Tag Archives: Innovation

Library Innovation

Bobbi Newman runs a great blog on all things library related.  Recently she posted a great slide deck titled Set the World on Fire, keynote, Colorado Association of Libraries. I like the deck because it is simple and really applies to a broader audience then just librarians.  Give it a quick look!


Set the World on Fire, keynote, Colorado Association of Libraries/strong> from Bobbi Newman

Are you inspired yet?  Need more?  Read on…

The James B. Hunt Library at North Carolina State University describes itself as the library of the future.  That is a pretty bold statement.  But if their promotional videos are reflective of the real life experience they may be understating their status.

Now check out the article below from Fast Company featuring the library.  There are some great pictures as well as another video discussing the innovations they’ve implemented.

Fast Company: This New Library Of The Future Brings You Your Books Via Robot 

(What If…) Build a School in the Cloud

Sugata Mitra has won the $1 million TED Prize for his wish to build a school in the cloud. The TED Prize is meant to “inspire dreamers to think bigger about what’s possible.” Sugata’s wish is inspiring indeed.

“My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online. I also invite you, wherever you are, to create your own miniature child-driven learning environments and share your discoveries.”

Here is Sugata Mitra talking about his wish at TED.

With $1 million, it is now more than a wish. There is a plan and ways that anyone can help. As a part of the plan they are looking for some core technology assistance including “Cloud-based software design to manage laboratory school operations and education resources.”

SCSU might not be ready to dive into Sugata’s wish just yet, but what if we started with a smaller, more local concept? I am excited about the new ISELF building that will house fantastic equipment for our students to use for their studies.

What if… we made some of the equipment available via the internet? It could be used as a “Virtual Lab” by our own students. It could be used by nearby high schools. Or, let’s get crazy, the world. This concept is already being applied today. iLabCentral is a great example project supported by the National Science Foundation.

 

(What If…) Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Awards

Major leaders from the technology industry (Google, Facebook, Apple, and Mail.ru) have joined together to create a not-for-profit corporation, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, that will offer 5 annual prizes of $3 million to breakthrough scientists. This is pretty darn cool as most big awards like this go to established scientists that have already completed their work. Often the awards come from large government or health organizations. Changing the model may have a huge impact on research.

What If… Information Technology Services teamed up with partners and created our own award to be given to new ambitious faculty using technology in the classroom? This would give us an opportunity to connect ITS with faculty, showcase great work being done, and encourage others to use technology in new ways. There are many schools out there doing this already: Brown University, California Community Colleges, Old Dominion University, Rochester Institute of Technology

Reference Articles
eWeek: Google’s Brin, Facebook’s Zuckerberg Help Fund $3 Million Science Awards
CNN: Tech titans create $3 million ‘Breakthrough Prize’ for scientists

 

ISELF Tour

Last week I was fortunate enough to join a few other members of the ITS team on a tour of the new ISELF building. Dean DeGroote was kind enough to be our tour guide showing us around and explaining the function of the various areas of the building. The key takeaways for me were that the building is very open, flexible, and ready to support the emerging science fields.

When we first entered the building we could see that there was a lot of windows and open spaces. Dean DeGroote pointed out many areas that he described as “informal gathering spaces” – particularly on the West end of the building. As we toured the Dean’s Reception Area, and the Senior Design Lab he explained that the layout was intentionally open, with casing on the exterior and the floor space was flexible and reconfigurable to support any number of activities and configurations. In the lab areas that meant that power, data, gas, fluids, etc. would be available overhead allowing for furniture and equipment to be movable. As a side note, the Dean’s Reception Area reminded me of a video on the “Workplace of the Future.”

While the current configuration of the rooms is flexible, so are the walls themselves. Most areas have walls that could be removed or reconfigured without great expense. Some rooms are deemed “unassigned” and can be renovated to accommodate future needs (i.e. a 2 year grant from the National Science Foundation). The ISELF building itself may be expanded on with another phase added to the West of the building. The loading dock was built large enough to serve the new addition removing the need for another loading dock to be added.

Dean DeGroote explained that the entire building is intended to be a space for research and lab work, not for offices and residency. The thought here is that professors will have their departmental space and office services hosted in other buildings. When it comes time for the faculty and students to work in the lab, they will be able to leverage the spaces in ISELF. After they are done with their lab work, they may collaborate informally in ISELF, but otherwise they will most likely return to their departmental areas back in other buildings on campus.

Earlier I had blogged about ISELF getting an X-ray diffractometer. Turns out, we got it! There are a lot of really cool spaces and equipment that we be available to our students and community once ISELF is complete. I am proud of the work Dean DeGroote and his team have done. And I am excited to see our students, faculty, and community make the most of this cutting edge resource. Added to the recent announcement of the $4.8 million enhancement to the UTVS TV studio, and the Presidents engagement in attracting the brightest students from all over the world, this sets SCSU and our community on an exhilarating trajectory.

I’ve built a quasi-virtual tour of ISELF on Prezi if you are interested in seeing more.

Creative Response to a Nexus of Forces?

Recently Gartner held their annual Gartner Symposium where they discussed what they see as the onset of a “nexus of forces” descending onto businesses and forcing IT departments to change their perspective.  PC Magazine has a great article here.  These forces: cloud, mobile, social, and information are not new forces, but the impact of their peak and convergence in a focused way is new, and presents a real challenge for IT and businesses as a whole.  While Gartner’s focus is often centered around the business world, it is easy to argue that education may be impact sooner given that their customer base is often comprised of a population that embraces new technology and trends.

St. Cloud State University like all other organizations will need to decide how to respond to this nexus of forces.  Responding to the challenge will take more than just finding ways to modify our existing services.  Instead, we’ll need to think outside of the box and develop new services.  Below is a TED talk where Catherine Courage suggests using creativity, experiments, and storytelling.

More on Education and Technology

I mentioned in my last post that I like to follow what some other innovative institutions are doing.  That post I focused in on Cornell’s IT Strategic Plan.  Another university that I see as a leader in innovation is Indiana University.  Recently Bradley Wheeler, the CIO for Indiana University, gave a fantastic keynote address at their Statewide IT Conference.  I want to highlight a few things that came up in that keynote presentation, but first I want to talk about the conference itself.

Every year the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MNSCU) system has its own statewide MSNSCU IT Conference.  I’ve been fortunate enough to attend many of those conferences over the past few years.  I believe that they bring tremendous value back to the institutions and ultimately to our students.  That said, I think we should always be looking for ways to improve.  Here are a few things that I like about the Indiana University Statewide IT Conference that I think we should consider at our next MSNSCU IT Conference.

  • Openness. The Indiana Daily Student reported that “about 700 students and professionals from across Indiana” attended the conference.  We’ve always focused our conference on IT professionals.  But why not expand a section of our conference to the broader community – students, staff, faculty?  Maybe take it one step further and bring in CIO’s from the commercial sector?  How about K-12 technology professionals?
  • Thought leaders.  During my last post I linked to Shel Waggener’s keynote video.  He made another appearance at Indiana’s conference as a part of “Great Cloud Debate” event.  Brining in thought leaders from the industry like Shel Waggener or Diana Oblinger is a great way to challenge our community to rethink how we approach technology in education.
  • Communication.  I love that both Cornell and Indiana have made the topics and content from their conferences available to everyone.  The community was invited to attend or participate via Twitter, watch their keynote speakers on demand, they have great websites full of active information.
  • Post conference events.  There are many engaging conversations that happen at these conferences.  But continuing those conversations and keeping the connections alive isn’t as well thought through.  Let’s organize touch points throughout the year so that the excitement doesn’t fizzle out!

Okay.  Now let me highlight a few things that I found to be key takeaways for myself from the keynote at Indiana University’s Statewide IT Conference.  First, watch the keynote for yourself here: Indiana University Statewide IT Conference Keynote.

  • I like that they are taking a nimble approach to technology.  They are experimenting.  They know there will be mistakes and bumps along the way.  That is not a trivial statement for CIO to make. But making the statement to a large public audience says a lot, and sets a tone for their culture.
  • I like that they are truly embracing the cloud.  More than that they are actively working with partners (Internet2, textbook companies, etc.) to shape the future of cloud technologies.  They aren’t sitting on the sidelines waiting for others to pave the path, they are charting their own course and deciding their own destiny.  I’m also a fan of their strong push to leverage Citrix and Box.com for their IU Anywhere service.
  • I like that they are open an honest.  They admit that they’ve made mistakes.  Just says yeah we’ve made mistakes is a step, but they go one step further and cite those mistakes, in their case citing their online learning strategy.  That approach is definitely an exception to the rule, and one that I believe will bolster trust in their community and have a profound positive impact on their culture.
  • I like that the CIO spent time to advocate for a healthy workforce.  Encouraging the staff to take a break from emails, run a 5k, and participate in healthy activites shows that they care about their people, and it’s not all about producing IT widgets.
  • I like that they value training, professional development, and career advancement.  A workforce where your employees are valued and feel like they have an advocate as opposed to an environment where you’re always worried about who’s going to step on you or what your numbers are for the quarter is one that should attract the best of the best.
  • Lastly, and probably the biggest takeaway for me, I like their strategy to work as a system and offer a single centralized online offering for general “intro” classes.  Why have each regional institution try to develop their own brand for commodity classes?  Why not work together leveraging the best minds from across the system to build the best offering possible.  Let your regional institution shine in specialized areas with more advanced coursework.  This is a strategy MNSCU needs to consider.

Image courtesy http://thegoldguys.blogspot.com

Education Technology Transformation

I believe that we can learn a lot from other academic institutions. One of the institutions that I like to check in on is Cornell University. Cornell is going through an Information Technology re-envisioning process and it reminds me a lot of the journey we are on at St. Cloud State University. If you are interested in getting involved in the future of IT as SCSU, I strongly encourage you to look at follow the conversation at Cornell’s IT Strategic Plan site. There are so many good things I could point out about Cornell’s site but I’ll try to focus in on a few.

This year during the Fall Convocation Provost Malhotra asked that we “re-imaging the student experience.” Cornell has put together a Student Experience Innovation Gallery that has a ton of great ideas. Does that spark any ideas for you on ways we can help re-imaging the student experience?

Next, as a part of their process to focus on the future of IT, they held an open daylong meeting and brought in some great keynote speakers: Shel Waggener and Diana Oblinger. Shel Waggener is a Senior Vice President of Internet2 and Diana Oblinger is the President and CEO of EDUCAUSE. (Nerd Alert) From an Education-IT perspective, that is a rock star lineup for an IT planning meeting! I encourage you to read the abstract of their presentations on the Cornell IT Strategic Future site. Or even better watch their full presentation via their streaming video site.

I want to highlight a few key points from their presentation that I think are particularly relevant to SCSU. The first point made by Shel Waggener is that the cloud is real, imminent, and unavoidable. It is like a stampede and Universities can either decide to get trampled or to get on our horse and help direct its future. I believe that this he is dead on in this assessment. Both SCSU and MNSCU are trying to do more with less and there is a new push to try to collaborate and share services. This is a great and noble endeavor, but I believe it’s 5 or more years too late. The cloud players are massive. Trying to go it our own just doesn’t make sense anymore. From an innovation perspective there is no way to keep up. From a financial perspective there is absolutely no way to keep up. I’ve heard many people concerned about outsourcing, losing their jobs, etc. Is see the situation from the opposite perspective. If we try to do it all and compete with services like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. we will lose. And we simply do not have enough people to help our faculty, staff, and students embrace the cloud services that will make them the most successful. Embracing these cloud services is the best way to keep a vibrant technology department that can deliver the results our community needs.

Next, Diana Oblinger shows us that technology and education at our local universities needs to change radically. There are so many innovative services available to our community. Our community will ultimately end up leveraging these services whether or not we embrace them. Diana offers many different ways to consider leveraging new technology services and trends. I think her presentation should inspire us all to reimagine what might be possible with technology and education in the future.

Kudos to Cornell University’s IT department for putting together so many great resources and offering outstanding communication to their community to build a better IT department. Let’s learn from their success!

An Innovative Web Experience

Developers working with Google created a browser experiment that allows you to visit a website using Google Chrome and follow a Cirque du Soleil character through a whimsical journey with acrobatic  performances and imaginative scenery.  The coolest part is that the experience is interactive and crosses any device, it’s awesome!  Their blog post explains that because it was built using HTML5, it works  across all devices and leverages capabilities like the accelerometer, camera, and microphone and allows you to actually participate in the story.

I highly recommend visiting www.movikantirevo.com using Google Chrome to check it out.  If you have a device with a camera/microphone/accelerometer that would be best.

Innovation in Education

Recently Dell hosted a Social Think Tank event titled “A Day of Innovation in Education.”  They streamed the discussion and have made it available for viewing.  There were many interesting perspectives shared from a panel made of diverse individuals, but I’m not sure that there were any revelations made.   That said, if you are interested in this topic you might find the discussion interesting.  Head on over to Dell’s site to checkout the videos.

http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/innovation-in-education.aspx