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A newsletter for the students, faculty and staff of the Collin College. Published monthly. For information or submissions, call 972.599.3142. Cougar News welcomes student and faculty submissions. Next deadline: April 10 All submissions are due by 5 p.m. on the due date. Photos cannot be returned. Text should be emailed to mrobinson@ccccd.edu or sent on disk. Please submit copy that is proofed, edited and saved in Word format. Cougar News staff: Lisa Vasquez, director; Mark Robinson, editor; Marcy Cadena-Smith, contributor; Dana Schmitz, contributor; Sydney Portilla-Diggs, campus correspondent; Stephanie Hall, student correspondent; Nick Young, photographer and layout.
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Conference sheds light on the tomorrow of technology for colleges
By Garrison Reid
Special Contributor
The North Texas Community College Technology Forum was held Feb. 16 at the Spring Creek Campus. The annual event has experienced significant growth bringing together peer institutions to talk about technologies of today and tomorrow.
The keynote speaker Elliott Masie, an author, a futurist and a speaker recognized for his foresight on topics of technology, eLearning and the future of education, would describe higher education as a tugboat in the sense that it is increasingly harder to change direction as size increases. That might be true, but the day felt more like a jet boat. Attendees learned quickly about the current state of technology and technology for the future.
Masie's speech addressed the complications of higher education institutions to stay current. The keynote addressed the new era of education that Masie describes as "VUCA." The phrase defines today's vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Masie describes the ever-changing world as it relates to career training.
"I need to be able to see my content set as surrounded by a much more complex set of knowledge," he said. In the integrated world of today, "knowledge that is siloed becomes almost useless, irrelevant. I would argue dangerous," he added.
He explained that single function instruments have a limited lifespan. Masie's organization feels that due to an increasingly complex world, people will turn to triple-majors and quadruple-majors. Masie explained that, "People will be drawn to gaining content in a much more interdisciplinary fashion, and in fact, the tools of doing that are going to be ever more important for us."
Masie and his organization, The Masie Center, a learning lab and educational think tank based in Saratoga Springs, New York, strongly suggests staying on top of Web 2.0. The phrase Web 2.0 defines a new era of dynamic, user-generated personalized content. The complexity of web development is hidden behind even more complex web applications. The user perspective when working within Web 2.0 environments is simple, highly usable, customizable and personalized.
He suggests incorporating blogs and wiki technologies – a web concept allows a community to develop the content of a website – into educational environments and websites. In the keynote, Masie also notes a concept described as the "wisdom of the crowd." This defines the wiki (such as wikipedia.org) environment. Wikipedia is open to any web user, but Masie offers up an idea of wikis for scholastic topics such as advising or registration. What if these processes could be explained and defined through the collective knowledge of those involved? Would the fused perspectives explain or describe a topic more than any single perspective alone? Masie would certainly say so.
Technology is increasingly becoming part of the educational experience. From early elementary school computer access to fancy projectors and overhead devices at the college level, many personal introductions to cutting edge technology come from schools.
Podcasting, in my biased perspective, stands as one of the more important concepts addressed at the forum. With an increasing population of students owning mp3 players, higher education faces the challenge of successfully reaching this audience using these popular devices. The section discussed many iPod solutions to the current higher education dilemma. An example would be communication students doing field interviews on their iPod using a third-party recorder. Though it seemed like a significant resource allocation to develop podcasts, the audience seemed excited about podcasting.
That being said, with mp3 players, cell phones (with and without e-mail or cameras), it feels that today we are faced with the challenge of the opposite and, luckily for me, there are people focused on today and tomorrow.
Garrison Reid is the web communications editor at Collin College.
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