Institutional Innovation

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 »