(Image derived from Paul Bailey’s Wordle, generated after our session)

Last month we ran a session at the JISC Next Generation Technologies in Practice conference (10/11 March, Burleigh Court, Loughborough University).  We were asked to consider Innovative change, institutional policies and communities. James began the session by outlining our project, the notion of disruptive technologies and our “5R” approach to analysing institutions and their responses to emergent technologies:

1. Roles & Responsibilities
2. Rules & Regulations
3. Rewards
4. Relationships
5. Routines

For this session we focused on two of these areas:

• Rules and regulations, or more precisely formal institution-internal policies; and,
• Relationships, or more precisely communities that extend beyond the boundaries of the institution.

We ran two exercises, inviting session participants to identify relevant institutional policies and cross institutional communities. Then, using coloured dots, participants indicated whether each of the policies or communities was supportive (green), non-aligned (amber) or constraining (red) in relation to the innovative use of emergent technologies. Although time was short and hence participants had to make quick decisions, these exercises provide some insightful results and rich topics for discussion during the session. (An interactive session was also well received after a rather hearty lunch!)

Results: Policies (Institution-internal rules & regulations)

The results indicate considerable variability between individuals and between institutions. Some general patterns, however, stand out. In terms of policies, the strongest support for innovative use of emergent technologies was seen as coming from polices for Teaching and Learning and e-Learning, with strong support from policies in the areas of inclusion and disability and plagiarism. Departmental policies, Library and information policies and Quality Enhancement policies were also seen as mostly positive for innovation.

Policies which were more generally seen to hamper innovation were Corporate Visual Identity Policy, Service Agreements from the Computing Service, HR Policies, Student and Staff IT Policy & Computer Acceptable Use Policies, Course Accreditation Policies, Business IT Policy, and Data Protection and Privacy Policy (including Copyright).

An interesting observation suggested during the session was that more positive policies came from policy areas which are more ‘student-facing’ and less supportive policy areas are more likely to be ‘back office’.

We might also note that, overall, policies were seen as more likely to be constraining than supportive, with 108 red dots compared with only 77 green dots. (Full results are shown in the table below).

Results: Communities (beyond institutional boundaries)

The second exercise, considering the role of communities, gave much clearer results. Almost all communities (except the Business IT Community, the Senior Manager Community, and the Student/Staff  IT Service Community) were seen as supportive of emergent technologies. In short, unless communities had formed around ‘institutional’ enterprise technologies, they were considered to be supportive of emergent technologies.

Perhaps this should not be surprising given that many emergent technologies are often linked to social networks and communities, rather than formal organisations and institutions.

Making an impact on the conference

Our session generated a large number of tweets, from attendees commenting during the session and from others in parallel sessions. In fact, in summing up the conference, Paul Bailey demonstrated two Wordle images from the twitterstream: before and after our session. Disruption indeed!

Full results for Policies exercise

Note: Red = ‘constraining’, Amber = ‘non-aligned’, Green = ’supportive’ (Ordered by number of green dots)

Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs), like almost all organisations, are divided into different functional units. And, like almost all organisations, these units each have different images of the organisation, different priorities and different attitudes towards technologies. As a result, they often come into tension with one another leading to a pattern of alliances and conflicts. One way of thinking of the institutional response to emerging technologies is as the outcome of a struggle among different units within the institution.

To explore this idea, at the Chelsea programme meeting we identified a range of functional units or responsibilities within institutions and asked participants to identify those that were:

• allies: helping projects them to implement emergent technologies
• non-aligned: involved, but had a neutral stance towards the emergent technology projects
• Enemies who were obstructive or negative towards emergent technology projects

The full results are given in the table at the end, but the key results are as follows:

Allies

• Teaching and Learning Committee
• Careers Service
• IT for students & Staff
• Student Recruitment
• Staff Development Unit
• Alumni Office

Non-aligned

• Library
• Vice Chancellors Office
• Estates
• Human Resources
• Legal Department
• Student Union

Enemies

• Marketing
• IT for students and Staff
• IT for business applications
• Library

The most engaged functions (as allies, enemies or non-aligned) were the Library, IT for Students and Staff, Marketing, IT for Business Applications and Human Resources. The least engaged function was the Bursar/Chief Financial Officer/Finance Director.

These results are only indicative and include individuals from only a handful of institutions, but they do raise some interesting questions. Is it the case that the allies are mainly parts of the institution that deal with students, staff and ‘the outside world’ on a regular basis (such as Staff Development, Student Recruitment, Careers Service and Alumni)? Would emergent technologies develop more quickly if Finance Directors were more involved in their planning and deployment?

What about your institution? Does it fit this pattern? Who are your allies and enemies when it comes to emergent technologies?

James Cornford - IRET Team

photo credit: Aaron Michael Brown via Flickr

The JISC has identified a group of technologies, services and practices that they have variously labelled as “emerging” or “emergent” technologies. In JISC documentation the term is defined in terms of the following six elements

• The web as a platform;
• Things that think;
• An architecture of participation;
• Data consumption and remixing from other sources
• A rich, interactive, user-friendly interface;
• Elements of social networking.

Examples of emerging or emergent technologies given by JISC include: online word processors and spreadsheets; embedded computers, mobile telephones, smart phones and entertainment devices; wikis; and mashups. However, the notion is clearly intended to include many other practices and activities.

What ties all these things together? Is this just a collection of the latest buzz words or is it something more coherent?

The JISC argue that what is brought into question by these technologies is the “locus of control” in relation to rights to, and responsibilities for, physical devices, information and services.

Historically, information technology was complex, risky and expensive. It was therefore thought of as primarily the responsibility of educational institutions, which had the necessary finance, technical expertise and security capability to acquire and run technologies. Users (students and staff) were then “allowed” to access these resources (e.g., through computer clusters or PCs on the desk). In the past, universities and colleges were often the institutions that provided users with their first experiences of networked information technology services such as email and easy access to the web. Today, however, uses arrive at universities and colleges often, but not always, with years of experience of these technologies, acquired at home or at school. As a result, the ways in which individuals use technologies, and their expectations about how they are going to use those technologies, are already ell established. Institutions not longer introduce users to information technology; instead, information technology is often the main context in which users are introduced to the institution. What is more, it is increasingly the case that users are bringing their own devices –lap tops, smartphones, PDAs – onto campus. Users are now expecting to be able to connect and use these devices on campus as well as at home.

These developments don’t only concern physical technologies and services such as broadband or wireless connections. They also concern the ways in which users think about content – information. The traditional informational models in higher education, which have stressed the use of formally accredited information through carefully constructed and managed channels and the ‘delivery’ of ‘course content’ to students, have been challenged by the availability of new services which provide more direct, if also often opaque, routes to find information, new ways of sharing information on a peer-to-peer basis and the expectation of a much more interactive experience of online education. These developments have been partially made from within academic institutions – for example through the development of new and more interactional VLE and MLE systems – but, once again, many of these developments have their origins and impetus mainly outside of HEIs.

So should we talk of emerging or emergent technologies?

The idea of emerging technologies implies that there is something novel about the technologies themselves. This makes little sense in terms of the bundle of physical technologies and practices which we have identified. Many of these basic technologies, standards and even practices are quite stable and well established. Indeed, it is this very stability and reliability, coupled with falling costs that come from mass production, that have led to their take up by individuals and households. If these technologies are emerging, then they are not emerging from the labs as cutting edge technology.

In systems theory emergent properties of the system are those that can’t be explained in a reductionist manner, that is to say, by the actions of the constituent parts of the system, but rather which arise from the interaction from those parts. The basic idea is well captured in the ordinary language phase ‘the whole is more than the sum of the parts’. Emergence can be observed in both the natural and the social world. A common example from nature is colour. Elementary particles have no colour, but when they are combined into atoms, they begin to absorb specific wavelengths of light. By analogy, what is interesting about the emergent technologies is the ways in which the outcomes of these technologies deployment cannot be treated in a reductionist manner. What is important about emergent technologies is that they aggregate together large numbers of individual decisions to create, sometimes unpredictable, outcomes

Both emerging and emergent relate to the concept of emergence. Emergence is often related to the ideas such as evolution or ecology which stress interdependence of varying kinds (both the symbiosis of flowers and insects and the less harmonious kinds of reliance found in the food chain). The key terms here, however, is interdependence. For a long time HEIs were able to treat information and communication technologies as a field where they felt that they had a high degree of control and were relatively independent in choices that they made – choices that could be relatively unproblematically passed on to users. The notion of emergent technologies signals the end of this phase and the recognition that institutions and users are much more interdependent, their respective choices conditioning and interacting in new, and perhaps unpredictable, ways.

James Conford - IRET Team

photo credit: nkzs on stock.xchang

The latest was a ‘virtual open day’ we’re developing based on video interviews with students and staff [view a prototype]. As this is a fairly big development, we flagged it up with the institutional web team. After outlining our plans, I was asked “why don’t you use the university streaming video service?”. I had to confess that despite registering years ago, this hadn’t even occurred to me. So I looked into it and in the process learned a few things about institutional systems…

First off, even for someone who should know a bit about web video, the service documentation was somewhat off-putting  - which makes me wonder how many other staff fall at this early hurdle. The streaming video service is clearly a sophisticated system, but compared to putting a video on YouTube, using it seems like a lot of effort for little gain (even ignoring the benefits of social media).

A blog post I read recently on usage lifecycle of web services suggested some common barriers that prevent people becoming regular users - lack of awareness, complex registration, low motivation for return visits and no emotional attachment. Like many institutional systems, this one has most of those barriers.

Having ruled this system out, our client asked the reasonable question ‘why not put the videos on YouTube?’. It’s simple, reliable and offered all the features they needed. We passed this by the university, but they were not happy with YouTube’s terms & conditions, which give them a claim to ownership of content they host. Brian Kelly blogged about similar concerns at another institution, so perhaps this is common.

This led us to blip.TV - a lesser known video sharing service that’s as easy to use as YouTube, offers better features and allows you to control licensing of your content - which should keep everyone happy. We didn’t use them for this project, but it was certainly our first choice for the IRET project videos.

The more projects we do, the more we find that there’s an external service to cater for just about every need. What’s more, these are almost always simple to use and offer clear advantages over their institutional equivalents. That sounds great to me as a developer, but I do wonder if there are issues for institutions if more and more people stay under the radar and use external services?

How about you? Are there institutional systems you couldn’t do without? If so, what makes them so essential? Could you ever see a time when an external service comes along and changes your mind?

Steve Boneham, JISC-IRET support team.

To get them going, I started with a presentation designed to provoke a response by making some controversial statements about emergent technologies.

The key points were:

Do individuals still need institutions?  An ever increasing range of sophisticated web services are available to any web user. This freedom of choice means individuals are no longer tied to using only the tools that their institution provides. Potentially, this should mean we’re free, happy and more productive, but is this always the case? Does the use of emerging technologies also bring about a change in working practice and do all individuals welcome this?

Who should decide what tools we use, when and how? Should institutions dictate what tools we can and can’t use? Should they be the sole provider of all services? Should they block external services they see as inappropriate or just not support them? If individuals use different tools to those recommended by the institution, what new responsibilities do they have with regards to institutional standards/practice?

How do we cope in a constantly changing environment? Web tools are emerging at an unprecedented rate, so how can institutions support individual users in such an environment? Are HE institutions naturally resistant to change and does that suppress innovation? If so, can this inertia be overcome whilst still maintaining control over reputation management, privacy, copyright and IPR?

Who are the gatekeepers to emerging technologies? Is it still IT services, or are they now just one of a range of  potential service providers? Within an institution, who decides which tools are used? Management? Researchers? Teachers? Students?

What about the next generation? Do we need to change our approach to cater for people arriving with different expectations of what an institution is and what it should provide?

Our Findings

Summaries of the points raised in the subsequent discussions are provided below:

The institutional perspective

• There was a general feeling that we’re currently experiencing a “forever BETA” environment, and that institutions need to adapt more quickly to opportunities offered my new developments and also the changing demands from staff.
• Outsourcing should be investigated further and some institutions are already heading down this path. However, adequate service level agreements are required.
• Institutions should develop licensing agreements to allow them to run emergent tools or technologies on their servers.
• Regarding teaching & learning, institutions should ensure that change is driven by sound pedagogy and not by the superficial attraction of new tools or technologies.

The individual member of staff’s perspective

• Clear communications to staff regarding the wider e-environment are required, including supported tools and services and institutional requirements regarding IPR, copyright, data privacy. Induction sessions for new staff and refresher sessions for existing staff.
• Consider the ‘hidden’ users.  What are their needs?  What is the best way to develop their skills?
• Manage expectations. Support staff to understand the possibilities and limitations of emerging technologies.
• Break down some of the power relations within an institution. IT Services should engage with and support staff who are leading innovation and adopting emerging tools and technologies.

We’re very interested to hear your opinions and experiences re. how it really is at your institution, so please do comment. Alternatively contact us directly if you’d prefer to stay off the record!

Steve Boneham

JISC-IRET support team