The Future of Technology at Eiu - Part 1

♪ [music playing--no dialogue] ♪♪. (male narrator) Jon Beard. Fifteen years in education instructional technology assessment and planning. Twenty-five years consulting and delivering instructional technology solutions. Fifteen years consulting for education software and hardware providers. CEO of Knowledge Network Solutions (KNS). [no dialogue]. I think what I'd like to do first is to spend a little bit of time talking about maybe some of the global things that are going on, not only here in the US but internationally. And I think that's important to kind of get grounded that way first. Because what you're going to be doing is you're going to be setting up your vision, your mission for instructional technology and what you want to do administratively. And I think it's just really important for all of our education here in the United States to stop and think about what's happening globally. And so I have a podcast that we'll play maybe when we get the speaker system situated. But, let's just think for a second. How many of you have had a chance to read this particular book, "The World Is Flat"? That's kind of a call-out, it's kind of an awakening, wouldn't you say? For those of you that have not read this, I strongly recommend that you go pick a copy up. It's probably right here in your library, I'm sure it is. But there's a couple things, just for those of you that haven't had the opportunity at this point, I'd like to bring up. First, he talks about--Tom Friedman does in here--three levels of globalization, and one level of globalization is really kind of back to the Columbus days, through the 1800 period. And he talks about discovery and coming to America and setting up America, thinking he's going to go around to India and so forth. But it was around discovery. The next period or globalization period was probably from 1800 to the year 2000 if you want to think of it that way, just almost right in our back yard here. And it was kind of the industrial revolution and, you know, we had a lot of things going on there. We had an opportunity to get into what we think of now as the IT revolution and making things happen. And since 2000 and up until we are today and all these things started kind of happening together, we start looking now at this third globalization point. And this is really something that has just taken off, it's really huge, it's made a lot of change for us. With the internet, what we've done is we've kind of set a pipeline to all of our neighboring countries around the world. And that pipeline has done a lot of things for us here in the US in terms of equalizing, you know, kind of being the great equalizer that we thought it would be for the US. But guess what? It's made all of our other countries out there equal as well. And what that means to us is that it really comes down to now not being, you know, the US having the knowledge and everything, the ability to compute and to be creative. It's really sent the internet and all the information, the ability to collaborate, the ability to create, to all of these countries. And as a result of that, I think what we've got to really stop and think about now is that what we're doing educationally and what we assess internally to the US is against our standards in many cases and what we've been assessing against over many years. What we're thinking about now and one of the items that I'd like to bring up in just a second is the 21st century learning skills and the framework for 21st century learning. And I want to talk about collaboration and critical thinking and all these other topics that we have to now address in our educational institutions. What I'd like to do is bring up a little screen right here and just--'cause I know that you as deans represent a lot of the different departments. And I'd like to maybe just draw this out if I may, going to look here. You know...we kind of had the technology revolution and with the technology revolution we started really working with technology skills for our faculty and for our students. And skills was good early on, but then we decided and we understand now that integration... was very key to that. We needed to be able to integrate technology into what we do everyday in the classroom. But now what we've got as well is we have these 21st...century... learning skills. Collaboration, critical thinking, inquiry learning, all of these things that are happening now that we really need to be looking at from a global perspective. If I were to go in and number these one through four, let me ask you guys in your various departments, where do you think--just raise your hands--do you think your faculty and your students are at a level one, a level two, a level three, or a level four within your departments. What do you think about that? Are you somewhere between skills and integration? Are you right there and your faculty is all over the 21st century learning platform? Just a show of hands, where do you think you fit in your departments right now? [unclear audience response]. Two to three? And that's really nationally when we talk about this, this is where we see a lot of higher ed institutions falling in there, somewhere between two and three. And they're trying to get to that three. But what I'd like for you to think about as we go through today is think about instructionally, curriculum wise, how can we move from two to three and really get down to four, which is what we're really going to need for these students once we get out of here. And before I even think you start your planning process, you really just have to have that vision kind of set in your mind as to you really want to see that as a goal as you move forward. Any thoughts, do any of you have any specific thoughts about having read this, those of you that have, that particularly stand out for you? (male audience response) Competition. (Jon) Competition. [unclear male audience response]. (Jon) Yes, absolutely. The quick and the dead. (male audience response) One thing I took away from the book is that the 21st century will belong to those who are creative, to those who are not wedded to old models of either doing business or learning or whatever, and I think creativity and critical thinking will become the key to success in the future. (Jon) Absolutely. I think one of the points they make in the book there is that you really, you know, the memorization and remembering facts and things like is not what it's all about anymore. We've got so much information, so much information, that we need now to have information literacy and critical thinking. What do we mean by information literacy? We're talking about doing what, as faculty and students? (female audience response) Being able to find the information and use it. (Jon) Being able to find it and then use it properly, absolutely. Organize it in ways that we haven't been organizing before because we haven't had this much information. And then be able to organize it in a way that we can recall it when we need to recall it. And those skills are going to be more critical going forward than some of the other skills that maybe we've learned in the past in terms of memorization and so forth. So as we think about this, information, literacy, and the ability to manage information is going to be really, really important. Critical thinking as you've suggested. And there's a certain urgency out there right now. The creativity is going to be really important because what they're talking about here is that a lot of the jobs that we know of, as we know them today, may not be here tomorrow. They may go somewhere else, they may be at a different level. So what we really need to start looking at is what can we do creatively to create additional jobs for the 21st century, and how are we going to be creative and use our skills here in the US to really move forward. So those are just some things that I like to share with you going into the planning process, and I think that's going to be important to us. If I flip back over here to our schedule, what I'd like to do is just mention a couple of other folks. There's Tom Friedman, the flat world concept. Some other folks that I would recommend that you take a look at, maybe do a little research on, is Ken Kay, he's with the 21st century skills organization. He's got some really good podcasts about education and what it's going to mean to education going forward. Alan November, I'm sure most of you are familiar with, has some really good information about education and what's going to be happening. We've got a little podcast here that we'll play with Alan November. One of his points was that when he was growing up his parents said, you know, be sure to clean your plate, you know there's kids starving in China for that food that they could have. And he said well, he tells his children today is that, you know, do your homework because kids in China are starving for your job. So it's kind of a wakeup call, it's kind of a, you know, I'm not sure we're all necessarily on the same page with that. I was with a group the other day that was a very traditional school, institution, and I'm not sure they were ready, some of the faculty, to take that next step to move forward, you know, we have our environment, we're a traditional school, we want to teach the traditional ways and there's certainly a place for that. But I think what we have to look for is a blend of tradition as well as making sure we're moving forward and we're going to make our students competitive in the future. So with all that said, I'd like to have you just pull this sheet up right here and this is kind of a framework that kind of gets into some of the things that we just talked about but it kind of nails them down in one page and I think that's helpful alot of times just to be able to see that. I'm going to bring up our framework right here. [pause in dialogue]. You know if you look at the bottom of that chart right there, you know you have your core subjects certainly, and your assessments, you have your 21st century assessments which, I think that's really important to think about, you know, the way we look at our students and how they're performing today. We probably need to change the way we look at that a bit and add, you know, are they getting those critical thinking skills, those inquiry skills, so as we think about going forward, we need to think about how we assess our faculty and our students. So the 21st century content, global awareness, there's a huge economic impact coming our way, I feel. Number three, the learning and thinking skills--which is what you mentioned a moment ago--critical thinking, problem solving, communication skills, creativity, innovation, collaboration, information literacy. The ICT literacy, just making sure that information and communication technologies are being used properly. Certainly the life skills, probably alot of these you're doing right niow. And then finally on the 21st century assessments, being able to modify those to be more in line with what, you know, our students are going to need going forward. So these are some critical areas, and I wanted you to have this sheet in your hand because I think it's important enough for you to carry away with you. A lot of the information I may be showing you today, we'll make sure that you have copies of. So we'll work forward on that as well.