Megan Poore's List: planning, policy and infrastructure

• But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
• But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
• “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing  equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the  machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich  A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

1 more annotation...

• lack of academic leadership, clear vision and formal strategic planning, and the absence of clear institutional policies, processes and standards
• The literature stresses a lack of systems reliability, technological problems and malfunctions including slow download times and bandwidth issues are frustrating for both academics and students
• Moreover, the adoption and integration of educational technology appears to have facilitated renewal and regeneration with some academics reporting a desire to 'energise' their teaching (Jones & Kelley, 2003)
• interviewees perceived that there was a lack of clear institutional direction concerning the design and delivery of distance education courses. In particular, interviewees expressed concerns regarding the apparent lack of program-wide strategic plans, clear policies, procedures and processes.

2 more annotations...

• 1. Start Tactical and Bottom Up
• 2. Avoid the Culture Question
• 3. Avoid Highly Regulated Content (and Lawyers)
• 4. Learning Professionals Must Lead
• 5. Prepare Workers for Learning 2.0
• 6. Technology is Tactical not Strategic
• 7. Avoid the CIO

5 more annotations...

• 1. Security and Identity Management

  2. Funding IT

  3. Administrative/ERP/Information Systems

  4. Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity

  5. Faculty Development, Support, and Training

  6. Infrastructure

  7. Strategic Planning

  8. Governance, Organization, and Leadership

  9. E-Learning/Distributed Teaching and Learning

  10. Web Systems and Services

• Aimed at Government and partners, this document sets out what the e-strategy is and how its delivery will be co-ordinated.

• Becta's self-review framework offers you a route for assessing and improving your school's use of ICT. Based on maturity models, the framework allows you to benchmark against established best practice and helps to create an action plan for improvement.

• This research bulletin examines outsourcing and cloud computing through the lens of strategic decision making for higher education. Strategic decisions have long-term impact, create institutional advantage, are difficult to reverse, affect organizational scope, stretch resources and competencies, and often require high-level governance. As such, they are inherently risky because they often involve a high degree of uncertainty. Outsourcing, particularly when applied to core or infrastructure services, can have unintended consequences that should be weighed during the decision-making process.

• Cycle of innovation:
  Insight - Invention - Application - Reflection and communication - Megan Poore on 2009-06-24
• "transformative innovation ... challenges our assumptions about how we do things" (5)
  
  "innovation is the exploitation of ideas (not just the ideas themselves); ... those ideas are generated by mixing creativity and insight (including understanding the problem you are attempting to overcome); ... when applied, the practice is something valued" (5)
  
  "Currently ... most teacher innovation ... might be termed 'sustaining innovation', that is, changing activities within a given structure, rather than adopting transformational or 'disruptive' innovation practices." (6) - Megan Poore on 2009-06-24

• insufficient thought is currently being given within education institutions to social and technological development, and, consequently, how that should influence planning.
• “What has happened in the past is that people have harnessed technology to do the things they always did – for example, using technology to pass exams a little better, without criticising what the exams were testing,”

• Most state governments in Australia have banned popular online networking sites from public schools after these sites were accused of supporting a broad host of threats to young people. This paper questions the effectiveness of these bans in light of recent empirical research that highlights the social and educational benefits that can accrue from young people's online network use. In doing so, this paper argues for a more informed policy debate that considers not only the risks involved in using online networks, but also the opportunities online networks afford and the capabilities young people require to use them effectively.

• "Most of the content of these sites has little educational value" (QLD DET)!!! // Restricting access may be restricting access to help - Megan Poore on 2009-06-25