So we’re about 20 hours into this week, and so far I’ve spent over 10 of those hours on drafting an academic technology plan for my institution.

I have trouble explaining why it’s so hard to draft, but perhaps if you’ve ever tried to tie a policy document into the greater fabric of policy documents at your college or large corporation, you’ll understand. What seems to be happening is I’m coming at this downward, from the broad objectives of the college, and then trying to fit my thinking into that framework. Like all policy documents, it has to be a bit of a magic trick — I have to show how the aims of the college have led to this approach to technology the whole time.

But of course, my understanding of technology doesn’t really descend from the aims of the college. It comes from a lifetime of solving problems using computers and networks, from ten years of applying technology to “academic” problems, and from political blogging, where it’s become really apparent to me that even in areas where problems are not technical that a creative orientation to technology can quite literally allow students to change the world.

So here, completely off the top of my head, 15 minutes before the meeting where I will present my tortured institutional draft of the AT plan — here is what I would *like* to it to say:

We’ll use technology to help students and faculty to change the world. Sometimes that means pulling together people to colloborate and solve a sticky problem. Sometimes it means providing a service that no one has thought to provide. Sometimes it means setting up a Learning Management System to automatically import a student roster so that a professor can spend that time with students instead of Excel. Ultimately if you can show us an interesting problem, we can tell you how technology and network thinking can address it better. The more it would improve the world relative to the effort required, the higher it goes in the queue.

We’ll graduate students who think creatively about technology and loose processes. Today’s world belongs to the systems analyst, the person who understands that a loose process is as much a machine as a tightly programmed circuit board. The person that understands where it makes sense to encode a process in a circuit board, and where it makes sense to encode a process in a short verbal agreement. The person that knows how to evaluate a process as a whole, and swap out the defective or inefficient bits, and improve what they do incrementally. Our students when confronted with a task won’t ask where the application is that can do it for them — they’ll assemble new and old technologies in front of them, like a chef reverse engineering a recipe. And they’ll start to mix.

We will bring our own institution (and our learning) into the Networked Age. The Information Age has been supplanted by the Network Age. And while that network is technology-mediated, the ramifications of this transition exceed technology. Students will graduate into jobs that don’t exist yet. They don’t need facts. They need to learn to use the network to learn. We’ll stop teaching them in ways they will never encounter again, and embrace our mission of showing them ways to learn which they can use over their lifetime. This means more wikis and less lecture halls, more Just-in-Time learning, more distributed knowledge. What they need is on the network. Let’s show them how to get it.

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Well, times up.  Have to head to this thing now. That’s not complete, but it’s amazing what you can write in 15 minutes if you start from the direction you entered the issue. And it’s amazing how many hours it takes to write against the grain….

Been trying out Brightcove as a video service. Test film follows below:

If anyone has any thoughts on the use of Brightcove, please share.

I think this video does a nice job of showing what a museum a university education has become:

(h/t Andy Rush)

So after all the political stories I’ve labored over, I finally made front page on Huffington Post — with a story I wrote in 5 minutes while downing my morning coffee.

Oh well, I’ll take it! Thanks to the Off The Bus crowd who have been pushing hard to get these stories by amateurs like me better placement.

…and it’s not even that hard.

I’ve said before that one of the fundamental things the university has not come to terms with is that in an environment where failure is inexpensive, undergraduates can be pushed to solve real problems, rather than to practice solving problems they might encounter once they get out of college.

In the world of net-enabled education, this is possibly the most important differentiator.  And it will change the face of undergraduate education.

The product that colleges will be giving you in twenty years is not a degree, but a reputation. The number of students that have done something significant and public in undergrad will hit a critical mass, so much so that the reputation of colleges will be largely determined by what they helped their students do while the students were under their mentoring.

Here’s the thing: people in higher education often object — “But our students aren’t that smart! Not everybody can be an entrepreneur!”

Or they say something else with more syllables, but they mean that.

They are wrong.

Case in point — the hottest New Hampshire political blog right now is not Blue Hampshire or GraniteGrok. It’s New Hampshire Presidential Watch, a blog run by a St. Anselm’s undergrad.

What is it that attracts visitors?  Incisive political analysis? Horse race statistics? Round the clock reporting?

Nope. What the kid who runs it does is take all the emails and other info he gets from all the Presidential candidates, and does the painful but absolutely essential work of organizing it into a single calendar. And because he’s become the destination site to find out who’s in the state, candidates now send him the updates. And because he now has an audience, he *can* do political reporting, and be read by thousands.

No algorithms. No advanced marketing plan. Just someone saying to a kid, you know, I wish I didn’t have to go to 16 different sites to figure out who was in town, and the kid thinking: I can solve that.

The talent is not in the compilation of these materials. It’s in that impulse: I can solve that. And because this impulse is what fuels the new economy, this kid will never want for a job. He will graduate Saint A’s, and the degree will be a footnote to what he already accomplished.

He’ll graduate with a reputation.

You can call it service, or entrepreneurship, or academic engagement; in truth, it’s all three.

What you can’t call it is idealistic. It’s here and now. It’s happening. And there’s absolutely no reason not to embrace it.

I know it’s good form to say where you’ve been when you disappear off the face of your blog for two weeks.

Answer: bilge-pumping.

That said, we’ll try to do better next time.

Now onto to other things.

A side project I do got some news coverage this past Sunday. And it was a pretty nice article in that they represent our political community site fairly well. (I wish sometimes they’d focus on how hard it is to do this with so little spare time, but oh well).

But the hook in these things is always so predictable I have to laugh. Here’s the final paragraphs:

“Bloggers are the new key influencers in the community. National bloggers are shaping opinions. They are engaged in the daily dialogue of national affairs and some voices are very influential,” Hynes said.

He said in New Hampshire for the 2008 election, three or four influential bloggers have emerged with “tier one” access to candidates – i.e. press credentials to cover events and interview the candidates – when many believed the blogging trend had plateaued.

“Bloggers will have a marginal effect, but a lot of races are decided in the margins,” he said.

I hate to pick on this article, because it got more stuff right than most. And they are just quoting Patrick Hynes a “blog outreach consultant” (Wow!) for John McCain. But much of the article follows the same philosophy, ticking off a list of types of access the campaigns give us, and saying isn’t it crazy? The world is upside down!

But it’s the press that has the battery wired backwards.

The reason blogging works is not because we’re so influential that we get access. The reason it works is that we don’t care about access. Frankly, we’re not corrupted by it. I receive so many invites to blogger conference calls I route them to a special folder. I hardly ever go. Why should I, when it’s just the candidate repeating the same talking points they just put out in a press release?

And I think it drives some campaigns crazy, but I don’t write stories off of press releases either. And although I get invited to “surrogate” events, for the most part I don’t go. I have no desire to see so and so’s daughter tell me how great their Dad is. Sorry. I just see that as another commercial.

Patrick Hynes, the blog outreach coordinator quoted, doesn’t know me, but I know his candidate. And that’s by design. I took a $119 video camera to an event of McCain’s last Sunday, and I sat in the back row, listening and filming.

I’ve been thinking about what I heard, and how he reacted to the audience questions. I’ve been thinking about which issues he dodged and which he didn’t, and how this might differ from his last spin through New Hampshire. I’ve been thinking about the reaction of people around me — people I might add that were the audience, not fellow reporters in some “press pen”.

All that “access”? Let’s be honest. The access beyond see the candidate in a Town Hall setting is spin control. It’s entry into the PR ecosystem.

And I have very little interest in it. Strip away credentials and access, and I’d argue what you get is better reporting.

"I will be arguing, and this is a controversial opinion, that Madison’s support for democracy comes not because of a belief in the innate wisdom of the majority in society, but because he believes that in the absence of objective answers it is better for the honor of the individuals in society to allow everyone to participate…"

We’re having a Symposium on Citizenship here at Keene State, November 6-9. And since we are putting together a blog on the event, we thought it might be a good idea to go out and get some video of some of the speakers talking about their presentations.

We started with Dr. Sander Lee, who will be presenting on James Madison and Democracy (we’ll get the date and time soon) Renee Staudinger, a student intern of ours, filmed it with our lo-fi guerilla vlogger equipment (and did a splendid job — thanks Renee!).

Here’s the clip:

For more on Dr. Lee, check out his personal page. This will also be available on the Citizenship Symposium site (on KeeneWeb) as soon as we whip that site into shape. I’ve also x-posted this on KeeneFeed, a sporadic blog about Keene State that we’re trying out here.

The hardest thing to answer when you’re trying to start an institutional blogging community is what the legal ramifications of it are.

It’s not only hard to answer — it’s impossible. It’s a legal question. You’re not supposed to answer it.

The problem is that it’s hard with this sort of thing to start from a default position of strength. Without other institutions doing it, you’re forever the person that has to prove the negative: that there are not legal issues large enough to forgo the venture.

And unless you have a web-savvy lawyer on your side, you’re kind of stuck.

Until now. Because while I follow the good practice of never giving legal advice, I also follow the practice of pointing to the behavior of people smarter than me. So I plan to send this link around a lot:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/

That’s right. Harvard Law has a blogging area that’s almost an exact policy match to the UMW/KeeneWeb model.

And if the suits down at Harvard are listening to Weinberger (or whoever is at Berkman now), I’m feeling pretty good about our little venture.

Definitely check out Harvard’s Weblogs: not only is it a key bookmark that you are going to want to mail around, it’s a great example of a motley weblog community in action: you can read an analysis of contingency fees, a defense of Britney Spears, admissions talking about their favorite moments from admissions phone calls, and a discussion of Samuel Johnson-themed beer labels.

So… are there any further questions?

So, deciding I had not reached my full geek potential, last night I started a league in Fantasy Congress.

Fantasy Congress is like Fantasy Football — you pick a team out of all available members of Congress and the Senate, and during a specified season your team competes — if my Senators “stats” (for legislation passed or co-sponsored) beat all the other Senators stats, I win in that “position”, and so on.

It’s actually a litttle more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

So I started thinking — would this be useful at all in a politics classsroom?

My first thought was no. Because the model is wrong. It’s a lousy model to compute effectiveness. 

To cite just a few examples: co-sponsoring is rated too highly in the formula relative to authoring legislation. And attendance, which has very little to do with congressional sway, is in the formula, as is level of news coverage, which tends to favor presidential candidates, regardless of their congressional duties. And “Mavericking”, the act of voting against your party, is often a sign of strength, but it also occurs where weak politicians find themselves sitting on districts with rapidly changing red-blue demographics — giving points for bowing to that pressure seems just wrong.

So that was my first thought. 

My second thought was that any kid who left an American Government class able to articulate what was wrong with Fantasy Congress’s model of congressional power would leave with knowledge superior to that of 99.9% of Americans.

Where the professor in a class has enough knowledge to assist students in critiquing underlying models, a bad model can do you as well as a good one. I still love the Cognitive Arts dream of highly engaging, highly accurate simulations. But failing that, get an inaccurate simulation and have students critique it. They may learn just as much.

So, like the WordPress junkie I am, I’ve been trying to recruit other Keene Staters here into my fold. Trying to get me some co-bloggers.

And so it was I broke the will of one Jenny Darrow, who leads and implements much of the Academic IT initiatives over here.

Her first posts are up and the third one is music to my ears. Here’s the thumbnail sketch:

The point is that we (anyone over the age of 35) assume that students don’t need support with any kind of technology, that somehow by some miracle they know how to configure their bluetooth access, create a blog, subscribe to syndicated content, create digital presentations, etc. It’s not a wrong assumption — it’s just not entirely accurate.

Agreed. I’ve often railed against the mindset that turns higher education’s abdication of responsibility in this regard into a “blinking VCR clock” joke. Students come to us with certain skills. They always have. Our job is to take those skills and help them refine and focus them. And if we lack the institutional capability to do that — well, it’s really not that funny.

We assume that because kids are blogging, they are blogging effectively. That these are binary skills, stuck either in the on or off position. But it’s not that simple.

But then Jenny goes further, because she goes to the 2007 Horizon Report and pulls the money quote from it:

Although new tools make it increasingly easy to produce multimedia works, students lack essential skills in composition, storytelling, and design. In addition, faculty need curricula that adapt to the pace of change and that teach the skills that will be needed—even though it is not clear what all those skills may be.

This is exactly right. And if we are going to teach them how to tell stories in this new media landscape, we are going to have to see new media as more than a bolt-on to existing courses, and certainly as more than a specialization within a major. We are going to have to see new media as a set of dialects in which all graduates must be fluent.

And if that means we have to set our VCR clock in the process, so be it.

Oh, and fellow rebels, go give Jenny some newbie love. For or against, it doesn’t matter…just enough feedback to nurse that blogging addiction….