Must read: The year ahead for IT in Higher Ed

[Here is an excellent article by my good friend Lev Gonick on future trends for IT in Higher Ed.
I have been blogging about many of these trends, especially about how R&E networks and broadband will play a critical role in these developments.  For those who will be attending Internet Joint Techs in Baton Rouge I will be expounding on a number of these themes in my keynote talk on how research issues are operational drivers of network research  --BSA]

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/06/gonick-essay-predicting-higher-ed-it-developments-2012


The Year Ahead in IT, 2012
January 6, 2012 - 3:00am
By
Lev Gonick
This series of annual Year Ahead articles on technology and education began on the eve of what we now know is one of the profound downturns in modern capitalism. When history is written, the impact of the deep economic recession of 2008-2012 will have been pivotal in the shifting balance of economic and political power around the world. Clear, too, is the reality that innovation and technology as it is applied to education is moving rapidly from its Anglo-American-centered roots to a now globally distributed dynamic generating disruptive activities that affect learners and institutions the world over.
Seventy years ago, the Austrian-born Harvard lecturer and conservative political economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the now famous description of the logic of capitalism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
The opening of new markets, foreign or domestic … illustrate(s) the same process of industrial mutation – if I may use that biological term – that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
Our colleges and universities, especially those in the United States, are among the most conservative institutions in the world. The rollback of public investment in, pressure for access to, and indeterminate impact of globalization on postsecondary education all contribute to significant disorientation in our thinking about the future of the university. And then there are the disruptive impacts of information technology that only exacerbate the general set of contradictions that we associate with higher education.
The faculty are autonomous and constrained, powerful and vulnerable, innovative at the margins yet conservative at the core, dedicated to education while demeaning teaching devoted to liberal arts and yet powerfully vocational, nonprofit in their sensibilities and at the same time opportunistically commercial, in what Clark Kerr, inThe Uses of the University, called an "aristocracy of intellect" in a populist society. And while reports of the death of the American university are greatly exaggerated, there is an ineluctable force at play that continues to exert growing pressure against the membranes of the higher education ecosystem. The uneven and unequal dynamics of the global economy and information technology are major forces leading to growing pressure for universities to adapt through the process of creative destruction. The emergent trends I note below include disruptive forces that, if history is a guide, will lead future students of the history of technology to note the period ahead as the beginning of the next great tech bubble.
The year ahead may be among the most difficult ever for the economics of postsecondary education in much of the world.  At the same time, and in the same time frame, I believe we will see major new developments from the world of information technology that will, over time, lead the university to adapt and enable the familiar institution to not only persist but to maintain its relevance to the disruptive forces of society and economy all around it
Here are the 2012 top 10 IT trends impacting the future of higher education:

1.  Open Learning Initiatives Become an Institutional Imperative
Each year for the past three I have noted in this annual column the rise of open learning and open education resources enabled through information and communication technology. This past year’s experimentation by Stanford’s much-publicized global offering to tens of thousands of learners around the world followed by MIT’s MITxinitiative will quickly become a table stakes conversation for most top universities and colleges the world over. The range of subjects, the variety of modalities for delivery, and the extension of learning opportunities around the world are approaching an inflection point.  No one can or should ignore the most important and explosive opportunity in postsecondary learning in over half a century.  As new massive open online learning environments (MOOLEs) move from a nascent state along the maturity curve economic models, new entrants and laggards, winners and losers, and new centers of knowledge will follow.

2. The United States Launches Next Generation Network Infrastructure and Applications in Partnership with Neighbors and Cities
Boundary-spanning activities are not limited to online learning environments. In 2012, at least two major national next generation network initiatives will be launched.  The goal is to create a comparative advantage for the United States in the network-enabled 21st-century economy.  The tactical approach is to partner with those prepared to invest, build and operate new gigabit networks in neighborhoods around our universities and colleges as well as offer “above the network” services to our neighbors. The premise is that advanced network infrastructure to the environs around the university will catalyze new, never-before-seen applications and services that will improve the quality of life of millions of Americans who live around our major universities.
Gig.U is a national initiative led by U.S. National Broadband Plan architect Blair Levin, designed to create a national partnership among universities, telecommunication providers, and technology companies that leverages blazing-speed wired and wireless networks to build a network of testbed facilities in neighborhoods around our universities.  The project draws inspiration from Google’s Gigabit Community initiative that led to the decision to engage with Kansas City and early prototyping some years earlier in Cleveland in the development of OneCommunity and the Case Connection Zone to build gigabit fiber to the home networks and applications.
The second initiative is US Ignite, a multifaceted initiative led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Science Foundation, and a new 501(c)3. US Ignite seeks to catalyze and choreograph the development of a new generation of applications that can run on and leverage the next generation networks being deployed by NSF, Google, Internet2, NLR,  Gig.U and others.
The opportunity to extend unprecedented network access and services to neighborhoods around our universities will unleash new opportunities for innovation, collaboration, and opportunities for both our postsecondary institutions and the cities and towns within which we live, work and study.

3. Big Data is Here: Getting Beyond the Campus View
Zettabyte-scale data sets (1 billion terabytes) will be here in 2012, if we can achieve three preconditions. Prospects of an emergent zettabyte-scale big science world of proteomic data are being rate limited by existing network capacity, visualization tools for analysis and the encrusted logic of university funding and our IT organizations.  Network and storage innovation and visualization and analytical tools will continue to evolve at cloud scale and speed.   The prospects of creating a vector in which the technology and our analytical tools meet the needs of our research science community will require some unprecedented collaboration among US funding agencies and our universities. The most exciting development on this front is the set of initiatives led by Internet2 and their NET+ work. Led by former MIT CIO Jerry Grochow, NET+ is our single best opportunity to support big science and to position the United States to be able to compete in the growing competitive international big science playing field.

NET+ is tackling the thorny problem associated with Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction proposition. We can spend the next 25 years in "business as usual mode" attempting to build the infrastructure for big science on each of our university campuses and reinforce the patterns of securing funding, building platforms, and supporting analytical services. We will also miss the train. There is simply no way we can afford to create redundant infrastructure to support the next generation of science, discovery, and innovation. Three-letter federal funding agencies, state economic development and education organizations, research and education networks, research scientists, and of course our higher education leaders, including our CIO community, should join and challenge Net+ to quickly set its sights on the development of an unprecedented collaborative set of platform technologies. The race for big science is on. The stakes are too high to be left to single or even small numbers of campus solutions.

4. Big Data Applied to Creating a New Learning Genome
The promise of massively scalable capacity to enable, track, and assess learning outcomes based on personalized learning needs is both compelling and ready for prime time. Notwithstanding internal debates on learning styles (Pasher, Harold, et al. “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9.3 (2009): 105-119), the methods, modeling techniques, and rigor applied to big data science are well positioned to advance our understanding and application of learning sciences. The higher education marketplace is poised to begin marshaling the growing tsunami of data points and apply first generation algorithms to provide both predictive models of learning success and, over time, refine those algorithms to align different learning styles to learning successes.
The framework of a new learning genome begins in earnest in 2012. Look for a wide range of players from Blackboard Analytics, University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, Pearson Education, and perhaps ERP players to make a run at an “Enterprise Education Platform.” Startups with secret sauce are ready to scatter their pixie dust on colleges and universities to magically solve everything that ails us, from predictive modeling for retention to career counseling.
Growing interest in big data for college success has many CIOs salivating at the opportunity to build new platforms and realign their organizations to respond to the heightened interest in data-driven decision support.  But the science of learning as applied to a new learning genome is in a nascent state. We should be wary of the unbounded enthusiasm that the hype curve will generate in the next year and work on the foundations of campus readiness, governance and partnerships to focus on requirements and advancing our ability to contribute our loaf of bread to the emergent marketplace of “solutions.”

5. SmartPads and New Learning Content
Circa 1993, the most provocative concepts in educational technology were CD-ROM and laserdisc multimedia tools, like Macromedia Director and Bob Stein’s Voyager multimedia publishing ventures that produced works like Who Built America. Then came the World Wide Web.  Multimedia education content innovation remained largely frozen in place for nearly 20 years. The emergence of SmartPad technologies has led to a resurgence and revival of interest in multimedia content education. To date we have seen well-financed platform players transpose traditional textbooks and port them over to Kindle, iOS and/or Android environments.
The SmartPad is the experience platform of choice for many students.  Value-added functionality for textbooks like highlighting, clipping services, and collaboration tools will continue to extend the value of existing textbook content and the role of the traditional publishing industry. In 2012 a new class of learning content projects that combines advanced multimedia tools and hybrid interactions enabled over the Web will find their way to the mainstream. Look for gaming platforms on SmartPads (with integration on the web) to create quest adventures for disciplines as diverse as history and physical sciences.  Traditional research journals in disciplines such as law and medicine will start piloting the integration of multimedia content, well beyond nesting video or hyperlinked content.  Areas as diverse as nursing and workforce development will integrate artificial intelligence engines and advanced multimedia learning content to promote simulation experiences to facilitate meaningful use and practice. This emergent market will likely see several large venture back startups this year along with interest from a handful of forward-thinking traditional publishers.

[smip]

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/06/gonick-essay-predicting-higher-ed-it-developments-2012#ixzz1igRdxyH4
Inside Higher Ed

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R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.

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