What trends do you expect to have a significant impact on the ways in which colleges and universities approach their core missions of teaching and research?


  • Timeshifting – technology is allowing us more and more freedom to choose when and where we want to have an experience (Diana Oblinger)
  • Distributed Cognition/Social Networking (Diana Oblinger)
  • Visualization – 3-D can hold more info than 2-D (Diana Oblinger)
  • Increasing Individualization the explosive growth of self-publishing is just one example; Flickr and other online communities also encourage individualization of the experience; peer-to-peer has some interesting social dimensions that faciliate this as well (Diana Oblinger)
  • Mobility – People increasingly want their technology to go (Diana Oblinger); which for students means on the device they always have with them, their cell phones (Ruth Sabean)
  • IP again - see previous notes in Question 4 about walled gardens versus open content (Bryan Alexander)
  • Consumption to Creation - Web 2.0, aka the Programmable Web, aka Web as platform. The move from Web 1.0 applications, aka the Read/Write web to Web 2.0 (e.g. RSS, folksonomic tools and net documents mentioned above). Follow the Wikipedia link wrapped around Web 2.0. Click here to see a visualization of this movement. Also the Web 2.0 Meme Map produced by Tim O'Reily posted on Flickr. More visual representations. (Nick Noakes)
  • Remix and learn - Mashups of Web 2.0 applications. Click here to view a Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix. A new (coalescing?) group of people are pushing the web and are arguably a 'small pieces, loosely joined' type of distributed 'group'. Mashups here refer to mixes of Web 2.0 applications such as Goodle Maps, MSN Earth and Flickr. I think this is important because it is the spread of the remix culture that John Seely Brown and others discuss moving pervasively into all forms of learning. (Nick Noakes) For an interesting example, see ColrPickr, which uses Flickr's and other sources' APIs to allow people to search a wide range of photographic content simply by color. (Larry Johnson)
  • Large Data Sets Loosely Joined For that matter, the success of Google and Flickr who epose their data/APIS to third party developers is a milestone and contradiction to old models of protection (Alan Levine)
  • The new Services Ecnomy - Traditional departmental silos will have to be strongly bridged to give students the necessary education to work in a Services dominated economy. Using the language and needs of the digital natives ( interactivity, instant gratification, immersion, etc) colleges will teach sciences, economics, ethnography, etc, to all students using new media, including games. (Jean Paul)
  • Collaboration - technologies that help to shrink the world and facilitate communication within and among groups. Many are listed in the responses to this and the other questions. In order for collaboration to flourish the technology must be easy to access, easy to use, pervasive, and provide high quality delivery of the content. (Sue Bauer)
  • Faculty Development - Must be on-going, cutting edge, engaging, convincing. Must be supported by upper administration; i.e., finance the effort so that well-prepared personnel and high quality technology are employed to deliver & support faculty development. Faculty won't take the time nor make the effort to "develop" if the the program is not well supported (i.e., $$ & quality) (Sue Bauer)
  • Consumer Expectations - As individuals use technology for personal use, e.g. Amazon shopping, NetFlix, auto purchase research, getting health information online, sharing photos online, their expectations for e-services will be confronted with a perhaps rigid, 9-5, paper driven education establishment. (Alan Levine)
  • The Influx of Student Perosnal Technologies - Leveraging it for Academic Work - Students are bringing their own technology to campus and increasingly to class. Often their equipment is more contemporary that that offered by the institution, if it offers it at all. Universities and colleges will need to figure out how to leverage student-owned technology and rethink their teaching to take advantage these as resources, in some cases in place of what they have traditiionally acquired and made available for their students. (Phil Long)
  • Crisis of International Students - the US depends heavily on international students in the STEM disciplines, principally in graduate school. However, misplaced travel, immigration and resident work restrictions imposed in the name of 'security' severely isolate the US and threaten to make the only international experience students have in the future 'virtual'. (Phil Long)
  • Reduced Federal and State Financial Support - We're seeing the evisceration of NSF, the transforming of DOEd, and the closure of funding source after funding source happening before our eyes. From 2000 to 2004 NSF funding for teaching in the sciences and engineering has nearly been cut in half. Industry isn't stepping in to make up the declines. We must be more articulate and engaged with those making funding decisions or advising those who are, about the importance and critical necessity of federal support for teaching and learning in higher education. (Phil Long)
  • Open access - It may become increasingly important for institutions to expose their educational content by some kind of open access mechanism; the drive for this might come from the faculty themselves. (Richard Baraniuk ; a version of the open courseware initiative/movement that enables students (and ossibly others) to "publish" their work and build on the work of others under the CC license (Ruth Sabean)



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