From the Campus to the Future
EDUCAUSE, and partner organizations from Australia, the Netherlands, and the UK, undertook a visioning of the future of higher education which resulted in a white paper titled "The Future of Higher Education: Beyond the Campus." Just in case you don't want to read the entire white paper, "From the Campus to the Future," is an article in EDUCAUSE Review, in which Diana G. Oblinger undertakes a synopsis that stands alone as a good read and a valuable resource.
In looking at the drivers of change and the enablers of the future, several themes emerge. One is that many solutions will be found "above the campus." Although faculty, students, and staff are affiliated with a specific institution, the resources they access, the colleagues they interact with, and their frame of reference go well beyond the campus. Accessing a book may be more easily done online than physically. And the worldwide collections of resources (books, artifacts) far exceed what is available on any single campus. Computing cycles, storage, and specific applications are instantly accessible and scalable as a shared resource aggregated "above campus." As a result, higher education institutions need to focus less on ownership and more on access. Students do not need to own physical copies of books that can be accessed online. Applications such as e-mail can also be accessed in the cloud, and educational resources are often located in freely accessible repositories whose material is owned by no one — yet by everyone.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: environmental scanning, future, learning spaces, Oblinger
Pursuing Needless Innovations
Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) argues for the value of "traditional" learning and matriculation, and wonders why America's elites don't seem to want the great education they got, for the rest of the population. (Here is the Zephyr Teachout essay that we think is the one he refers to. It's also worth reading. Ekman's essay is here, from University Business: Most Americans today don’t harbor resentments against their alma maters. Nor is the popular critique of higher education mainly a matter of outrage over high tuition. Rather, the public criticism of colleges is, to a surprising extent, aimed at the educational experience itself. Discarding the baby with the bathwater, Zephyr Teachout’s widely-circulated essay argues that the traditional classroom-based college will soon be replaced by online education, and that the differences in reputation among colleges will no longer matter. I don’t know where Teachout went to college, but her view—especially that a college’s prestige won’t matter—seems more wishful than realistic.
Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring: Labels: academic planning, innovation, institutional planning, learning, learning spaces, liberal education
Rebooted Computer Labs Offer Savings for Campuses and Ambiance for Students
 Sometimes it's lonely on campus, being a planner. Start planning now to attend higher education's premier planning conference for 2010, SCUP–45, July 10–14 in Minneapolis, where you can network and converse with more than 1,000 of your peers and colleagues.
 What happens when "creative clutter" meets transparency in a new, elegant building? Robert Campbell reviews the new MIT Media Lab building at MIT. Frank Moss, the Media Lab’s director, puts it this way: “It will take time to regain the sense of mess and to repopulate with junk.’’It’s the classic marriage of form and content. The new building is Snow White and the Media Lab is Mad Max. Time will reveal how well the marriage works. That said, viewed simply and purely as a work of architecture, this is a wonderful building. You can think of it as an exercise in transparency. The Media Lab has long been famous for hiding itself in a building by I.M. Pei that was a nearly windowless box. The new building, which joins the Pei at one edge, is exactly the opposite. From outside, you can look all the way through it from one end to the other. It’s sheathed in shimmering glass and metal screens that allow about half the sunlight through to the interior. You feel that the building is temptingly veiled, not blanketed. During a recent tour of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, we noted the plethora of 'breakout' rooms which resemble the spaces this article describes as being created from what used to be computer labs. More than 11 percent of colleges and universities are either phasing out public computer labs or planning to do so, according to this year's survey of college technology leaders by the Campus Computing Project, released last month. At colleges that have not pulled the plug on their labs, nearly 20 percent are reviewing the option. This is the first year the Campus Computing Project has asked the question.
UVa will phase out computer labs like this one, at Thornton Hall, and let students log in to the campus network on their own machines to use expensive software. Institutions agree that computer labs, much like student centers and libraries before them, are due for an extreme makeover. That is why several technology officials contacted by The Chronicle believe in creating work spaces that hardly resemble the computer labs of the past.
These new spaces might be lounges filled with modular furniture and plasma televisions; virtual labs that give remote laptops access to software; or bigger, better computer rooms with state-of-the-art machines and pleasing architecture that can act as de facto student centers. Fortunately for young caffeine addicts, nearly all officials interviewed said they planned to let students drink and eat while typing away—something that has long been forbidden in traditional computer Labels: academic planning, computer labs, facilities planning, learning spaces, technology
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