic innovation

Part 3: How

Techno-cultural enablers

HOW, at the micro level, are projects doing what they are doing? What are the specific tools, standards, processes, being used? This will be a long and incohate list. Coherence is found at the level of innovation themes. This captures the diversity of the programme. PHP or Java? Google Apps or Microsoft SharePoint?

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

Very quickly the event took on an optimistic change-management perspective. The opening speaker, Steve Outram observed that individuals in institutions were ready for change but that change had to be relevant as much, if not more, for the individual and work group as to the larger institution. Citing Gibbs he suggested that change starts with individual practice and thinking and builds to co-ordinated strategy having an effect on the external environment.

Throughout the day projects shared their work in breakout sessions looking at the local “techno-cultures”: their own niches, and we began to relate these to “units of change” or “innovation themes”. Broadly, in our programme change appears to be happening in five areas. There is a fuller discussion of this here.

1. Portals and personal portals
2. Frameworks for accreditation
3. 21st century skills (digital literacy)
4. New ways of knowing
5. New patterns of participation.

The event was very positive about the potential for change. There was refreshingly little of the we-can’t-do-that-here which can sometimes pervade discussions about change in the higher education context. All the links to slides and the recordings of the Plenary Elluminate will be found here.

Continuity for the day was provided by a special edition of the Sounds of the Bazaar internet radio show, with important interviews with practitioners as well as music for the coffee breaks. And, in the evening we had a fun and informative online social activity using the music sharing service Blip FM and Twitter. As well as listening to each other’s picks we used tags to link content across two social media platforms: learning and playing

Looking ahead, we are taking the change theme forward into our annual face-to-face programme meeting on 28-29 January in Birmingham, where the focus of the event will be on “Acting as Change Agents in Higher Education”. The event will feature a “trade show” of project outputs emphasising usability and re-usability of the “products” of our work.

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?

Mark Drapeau points out the similarities between Twitter and Wikipedia (http://tinyurl.com/musjhb).

Faviki (http://www.faviki.com/) has implemented a semantic tagging approach on their site based on DBpedia

I wonder, if such a thing does not exist, can we – or someone – build one of these for any common platform using existing tools?

Could a person, for example, mine the specific wisdom of their, say, Twitter community by using a tag vocabularly drawn only from items found from blogs and other social network sites claimed by that set of people? Or could they normalise across their Delicious, Diigo and Technorati accounts? Or, in my particular instance, using a tag vocabulary drawn only from the blogs of the Institutional Innovation Programme?

Would anyone in the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme like to come together in an “Assembly” (http://assemblies.inin.jisc-ssbr.net/) to explore the tag-cloud field looking for helper tools to help us to make sense of the burgeoning folksonomic wisdom (?) of the Internet?

Or if there is a super easy tool that does this that I have not found, just point me at it! Thanks.

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Faviki is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to tag webpages you want to remember using Wikipedia terms. This means that everybody uses the same names for tags from the world’s largest collection of knowledge

If the wikipedia ontology: DBpedia and the ontologies from Delicious, Digg and Diigo could be mashed up into a tagging facilitation tool that plugged into WordPress, Blogger, etc I’d use it. Would you?

Posted via web from George’s posterous

That is the ‘unofficial’ stuff. Now on to the official things – papers, symposia and the like. I have tried to develop a series of linked papers / contributions for these events (I am not sure whether it will work) around the themes of Web 2.0, digital identities and Personal Learning Environments.  For the first of the events, Alt C, I am making a presentation as part of the project team from the now finished Jisc Emerge support project.

And. much as ever, comments on the past are comments on the present. I am interested to see how this symposium evolves and whether any movements might be detected; what might they be? I think the new themes are
- something around new multimedia epistemologies and their impact on the privileged academic literacies of text
- something around portals and personal portals (portfolios and PLEs) for CPD: highly reconfigurable views onto complex networks of collaboration and accreditation: regional, trans-regional, national, trans-national, which might disrupt traditional institutional identities, linked to
- Flexible frameworks for accreditation.

Posted via web from George’s posterous

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

• 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.

Back in 2000, Bruce Ingraham wrote Scholarly Rhetoric in Digital Media. In this article he addressed

the hypothesis that scholarly argument as it is presently pursued is mediated through print; but the advent of modern ICT offers alternative media to support scholarly publication.  However, few academics have much expertise with these media.  Accordingly, if this technology is to be fully exploited the academic community will need to acquire such expertise and this may have significant implications or the way in which scholarly argument is constructed.  This hypothesis is addressed from a rhetorical perspective and consideration is given to what the impact of alternative publication media may be on the structure of scholarly argument.

But it is more than that. We know how epistemological processes work in print. We know how peer review, and citation indices work. Industries are built on print-based epistemologies. Libraries are repositories of print. We give feedback in print because we value the perceived solidity of the written word. Digital text is being grudgingly accepted into the epistemological apparatus. The spoken word is at best an essay. A lecture series isn’t fully knowledge until it is published. A conference presentation counts for little in the evaluation of research. It is not until the presentation is written up as an article and printed that it has weight in the academic world.

And a video?

The problem is twofold. One, we do not yet know how to make non-print-based knowledge count. And two, there are a lot of people whose livelihoods and reputations depend on print-based epistemologies.

And a little aside: what has happened to the following Users and Innovation projects?

• ASEL or http://reports.jiscemerge.org.uk/Details/ASEL.html
• Synnote/Macfob or http://reports.jiscemerge.org.uk/Details/MACFoB.html
• Sounds Good or http://reports.jiscemerge.org.uk/Details/Sounds-Good.html

• Improvements to the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of educational and administrative processes within the institution(s) related to key areas of institutional ICT concern;
• Institutionally-sustainable technological solutions to problems in key areas of ICT concern, that are aligned to relevant institutional strategies and combine the open standards based and service oriented approaches of the e-Framework for Education and Research;
• Enhanced community networks, working with regional and national, sector-wide organisations that will encourage institutions to share practice in key areas of institutional ICT concern;
• Improved leadership to the sector in the role that technology can play in developing effective institutional strategies that address key areas of ICT concern and align ICT with education, research and administrative policies
• Enhanced capacity, knowledge and skills within the institution(s) and, for the wider sector, access to strategic advice, demonstrators and detailed guidance on how to use ICT effectively in key areas of institutional ICT concern.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/institutionalinnovation.aspx

The two key questions have to be:

• what are the key areas of institutional ICT concern?
• and what are the relevant institutional strategies and policies?

The first question has been addressed by an analysis of:

• HEFCE funding streams (Learning, Teaching and Assessment; Research and Development; Business and Community Engagement
• JISC committee themes, in particular JOS (role of technology within strategic management, e-Framework and architectures, changing staff roles, relationships and skills, e-Administration, business innovation)
• JISC strategic themes (Network, Access management, information environment, content, eLearning, eResearch, eAdmin, and Business and Community Engagement
• UCISA’s top ten concerns (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/02/ucisa.aspx)
• SCONUL topics (http://www.sconul.ac.uk/topics_issues/)

We can say with some confidence that the key areas of institutional ICT concern are (http://inin.jisc-ssbr.net/2009/06/21/analysis-discovery-and-synthesis-themes/):

• Learning teaching and assessment
• Research and development
• Business and community engagement
• Learning resources
• eAdmin
• Institutional ICT services
• Physical estates and learning spaces
• Mobile, location aware and pervasive computing
• Green ICT

The second question relevant institutional strategies and policies may be:

• Economic recovery and public funding
• Quality, standards and reputation
• Research governance
• International responsiveness
• Social mobility

So, returning to the outcomes, in respect of these, the program wants to deliver

• Efficiency, effectiveness and quality
• Sustainable technological solutions
• Open standards based, service oriented approaches
• Enhanced community networks
• Strategic leadership
• Access to strategic advice, demonstrators and detailed guidance

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.