What is clear from all of this, is that it is heating up substantially in Scotland as an issue. I declared when Dewar came up with his strategy to nullify the Nationalists by reconvening the Scottish Parliament, that it was a loss of position and it was only a matter of time before the issue would be decided outright for the present generation at least. The same angst as occurred in the 70s with Thatcher and Scotland’s oil is going to resurface again. What is interesting this time around is the different dynamic owing to the present global economic state. There are pros and cons on both sides.

Economist causes map-frenzy over Skintland originally appeared on Wisdom's Quintessence on May 13, 2012.

1. Higher education must become less of an elite enterprise; a much larger fraction of the world population will need higher education. Everybody will not need or achieve a four-year degree, but many more people must be educated to a higher standard than previously required. Achieving this goal will require both more effective education of disadvantaged groups and social policies to enable them to pay the costs of higher learning. Moreover, people are likely to obtain higher education throughout life, both as an economic necessity and as a “consumer good.” Many young people are likely to make the transition from adolescence to adulthood in “brick and mortar” colleges and universities, but this will not be the end of their higher education.

2. Higher education in the United States will continue to be a high social and political priority, but the economic stress of an aging population, health-care costs, growing deficits, and resistance to tax increases will require colleges and universities to increase productivity substantially in order to meet national goals. Achieving productivity gains while enhancing quality is the most significant challenge facing higher education. IT is a critically important resource for meeting this challenge.

3. The diversity of knowledge providers and delivery systems requires reengineered postsecondary systems to assure quality and promote improvement. More transparent and clear definitions of degree qualifications and new approaches to accreditation and the assessment and certification of learning are needed.

4. The growing importance of educational attainment will require more robust relationships between elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education. Stronger, more meaningful P–20 relationships in standards, professional development, and data systems are essential.

Diana has a chapter on IT as a game changer and she develops a number of opportunities for this to occur. A couple strike me immediately, namely, Informed decision making and unbundling and rebundling. In the former, she addresses the growing importance of analytics. I would hold that predictive will become even more important than the descriptive aspect of this. One of the impacts of the growing importance of this model, I predict, is the growth of big data in the HEI of tomorrow. I just was discussing this with team members who were convinced that big data was not relevant to HE IT. But I feel that the transactional log data from IT systems, all increasing because of the growth of digital access to learning, will increase our need to use big data methods and patterns in managing and improving that experience.

In unbundling and rebundling, Diana takes an interesting look at disruptive innovation opportunities on three models relevant to HE:

1. Open business models—these models use external as well as internal ideas and resources. For example, an “outside in” model uses external ideas and resources to support the institution (e.g., open educational resources used in courses).

2. Unbundled models—in these models, providers of specific products (e.g., student recruitment services or infrastructure services) are integrated into an institution’s structure.

3. Facilitated network models—these bring together a mixture of products and services from multiple organizations to improve a service.

But this makes me remember another Educause book, The Tower and the Cloud, where Richard Katz introduced me to the idea of unbundling being a market force in HE. Katz was talking about unbundling specific courses from programmes, and the loss of protection this would give to some traditionally protected areas, via requirements that all students would take that course as part of a programme, regardless of demand outside of the academy. What strikes me currently is that the badges movement currently happening could be modeled as an unbundling of credentials from large bundled, protected programmes. It strikes me that all of the consumer benefits that unbundling delivers could be mapped onto badges.

Educause Game Changers book worth a look originally appeared on Wisdom's Quintessence on May 12, 2012.

More cleverly, there is code that doesn’t allow you to print or cut and paste the result! So I can’t represent the output here for you unless I go to the trouble of typing it in again. So I invite you to go bang on the keys yourself.

But the result is very convincing. There was some thoughtful writing at Chronicle by Anastasia Salter on it, including the following:

At ProfHacker we’ve talked about how digital tools and communities have transformed writing and writing instruction, but digital tools also make it easier than ever to see personal writing as redundant. A student can see other essays on the same topic they are contemplating, or view the aggregate knowledge of a Wikipedia page, and never have the feeling that their writing covers something new. Google overload can be discouraging or overwhelming to a person processing information while that same data provides an opportunity for automated writing light years beyond EssayTyper’s parody.

Steven Levy asked in a recent Wired piece, “Can an algorithm write a better news story than a human reporter?”, and pointed to the work of Narrative Science, a company that takes analysis and algorithms of data-heavy subjects like sports and outputs a news article, complete with tone and even style. The robot works on familiarity and the knowledge of its mentor-programmers, not so unlike the learning process of any writer picking up the style of a particular field. But the question can easily be expanded: can algorithms replace students? Professors?

To some extent, they already have. The story of robot reporters parallels with Marc Bousquet’s recent piece, “Robots are grading your papers“. Marc Bousquet points out that the substitution works in standardized situations: “Machines can reproduce human essay-grading so well because human essay-grading practices are already mechanical.” Certainly the essay-grading rubrics of standardized tests leave little room for interpretation. And with robots also writing, I can only wonder how their essays would score by the standards of their fellow machines.

I would agree with the sentiment that we need to consider what the objectives of the writing assignments are. Are they the representation of understanding on a topic, or the introduction, synthesis of original thought, critique, etc. And if the latter, it is very difficult using automated means to mark the work for this original value.

EssayTyper as an automatic writing tool originally appeared on Wisdom's Quintessence on May 9, 2012.

In France, Nicholas Sarkozy lost the second round of voting in France’s presidential election to his main rival, François Hollande, by 3.3% of the vote. As a result, the right-wing incumbent will step down on Monday, 15 May, to be replaced by his Socialist rival.

During his campaign, Mr Hollande declared his slogan to be “My enemy is the world of finance” — and promised to boost France’s spending on social welfare. While campaigning, he vowed to introduce a 75% tax rate on those earning over €1 million a year, hire 60,000 new teachers and abandon austerity measures in favour of maintaining France’s social model.

With the ruling PASOK-New Democracy coalition winning under a third (32%) of the vote, Greek voters failed to elect a majority government. With anti-austerity MPs winning the majority of votes, Greece faces more weeks of uncertainty as it attempts to form a government.

In another worrying development, Golden Dawn — Greece’s first far-right party for nearly four decades — took around 7% of the vote. This anti-immigration, ultra-nationalist party promises to expel all legal and illegal immigrants. Its leading supporters wear black shirts and sport a Swastika-like symbol. Sound familiar at all?

These echoes of pre-war Nazi Germany, plus the uncertain election result, sparked a slide in the Greek stock market. On Monday, the ASE — Greece’s major stock-market index — nose-dived by 6.6% as investors rushed to dump Greek stocks at any price.

As the fool reports, the market were spooked, losing up to 3% in major European markets to regain to only slightly down on the day. But I would expect there to be solid downwards pressure with this growing storm.

And that leaves off the calculation when the first default arrives.

Eurozone in for a rough ride as crowd weighs in originally appeared on Wisdom's Quintessence on May 8, 2012.

Personally, I think that she is serving their purposes and only winning a small concession, even if it goes through. I am with Peter Murray-Rust and his Towards a Manifesto on Open Mining of Scholarship.

Elsevier is moving to open journals for text-mining originally appeared on Wisdom's Quintessence on May 7, 2012.

They used cookies to exploit the dafault privacy settings, making the browser think that the user was interacting with a given ad, thus allowing a tracking cookie to be installed. With that cookie installed, it became easy for Google to add additional cookies and to track users across the web as they visited other sites displaying ads from Google’s networks.

Google has done evil here and I am disappointed in there pursuit of ad revenue over privacy. the fine is too small to make much a difference in their world. The fine and methodology being used by the FTC is also a bit retroactive and small scale. The government is going to absorb the fine for little effect. Apple should consider going after Google for civil damages and the FTC should have issued a demand letter.

Perhaps the new Google directive is “Do evil and negotiate the fine…”

Google gets fined by FTC for being evil originally appeared on Wisdom's Quintessence on May 6, 2012.

Another example is that of computing as a utility, like electricity. I find that I’ve been gouged by my present utility, and in disgust cancel the contract and find another, cheaper, more responsive one. There is a cut-over date and the electrons feed in through a different meter.

These work just fine for things that are encapsulated enough to not have roots in the org. When the electrons roll through a different meter, it doesn’t break things in my org. Here is a list of some other factors to consider for commodity IT services. But if your function falls out of this set, I still advocate harbouring expertise and function in-house.

As Drue writes, in-line with what I was writing back a couple of years back, the good option is for low-risk, or short-term functions. What Drue writes that is interesting to me is the emphasis on the shift of the costs from capital to operational expense and the change in financial culture in the org as a consequence. Drue writes about the spectrum of risk, with the one end being risk owned entirely by the consumer, and the other being owned entirely by the provider. Neither is a sweet spot for the model to function, so it gravitates to the middle of the distribution. Drue argues that this middle will entail cloud providers entering “into what are called enterprise agreements, where the two parties can define the parameters of the relationship based on mutual risk sharing. Essentially, this ensures that each party has a vested interest in the financial success of the other party. There’s risk, but there’s also reward for better service”.

This makes sense to me, and will take some iteration to find for many orgs. For that expensive remote collaboration platform, I would rather not invest in internal resources for what is still a rapidly evolving platform, and if it is withdrawn for any reason, I have a fallback of traditional telephony. So I am able to take advantage of the rapidly evolving tech, not loading myself down with admin and iteration cycles, while the SP should be making enough of a large scale concern out of it that they value the investment in iteration.

In terms of the switch from capital to operational, Drue writes that the “reward for this potentially painful transition to operating expense is that the business gains flexibility and the ability to buy the services they need when they need them. But if you’re a CFO, you’ll have to decide whether you like consistent or variable expenditures. Operating expenses can be difficult to predict and control because service subscriptions can come from anywhere at any time. Ask yourself if you have a predictable cloud requisition/governance strategy that makes future service acquisitions easy.”

Cloud *aaService economics originally appeared on Wisdom's Quintessence on April 14, 2012.

There are commercial implications here as well. The author versions of articles published by commercial publishers and currently available only to journal subscribers will be made freely available via the public repository after embargo periods elapse, though their reuse will be more restricted than Bank-published material. Articles from 2007-2010 that appeared in the World Bank Research Observer and World Bank Economic Review (published by Oxford University Press), for example, are now in the repository. As I have written before, I believe that this sort of access is inevitable, but the for-profits are fighting it as hard as they can lobby.

Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project – HOAP, said the Bank’s new policy is “pioneering” in its adoption of Creative Commons licenses. “I’m delighted to see a major institution like the World Bank push the boundaries and not just make their work free of charge, but also free for use and reuse.”

While most of the Bank’s research outputs and knowledge products have been freely available, online in the past, “the good news is this initiative will give access to a much larger number of people, particularly in developing countries, to the published versions of our research articles,” said Adam Wagstaff, research manager in the Bank’s Development Research Group.

OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories, sponsored by the JISC. With more people around the world accessing the Internet through multiple devices, institutions increasingly are adopting open access policies. According to OpenDOAR Directory of Open Access Repositories, there are currently 2,180 open access institutional repositories worldwide. OpenDOAR Growth

World Bank goes Open Access originally appeared on Wisdom's Quintessence on April 13, 2012.

There are so many interesting scenarios for this sort of thing. It would be able to go out and fetch information for products that you are looking at (bar code scanner), augment information about things you are viewing (cultural tourism), sports information at events, etc. If you get the endpoint, I think that there is a wide, wide area of applications waiting to be cracked.

To date, the scale of the eyewear, battery life, and radio connectivity have been major drawbacks. But google appears to be tackling these issues. When the product would be available, and for how much, is unknown for the moment, outside the googleplex anyway, and it could be years in front of the curve. This could well be still in the first hump of the hype cycle, but the important thing to note is that through the trough of disillusionment will come market reality. Get ready for mainstream, mobile AR.

Google’s Project Glass originally appeared on Wisdom's Quintessence on April 5, 2012.

But too many managers, imho, need to control, rather than facilitate. Managing through something is a second-order effect, where you are not directly controlling the object but influencing it and managing its derivative characteristics. This should allow for more self-organization and accountability amongst the team members, resulting in some emergent properties from the generator that you have set up in the team.

As they state, managing through the team means to “use the social dynamics of the team to manage individual members, rather than managing members primarily one-by-one. This is a critical distinction that many managers miss. Though they extol the benefits of teamwork, they insist on managing their teams individual-by-individual. Thus, they virtually ensure that their groups will never become true teams.”

Of course, part of the problem is people often confuse teams and groups. A team is a group of people who do collective work and are mutually committed to a common team purpose and challenging goals related to that purpose. Teams are more productive and innovative than mere work groups. They produce results that exceed what groups of individuals can do through simple cooperation and coordination. Such results reflect a “team effect:” members perform better when they feel they’re part of a team. The root of this benefit is members’ strong mutual commitment to their joint work.

Teams have:

1. A mutual sense of purpose. Every high-performing team believes it exists for a compelling reason and that the world will be better for what it does. Its purpose is not the task or work it does but the benefit it delivers. It’s the difference between “We scrub hospital floors” and “We prevent the spread of deadly infections.” This is what pulls people together and makes them feel part of something bigger than themselves.

2. Tangible goals based on that purpose. Purpose must be made concrete or it will quickly wither. To sustain its sense of purpose, every team needs to strive toward specific, real achievements that will fulfill that purpose.

• The manager must ensure clarity about:

• Members’ roles and responsibilities — not everyone can do everything

• Important work processes — the way the team does its work, such as making decisions

• Values, norms, and standards that define what members expect of each other — how conflict, for example, may and may not be expressed

• The kinds of feedback and metrics needed to measure progress.

As they state, “Thus, instead of imposing and directing, you as group leader must suggest, support, define, focus on, talk about, expect, hire for, lead discussions about, and evaluate performance against the conditions that foster the spontaneous formation of a team. Your formal authority can be useful for directing people’s time and attention to the right issues and conditions. That’s far from nothing, but in the end only your group’s members can make themselves into a team by freely committing themselves to a mutual purpose.

Your job as team leader is to foster and then sustain the conditions that help them do that. You may not feel completely comfortable with such an indirect approach, but that’s how teams work.”

This leads to another problem, where too many people think that management and leadership are synonyms. Justin Menkes dealt with this problem back in June of 2011 in a very good article. Leadership is more about facilitation, as above in managing through teams. Create the environment, the vision, the direction, and allow the system to organize itself in response to those factors. Peter Drucker stated “Great leaders are great conductors.” The conductor is influencing his orchestra, which in turn is influencing his behavior, and within their exchange is created great music.

Justin quotes Bayer CEO Marijn Drekkers talking about a command and control manager. “You can go around barking orders to your people about what they must do and how they must do it. But what you gain in the three days of step-by-step instruction, you lose in the following three months of execution.” Marijn’s point was that if you present people with the challenge that must be overcome and allow them to figure out the best solution, while it may take a little longer, they tend to be much more dedicated to its implementation, and ultimately witnessing the success of their idea. This is agile thinking in its essence. Pass the problem to the team and allow them to work out an optimal solution by making the accountable.

Justin then gives us “Imagining leadership as a one directional process in which one barks orders and results are the effect is horribly misguided, never more so with than with the highly trained, sophisticated knowledge workers we have today. While real leadership is complex, perhaps inconveniently so, that does not mean it is beyond understanding. Interactionist frameworks are able to highlight identifiable organizing principles that cause directional flows. They also enable us to move beyond overly simplistic, reductionist views of human beings to shed new light on the fluid, recursive quality that is real leadership.”

Very nice.

Leading Through a Team originally appeared on Wisdom's Quintessence on April 4, 2012.