Invent the Future: Virginia Tech 2020
A report from the Task Force on Instructional Technology
April 8, 2011
I. THE CASE FOR CHANGE
We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the
history of the human race.
--Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power Of Organizing Without
Organizations (2008)
We live in extraordinary times. The Internet began as a communications link to
enable information-sharing and collaboration between universities, research
centers, and other institutions of higher learning. The World Wide Web began for
many of the same reasons. Both are now the primary means of communication on
the planet, with an unprecedented speed, reach, and multimodal capacity born of
the computer’s inherent property as a “universal machine,” a machine that can
simulate or model any other machine. These advances have come within an
astonishingly short time frame. Interactive computing is about fifty years old. The
concept of personal computing emerged a little less than forty years ago, at a time
when the notion of a personal computer seemed to many people as laughable and
irrelevant as the idea of a personal Saturn V. Within the last thirty years we have
moved from slow desktop computers with dual floppy disk drives to powerful
laptops to sophisticated smartphones that are essentially full-featured, always-
connected pocket computers that also do telephony, audio-video recording and
editing, and geolocation. Adrian Cockroft (http://perfcap.blogspot.com/) believes
that soon we will be carrying web servers around in our pockets, context-sensitive
machines that can seamlessly link us to varied peripherals in settings ranging from
offices to trains, planes, and automobiles—and everywhere in between.
As both Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants) and W. Brian Arthur (The Nature of
Technology) have recently argued, the pace of technological innovation, and the
often disruptive change it brings, will continue to increase, and the rate of increase
will also increase. This now-familiar “hockey stick” graph is born of the essentially
combinatorial nature of technological innovation. If we appreciate the implications
of this rate of change, we can see that, barring a major global disaster and a
concomitant loss of records and knowledge, we face both extraordinary challenges
and unprecedented opportunities. Our challenge and indeed our duty as educators
is to do the very best we can to help our students thrive as citizens of this new
digital world, equipping them with skills and learning, yes, but also with the meta-
tools of rich, flexible habits of mind that will enable them to face the challenge of
adapting to these changes as well as to develop their own capacities of creativity,
problem-solving and problem-finding, and persistent, rigorous inquiry for a lifetime
of learning.
There is one analogously dizzying and wonderful rate of change in our experience:
the everyday miracle of human intellectual development. With more potential
neural connections than there are particles in the known universe, the human
brains has evolved to be, in Norman Doidge’s words, “the brain that changes itself.”
The brain’s meta-ability of self-shaping, of employing meta-cognition to direct its
own growth and development over a lifetime, is even more remarkable than the
technologies our brains have invented. Yet they are now strikingly similar in their
growth and, according to many thinkers, in their very nature. As Kevin Kelly writes,
“Our technological creations are great extrapolations of the bodies that our genes
build. In this way, we can think of technology as our extended body…. If technology
is an extension of humans, it is not an extension of our genes, but of our minds.
Technology is therefore the extended body for ideas.”
Given this increasing resemblance between our neural networks, our
communications networks, and our technological networks, as well as the
computers that have propelled our world into its increasingly complex and varied
digital future, what we call “instructional technology” has become a medium of
understanding and invention at the very center of the educational enterprise. What
used to be supplemental devices are becoming as fluid and essential as language
itself. Indeed, it is not too fanciful to say that we are witnessing the emergence of a
new language, a new mode of representation as important as the emergence of the
phonetic alphabet.
How then should we prepare students to engage with these possibilities and thrive
within them as productive citizens in a digital age? We can and should survey
technological trends. We should carry out the most intensive and imaginative
research to discover how our learning environments can most effectively support
not only current modes of learning, but modes we can only imagine. Some of our
thoughts along these lines will appear in what follows. More than anything else,
however, we must think carefully and creatively about what computers represent as
tools for thought, to use Howard Rheingold’s phrase. We must build a curriculum
and organization that are answerable to the cultural moment we have before us. As
a public, land-grant university, we have a special mission to provide access to the
resources of a digital age for as many of our Commonwealth’s residents as possible,
as well as access to the high-quality education that will equip them to take full
advantage of these resources as participants in a democratic society.
Virginia Tech’s tagline is not a description or a wish. It is an imperative: invent the
future. What are the conceptual frameworks in our cultural moment that will best
answer that imperative? How can curriculum, leadership, and organizational
structures and practices prepare us for what we can see ahead as well as what we
cannot? This document offers a preliminary consideration of these questions.
Current learning technologies as well as the technological landscape we see before
us inform this consideration, but the focus is on underlying conceptual frameworks
and organizational practices. Lists and inventories are helpful, of course, but the real
challenge, as always, is cultural much more than technological—unless one
considers culture a technology as well, one we can shape, like our brains, to permit
and encourage further growth and development.
II. THE DIGITAL IMAGINATION
[Education] ought to teach and reward initiative, curiosity, the habit of self-
motivation, intellectual involvement…. Educators and computer enthusiasts tend to
agree on these goals. But what happens? Many of the inhumanities of the existing
system, no less wrong for being unintentional, are being continued into computer-
assisted teaching.
--Ted Nelson, “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” (1974)
Alan Kay, the enfant terrible of Xerox’s fabled Palo Alto Research Center and the
father of the personal computer, once observed that the
best way to predict the future was to invent it. There is a
promise and a warning implicit in that observation. The
promise is that we can build a future together. We are
not simply the victims of technological determinism.
The warning is that the future we get is only as good as
the future we invent. In other words, we must nurture
our powers of invention, powers that depend on the
Capital Gate, Abu Dhabi. Designed with Building
Information Modeling software (BIM), now available depth and strength of our imaginations. How can we do
for iPad.
this in a digital context?
We must awaken the digital imagination. Despite numerous “information literacy”
or “digital fluency” initiatives, typically in the form of “swimming test” requirements
or other bolted-on initiatives, no college or university has yet articulated this goal in
its appropriate depth and scope. When the Committee on Information Technology
Literacy published its own vision of 21st- century education in Being Fluent with
Information Technology (Washington: National Academy Press, 1999), it identified
computing skills, capabilities, and concepts as the three essential areas higher
education should attend to in its response to the digital age. So far, higher education
has ignored the conceptual level almost entirely. As a result, students, faculty, and
staff are much like the fish who don’t know they’re wet. We swim in an ocean of
networked computers, but we do not have the conceptual frameworks we need to
understand what that means or how to invent within it.
Yet those pioneers who invented the future we now inhabit understood the crucial
role of the digital imagination in achieving the ultimate goal of augmenting human
intellect. Early on, Alan Kay insisted that “a computer is an instrument whose music
is ideas.” Not a faster typewriter or an information appliance, but an instrument
whose music is ideas. At Xerox PARC, Kay and his colleague Adele Goldberg wrote a
widely influential essay titled “Personal Dynamic Media,” in which they recorded
this essential observation:
[T]he ability to simulate the details of any descriptive model means that the
computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media if the embedding
and viewing methods are sufficiently well provided. Moreover, this new
“metamedium” is active—it can respond to queries and experiments—so that
the messages may involve the learner in a two-way conversation…. We think
the implications are vast and compelling.
Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, “Personal Dynamic Media,” 1977
Computing as an active metamedium. Computers as ”universal machines” with the
peculiar ability to simulate and model any other machine. Software, an entirely new
human invention that Fred Brooks, author of the classic The Mythical Man-Month,
called “pure thought-stuff.” Perhaps not everyone needs to learn to program, but
certainly everyone needs to understand the implications of this invention. To read
the ambitions and excitement of the history of computing, from Vannevar Bush’s “As
We May Think” to Tim Berners-Lee’s “The World Wide Web” is to understand just
how dramatically and wonderfully new this invention is, how extraordinary its
promise, and how far we have fallen short of realizing that promise.
In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad and proclaimed another revolution. Many
writers compared the iPad to Alan Kay’s original conception of the “Dynabook.” Kay,
however, was not optimistic that the revolution he and his colleagues had so
yearned for had in fact arrived:
One way to look at what we were doing is that we were trying to make new
kinds of books, and telescopes and microscopes, etc., to advance “seeing and
thinking”, but if you give a microscope to a monkey they only will hold it up
to admire their reflection in the shiny brass barrel. And I think this is what
happened. Education never got on the bus and the “augmentation of human
intellect” (which is right there) got completely overwhelmed by the mirror
effect….
Alan Kay, responding to Alan Levine’s blog post “The Dynabook Pad”
http://cogdogblog.com/2010/10/17/the-dynabookpad/ on October 21,
2010.
We should not let any technology make monkeys out of us or our students. Indeed,
education is among other things our uniquely human culture of making the most out
of our peculiarly human characteristics. Yet the augmentation of human intellect
within the metamedium of networked, interactive computing has not yet become a
priority in any significant way within higher education.
It’s tough to go through a paradigm shift. When the earth moved from the still center
of the universe to the moving orbit of a heliocentric cosmos, massive intellectual and
social disruption ensued. When Hamlet was in its first run at the Globe Theatre, no
one knew that a déclassé public entertainment on the wrong side of the Thames
would one day be called the primary catalyst of modern self-awareness. Note,
however, that in both instances those who were agile and committed enough were
able to be among the first not only to enjoy the fruits of these discoveries and
accomplishments, but also those who could successfully exercise their own agency
and creativity within the rapidly changing context.
There have been numerous and welcome curricular shifts in response to emerging
cultural concerns over the last forty years, but no college or university has yet had
the vision or courage to answer the call sounded in 1999 by the blue-ribbon
Committee on Information Technology Literacy in their National Academy
publication Being Fluent with Information Technology: “the committee believes that
successful implementation of FITness [i.e., fluency in information technologies]
instruction will require serious rethinking of the college and university curriculum.
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Committee on Information
Technology Literacy, Being Fluent with Information Technology. Washington:
National Academy Press, 1999.
This committee did not advocate another set of tacked-on requirements, but instead
a curriculum in which students, faculty, and staff could awaken and exercise their
digital imaginations, working together from matriculation to commencement as
each new cohort appeared to explore the rich conceptual possibilities of the digital
age. What John Harwood (CIO Penn State) calls “Learning 2.0” is about much more
than content delivery, e-books, or articulation agreements. We need to consider a
world in which we can and probably will move beyond the credit hour, course and
term boundaries, and geographical location into a world in which creation and
learning become synonymous. The irony is that we’ve long known that creation and
learning are intimately related. We’ve had to meet challenges of access and cost by
scaling up along fairly crude industrial models, turning education into an assembly
line. But if the Internet has shown us anything, it’s shown us that a distributed,
loosely coupled model of creation and communication networks can trigger
network effects on a startling and unpredictable scale.
We should learn from the Internet itself what a learning community can be like.
When a small dialogue box inviting 140 characters of commentary can play an
integral role in global events ranging from a U.S. President’s State of the Union
Address (Twitter hashtag #sotu) to ongoing revolutions in the Middle East
beginning with Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, we are witnessing a symbiosis of
creation and learning that far outstrips any vision of academic transformation based
on quadrupling class sizes and outsourcing grading and instruction to poorly-
compensated adjuncts and paraprofessionals. But to understand and leverage these
changes, we must attain to a far deeper understanding of the computer itself than
we have yet attempted. We must understand computing the way we seek to
understand language itself. We must awaken our digital imaginations. If Virginia
Tech seizes this opportunity for leadership in this vital area, that leadership will
demonstrate that the noble democratic vision embodied in the concept of the land-
grant university is the true mother of accomplishment, and a far more sustainable
and equitable engine of economic prosperity than any other vision has yet realized.
How might we begin? We might begin with a
curriculum that brings students into creative,
challenging contact with the history and dreams
of the digital age, perhaps in a first-year
experience that asks them to reflect critically on
their own digital lives as well as begin to shape
and share their own digital creations, both
intramurally and publicly. Research into the
neurobiology of learning, building on decades of
Richard Feynman's blackboard at CalTech. educational research, has shown that students
learn deeply when they are asked to narrate
their learning, curate their creations within the learning environment, and share
what they have curated with a wide and, when appropriate, a public audience. As
students understand that they are not simply completing an assignment at a
professor’s behest, but in fact beginning their life’s work, they will necessarily
become more engaged and produce more authentic work reflective of their own
growing interests. By making that process as public and open as possible, Virginia
Tech will create and share not only educational resources, but the excitement and
engagement of the Hokie educational experience itself.
Of course, to get the full benefit from these experiences, students will need to enroll
here, at Virginia Tech itself.
In the same way, we cannot awaken students’ digital imagination without intensive
development opportunities for faculty and staff that will inspire their digital
imaginations as well. Much has been written about “digital natives” and “digital
immigrants.” While there are significant differences in experience between an 18-
year-old and mature adults who are (let us say) farther along in life’s journey, labels
such as these tend to pigeonhole the young and excuse their elders from the
necessity of learning this new language fluently. Faculty and staff are overworked,
it’s true. Demands of teaching, research, service, and continued learning are
enormous and seem only to grow as the years go by. The moral is therefore clear: a
university committed to digital leadership must provide time, rewards, and
recognition to encourage faculty and staff to pursue development opportunities. But
there must be more. There must be a clear signal of institutional priorities from the
presidential level through the tenure and promotion committee all the way down to
the departmental level. And there must be a move away from “training” and
workshops into deep, authentic intellectual and experiential engagement with the
conceptual frameworks underlying our digital age. Faculty respond much more
readily to ideas, inquiry, and discussion than they do to “training.” The
training/workshop model may get us to skills of a sort, but it leaves capabilities and
especially concepts almost completely untouched. By contrast, seminars and inquiry
groups begin with the conceptual framework and do their work by means of deep,
playful, and creative intellectual encounters. The “deliverable” should be a whole
new mind, to borrow the title of Dan Pink’s book—a changed perspective on the
digital world, as well as a renewed sense of curiosity and commitment to exploring
its many wonders.
And what about staff development? It should be no different than the opportunities
afforded faculty. Indeed, some of the richest, most diverse, most silo-busting and
collaborative seminars are those in which faculty and staff learn and grow side-by-
side, establishing synergistic partnerships that can transform entire schools and
build strong, enduring networks of trust, respect, and encouragement.
III. BUILD NOT FOR THE FUTURE, BUT IN THE FUTURE: The Case For Digital
Citizenship
To understand is to invent.
--Jean Piaget
We rightly think of citizenship in terms of nations, but there’s a deeper meaning
that’s especially important in our interconnected, global, digital world. The citizen is
the one who enjoys the privileges and duties of freedom. Freedom, in turn, depends
on agency, self-efficacy, a sense of one’s own power to make effective choices and
realize one’s fullest potential. To do so in a digital age requires an expanded notion
of citizenship. Becoming a digital citizen means one can experience effective agency
and self-determination in one’s culture—and culture increasingly comes in the
plural as time and distance are no longer barriers to free and fluid communication.
Indeed, one’s “cultures” increasingly implies a significant portion of “one’s planet.”
To have the freedom of this realm, one must become a digital citizen. Once the
digital imagination is awakened, the goal of digital citizenship can be reached.
To get to this level, however, colleges and universities must finally abandon notions
of one-size-fits-all that have dominated our notions of scaling and access for over a
century. The digital age permits mass customization. The culture of a school can
look much more like New York City and much less like The Mall Of America. Chris
Dede of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (and formerly of a sister school
to the north, George Mason University), has argued that human behaviors exist on a
continuum that can be describe by three points: sleeping, eating, and bonding.
Sleeping is very nearly one-size-fits-all. Eating is much more varied and personal.
Bonding is extraordinarily complex, personal, and almost bewilderingly varied (as
any parent of a teenager in love can testify). Dede observes that we treat learning
like sleeping, yet everything we know about learning suggests it is really much more
like bonding. “Yet the very best of our high-end learning environments have about
as much variety as a bad fast-food restaurant,” he concludes.
To get to the variety, depth, and complexity of true learning, then, we must commit
to the mass customization that the digital age makes possible. We cannot and should
not do that work for our students. We should empower their awakened digital
imaginations to do that work for themselves, as a powerful opportunity not only for
self-expression but also for metacognitive and critical reflections on their own
identities and purposes as students. We should not hand them a portfolio made up
of pre-formed data buckets. We should instead challenge them to build their own
personal cyberinfrastructures, iteratively developing them as their concepts deepen,
their knowledge broadens, and their imaginations flourish. We should challenge
them not to “manage” their learning, as the term “learning management system”
implies, but boldly to lead their learning lives within their degree work and far
beyond it. We must also empower them to understand the way the global digital
network operates and what it makes possible. Just as we buy our own houses
without applying for permission to a state “housing management authority” (let’s
ignore for the moment that a mortgage does involve an application), so we can
register a domain, subscribe to a hosting service, install open-source software, and
begin to publish our thoughts and dreams to the world without having to have even
the FCC-third-class-license-with-broadcast-endorsement one had to have to be a
disc jockey back in the day. To quote Clay Shirky again, it’s as if every book came
with a free printing press. Just as in the days of the printing press, there are many
worries about authority, authenticity, intellectual property, and sheer volume of
information. These complaints emerged within a few decades of Gutenberg’s
invention. Yet we do not rely on a National Committee To Screen And Filter Books
for our self-directed learning within this abundance of conversation. We educate our
youth and ourselves to read and write with facility and discernment. Likewise, we
must empower our students as digital citizens to make their contributions to the
global conversations, and to establish the corner of the global network that will be
their “Speaker’s Corner,” just like the corner in London’s Hyde Park where by
tradition anyone can have their turn to speak—and thus to lead the next phase of
the conversation.
It may be the case that students who are used to sitting in silence or distracting
themselves with Internet snacks will be caught off guard when they are not told to
put away their laptops but are instead encouraged and indeed expected to
demonstrate their contributions to the digital age. They may recall that something is
at stake here, and that their capacity as free men and women to create knowledge
and find meaning is a privilege not lightly to be discarded. Likewise, it may be that
teachers (and staff, too) who are used to captive audiences will need to realign their
goals and behaviors toward the free men and women, the digital citizens, who come
to study with them. The old contract in which both students and faculty pledge to
leave each other in peace may become a new relationship in which both students
and faculty are open and eager to building together as fellow digital citizens.
But there’s a catch: such a vision of digital leadership in our students’ and nation’s
future will require strong leadership now, before we have all the knowledge we
would like to proceed. To put that another way, the leadership Virginia Tech must
demonstrate to the world depends to a large extent on the willingness of its
adminstrators, faculty, and staff to empower each other to risk failure. We all fear
anarchy, and rightly so. There must at some level be the confidence that trains will
run on time, for without that confidence, our lives are ruled by fear and anxiety (and
our schedules are thrown into a cocked hat). Yet an on-time train going in the wrong
direction is worse than useless. Likewise, a burnished and mechanically
sophisticated Titanic on the bottom of the North Atlantic is a tragedy, not a
monument. The example of Google is instructive here. “Google Innovation Time Off”
has become famous as a means of encouraging employee creativity and innovation
(and thus leadership). 20% of the engineers’ work time can and should be spent on
their own projects. Most famously, gmail and AdSense emerged from “Innovation
Time Off.” What is less well known is that Google Labs, the primary beneficiary of
this innovation, courts just the kind of anarchy higher education would no doubt
blanch at:
Google Labs is a playground where our more adventurous users can play
around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer
feedback directly to the engineers who developed them. Please note that
Labs is the first phase in a lengthy product development process and none of
this stuff is guaranteed to make it onto Google.com. While some of our crazy
ideas might grow into the next Gmail or iGoogle, others might turn out to be,
well, just plain crazy.
Could we build a Google Labs for curriculum? For majors? For capstone or
cornerstone courses (or projects, or experiences)? For departments? If our digital
imaginations are awakened, if we have grown into the agency and self-efficacy of
mature digital citizenship, and if our leaders are willing to underwrite (with political
as well as financial capital) the failures and “just plain crazy” experiments that
would results, perhaps Virginia Tech, like Google, would find itself the place where
the most engaged and ambitious students are most eager to be. Google is not perfect
by any means, but if you can imagine a digital environment in which we empower
ourselves and our students to “launch their imaginations early and often,” to slightly
modify another Google mantra, then you can imagine a Virginia Tech that can truly
lead in a comprehensive, integrative program of digital citizenship.
You don’t have to believe in the “singularity” to see the wisdom and the caution in
this Ray Kurzweil quotation: “I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term
trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not
the world in which it is started” (emphasis added). The wisdom is clear, the caution
perhaps less so. But consider the second half of that second sentence. The best, most
prescient, most effective inventions will likely not be completely understood or even
understandable when they are begun. The true innovators among our digital
citizens who invent the future will need the patronage and courage of leaders who
are not afraid to confront their own lack of understanding and who can live with the
paradoxical certainty that the “unknown unknown” is where the richest innovations
will come from.
As a thought experiment, imagine explaining to a medieval king who prides himself
on not needing to know how to read that a day will come when mass literacy
empowers citizens worldwide. Imagine explaining to an alpha-male executive in the
early 1960s that a day will come when not knowing at least the rudiments of typing
will likely disqualify an applicant from obtaining an executive position. Imagine
explaining Twitter, or YouTube, or blogging, to the world of 1995, a time when many
people loudly insisted that no one would ever do something as foolish as enter a
credit card number in a form on a Web page. Virginia Tech has a proud tradition of
invention and innovation. We likely believe we would welcome the next Jeff Bezos
and empower him to invent the next Amazon.com. Are we willing to provide that
encouragement and those opportunities as part of our core curriculum? Can we
imagine a CLE that increases our students range of, and capacity for, sheer interest
and curiosity, and empowers the exploration and expression of that curiosity within
a digital context? If we cannot, we risk losing one of the most extraordinary
educational opportunities humanity has ever encountered. Moreover, we
shortchange both our students and ourselves. Not only our tagline but our very
mission should steer us toward full and deep intellectual and creative engagement
with the digital age.
III. TO INVENT IS TO REINVENT: An Organization Of Small Pieces Loosely Joined.
My personal view is we are observing the early emergence of the Meta University: a
transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework
of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be
constructed or enhanced.
--Charles Vest, MIT, 2006
Can we build a Meta University within universities as well as among them? Any
university that wants to be a leader in the digital world must do so. The most
effective contributions to this Meta University will come from those institutions that
walk the walk within their own structures. That is, the organizational structures that
will most effectively invent the future and lead education into a new millennium will
be those in which the organizational structures are themselves “accessible,
empowering, dynamic,” those that are “communally constructed framework[s] of
open materials and platforms.”
We know we need robust infrastructure: high-capacity, high-bandwidth
connections, both wired and wireless, and ubiquitous throughout the campus’s
physical spaces; flexible, reconfigurable learning environments; support for faculty,
staff, and students; easily accessible and navigable digital repositories, and so on.
We can identify these needs fairly readily, even if we do not yet know how we will
design or support the resources that meet them. Once again, however, the real
challenge is cultural. In addition to specific goals like the ones enumerated above,
the organizational subcommittee consistently uses words like “flexibility,”
“collaboration,” “sharing,” “integrating,” and most challenging of all, “nurture and
develop.” These are words that point to attitudes and values. These are cultural
words. How can we inculcate such a culture at a large research university with over
3,000 faculty and over 30,000 students, plus staff and administration?
Once again, we should look for a guiding principle to the Internet itself, in particular
the World Wide Web. In “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” (www.smallpieces.com), his
classic work on the design and organizing function of the Web, David Weinberger
writes, “the Web gets its value not from the smoothness of its overall operation but
from its abundance of small nuggets that point to more small nuggets.” The
challenge for an organization, then, is to identify those nuggets, teams, and services
that provide real value and organize them not into a tight structure but into a set of
flexible, networked links: small pieces loosely joined.
Large organizations function in almost the opposite way: huge pieces tightly joined,
or perhaps even worse, huge pieces completely disconnected from each other. The
challenge is one of communication within a structure that empowers each person to
create links among the small pieces loosely joined. Again we must ask, where are
these conversations possible (answer: everywhere), and how can we foster them?
Ironically, task forces such as this one are often the first time people from clearly
interdependent areas come together to voice their perspectives and articulate
common goals. Here leaders in the Registrar’s Office share their hopes and
frustrations with leaders from the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, or
with leaders from IDDL or CIDER. Here the conductor of a laptop orchestra
brainstorms with an education researcher, the dean of undergraduate studies, and
the chief information officer. We must instantiate these conversations more
regularly and widely. Such conversations not only generate solutions and ideas, but
also identify and begin to link those small pieces loosely joined. Again, leadership is
key. A task force such as this one clearly signals the priority and urgency the
institution has given to the conversation. To stimulate more of these conversations,
we will need more such assignments, more such signals from our leadership.
We have already seen how Google sends these signals to its employees. It’s
instructive also to recall Apple’s beginnings. When it came
time to design the Macintosh, a group physically relocated to
another building on the Apple campus and literally flew a
pirate’s flag from the rooftop. When the Macintosh was
finished, the first ones included reproductions of the
signatures from the entire project team inside the case of the
machine.
Metaphorically speaking, our approach to organizational structures
for 21st- century digital leadership must be one in which talented,
committee workers have the chance to be pirates (i.e., innovate
dramatically, even radically) as well as the chance to sign their
work, even if only they will know the signatures are there. Instead of
silos, we must build platforms for invention and reinvention. Wealth
will be generated if those platforms are fundamentally platforms for
conversation, and that conversation is encouraged to imagine and
embrace risk for the sake of renewal and invention.
IV: SELF-SIMILARITY, RECURSION, AND EMERGENCE: A Few Preliminary
Conclusions
The task is the same now as it ever has been, familiar, thrilling, unavoidable: we work
with all our myriad talents to expand our media of expression to the full measure of
our humanity.
--Janet Murray, “Inventing the Medium”
A pattern emerges within all this discussion, a fractal pattern of similar principles
and conceptual frameworks. We can identify this pattern with the help of Steven
Berlin Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, which traces significant innovation
and invention over the long sweep of human history. His conclusion is that
combination and recombination of what he calls “the adjacent possible” fuels
growth and innovation. The principle is the same as for emergence, and as difficult
to imagine: network effects that appear in a macrostate are not yet visible in a single
instance or microstate. One cannot have a flock of bird. Yet knowing that, we can
begin to understand the possibilities of self-stimulating, self-organizing structures,
and can begin to build platforms in which the range and number of adjacent
possibles are increased and best positioned for success.
Although committees are often compared to graveyards for good ideas, at their best,
committees are excellent platforms for emergence. The most exciting and
productive instance of the adjacent possible is two trusting and inventive colleagues
in conversation with each other. If the
extraordinary success of the Internet and the
Web has taught us anything, it’s that
conversations within networked, interactive
computing environments can scale and
generate an emergent “wealth of networks”
far beyond our expectations. Going forward,
we can design such an environment by
awakening the digital imagination,
empowering faculty, staff, and students as
digital citizens, and creating “hubs” or
“nodes” of conversation that are linked internally and externally in a network of
innovation. Whether we call this network a “skunk works” or a flotilla of pirate
ships, we must empower this network not only to invent but to reinvent. If we are to
create and innovate within the extraordinary disruption of the digital age, we must
not insulate ourselves from disruption, for that would be to reject the global
conversation itself. We must build curricula, learning environments, learning
opportunities, and organizational structures that foster the capacity for
collaboration and self-surprise within a framework of shared values and goals.
As it happens, interactive computing was invented for that very purpose. Douglas
Engelbart, the father of interactive computing, wrote these stirring words in the
essay that would eventually launch the Internet itself, “Augmenting Human Intellect:
A Conceptual Framework”:
We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations.
We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try,
intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully co-exist with
powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated
methods, and high-powered electronic aids.
No self-respecting institution of higher learning would neglect these principles, as
they are the foundation of educating our citizens for maximum agency and
contribution to a democracy, a form of government that is itself a model for
reinvention of the kind we are discussing here.
MIT’s Seymour Papert devoted his career to the idea that interactive computing
offered a new mode of experiential learning. In 1993, he published a book titled The
Children’s Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer. In this magisterial
and also deeply personal work, Papert distinguishes “Schoolers” from “Yearners.”
“Schoolers” are surprised and even indignant about the need for “megachange.” By
contrast, Papert writes, Yearners “do not say, ‘I can’t imagine what you could
possibly be looking for,’ because they have themselves felt the yearning for
something different.” If Virginia Tech is to invent the future, it must empower its
Yearners. It must help to awaken their digital imaginations, give them the tools,
responsibilities, and freedoms of digital citizens, and help them build platforms to
support and foster emergence despite the risks and failures along the way. Only
some of the obstacles to inventing the future are technological. Most are cultural.
Here too Papert’s insights are instructive.
My overarching message to anyone who wishes to influence, or simply
understand, the development of educational computing is that it is not about
one damn product after nother (to paraphrase a saying about how school
teaches history). Its essence is the growth of a culture, and it can be
influenced constructively only through understanding and fostering trends in
this culture.
Thus a task force on instructional technology inevitably becomes a task force on
institutional mission and culture. The difference, of course, is the difference
computers make. Surveying the landscape and visible horizons of a digital world as
digital citizens with a fully awakened digital imagination, we may plausibly conclude
that computers, properly understood, may make all the difference indeed.