Innovator's Dilemma and the Diffusion of Innovation

The End in Mind » Deja Vu All Over Again – Blackboard Still Stuck in the Innovator’s Dilemma (Jon Mott's excellent and insightful observations about Blackboard and the status of LMS/CMS products is well worth reading.  I've given a taste of his insight below, but I encourage you to read the entire blog post for it's depth and coherence.

Blackboard can still play a leading role in education. But it needs to think more about end-users and about non-consumers, not just about the universtity administrators who purchase and implement their products. That’s an admittedly tall order for a publicly-traded corporation to take on. But, as Christensen argues, they have to figure out a way to do so if they’re to remain relevant. That’s precisely the innovator’s dilemma.


My comments in response to Jon's excellent article:
Jon, I know your political science background will help you appreciate another relevant concept - the diffusion of innovation.  So, not only do the folks at Bb have an innovator's dilemma, there is the whole question of from whence innovation arises and how is spreads.  The s-curve of how innovation spreads might lead us to flip your model on it's head by suggesting that the innovators are faculty and students, the early adopters are colleagues and peers of the innovators.  I would suggest that, in Bb's defense, their institutional position requires them to be at the opposite end of the innovation curve.  In other words, they are likely to be "laggards" (not my word, but used in the innovation literature).  Conclusion: we expect innovation from Bb but in reality that's not a role they can play. 

Twitter Search in Plain English - Common Craft - Our Product is Explanation

From the folks at Common Craft - more cool stuff for simple brains like mine.

Twitter Search in Plain English - Common Craft - Our Product is Explanation

This video uses a metaphor of “Twitterville” to illustrate the opportunities to use the Twitter Search feature to find people and information, read news and discover emerging information.

Future of education lies online

Very insightful commentary from Matt Culbertson at ASU. Here are some excerpts...

Future of education lies online | ASU Web Devil - ASU's Online News Source

The role of the information gatekeeper isn’t what it used to be. There’s a diminished role of authority regulating the flow of information and decided what content passes forward —and anyone can be a mass-communicating producer and consumer of content.

Every industry and institution that functions as an information provider is facing more competition than ever before.

In some ways, the same forces driving newspapers and more isolated cases of traditional media bankrupt threaten the university model.

An April commentary article in the Chronicle of Higher Education pointed out that universities have a weakness with large, low-level undergraduate classes. An increasing number of online classes from for-profit groups threatens that revenue source.

The author cited the regulatory wall of college accreditation to bar competition, but private sector competition to the university environment is on a growth trend — more students than ever take classes with for-profit institutions like Kaplan University and the University of Phoenix.

A 2008 study by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation found that 22 percent of American college students took at least one online class in the fall 2007 semester.

But universities should be wary of the Internet’s tendency to kill business models — newspapers, recording labels and soon maybe the rest of traditional media demonstrate that lesson.


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The End in Mind » I’ve Seen the Future and the Future is Us (Using Google)

The End in Mind » I’ve Seen the Future and the Future is Us (Using Google)
From Jon Mott at BYU, a discussion of the new search and semantic web tools put well into context. Of particular note:

As we adopt and adapt tools like Twitter and Google Wave to our purposes as learning technologists, we have to change the way we think about managing facilitating learning conversations. We can no longer be satisfied with creating easy to manage course websites that live inside moated castles. We have to open up the learning process and experience to leverage the vastness of the data available to us and the power of the crowd, all the while remembering that learning is fundamentally about individuals conversing with each other about the meaning and value of the data they encounter and create. Technologies like Google Wave are important, not in and of themselves, but precisely because they force us to remember this reality and realign our priorities and processes to match it.

Inside Higher Ed - Impact of Adjuncts...an interesting article

offtrack / 27 - Inside Higher Ed
Some fascinating observations about adjunct instruction and the implications.

"Like the rest of higher education, elite universities have grown increasingly reliant on non-tenure-track faculty members. Leaders of those institutions are frequently unaware of the role played by adjuncts or how they have come to make up a larger share of the teaching force. The causes for this shift -- while related to money -- go far beyond the savings from hiring off the tenure track, and the blame may need to be shared by senior professors and graduate student unions. At the most celebrated institutions of higher education in the United States, the teaching quality of the adjuncts is many times better than that of those on the tenure tack."

While the rationales vary, the authors stress that they found that most universities never considered the direction their hiring was headed at senior levels. Such trends don't get attention from boards of trustees or senior administrators. And while boards and senior officials may exercise tight control over certain relevant issues -- such as the creation of new tenure-track slots -- at leading universities, much more autonomy is given on other issues.

On the issue of cost, the authors wrote that the impact is most apparent not in the creation of adjunct positions, which usually isn't done to save money. Cost is a factor in moving away from adjuncts, they write. Whatever rationale has been given for the creation of the slot off the tenure-track, officials see a high cost to either converting the slot to one on the tenure track or eliminating the job, they write.

Another challenge that the authors say the use of adjuncts create for elite universities is an uncomfortable reality: those off the tenure track -- with lesser working conditions and less money -- are frequently better teachers."

This summary doesn't do justice to what the book must contain, so I'll be getting a copy and reading the whole text soon.


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