Institutional Innovation

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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This post sets out a first take on our taxonomy: a preliminary set of themes which may be used to brief and guide Institutional Innovation project assemblies and benefits realisation project proposals and calls.

This post does not yet draw on the analysis of phase three projects.(Word version)

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