In my fantasy world our jobs in higher education technology include includes time for book discussion. The boss, or the unit, or someone would choose a book each month that relates to our jobs - buy the book for everyone - and set aside one hour for all of us to discuss. Maybe we'd all vote on the books. And all of us could choose the format we want to read our books. I'd choose audio. Maybe my colleague would choose an e-book. Some people would choose paper.

Two books I'd nominate right away would be the Daemon and Freedom, by Daniel Suarez.

I'm nominating these books not because they are great works of literature, or because they teach us something profound about the intersection of technology and education. Rather, I think these books are a blast - and I think our colleagues who work in networking, systems, and security would really enjoy them.

The author, Daniel Suarez, spent most of his career as an IT guy. From his website bio: "Daniel Suarez is an independent systems consultant to Fortune 1000 companies. He has designed and developed enterprise software for the defense, finance, and entertainment industries. An avid gamer and technologist…."

The first book, Daemon, was originally self-published - as the traditional publishers did not know what "genre" the book belonged in. Suarez was able to turn online buzz and blog mentions into a publishing deal. I think that this path to publication makes a great "meta story" around Daemon (and later Freedom), and would contributed to our ed. tech IT discussion.

Both Daemon and Freedom essentially take the perspective of the network specialist / systems engineer to tell a much bigger story about government, privacy, and corporate control. Suarez mixes large scale narratives of technology based economic change and the concentration of corporate ownership with lots of juicy technical ideas and speculations about how the Web is changing social life. It would be really enjoyable to discuss Suarez's ideas with the folks who design our networks, handle our information security (and see the intrusions), and admin our servers and systems.

What books would you recommend that you think may be of interest to across the higher ed IT spectrum?

I've been rejected to teach online at the University of Phoenix. I'll survive. But I'll admit to being a little perplexed.

The reasons that I applied to teach online for U of P are:

1) I love online teaching, and teaching online works well with my schedule, as I'm able to teach at night and on the weekends.

2) I thought that I would learn some things that I could take back to my day job - as the U of P methodology for developing courses and training faculty is well known for creating consistently positive outcomes.

3) Adult working professionals are the best students in the world to work with.

Teaching online is the best way that I know to fully understand the potential of learning management systems and Web 2.0 tools to transform the learning experience. Every course, (whether it be on-ground, hybrid, or fully online), is improved when faculty have gone through a rigorous process of online course development and mentoring/training/support for online teaching.

Up until this summer I taught online courses for the Master of Science in Organizational Leadership, at Quinnipiac University. These were courses I helped develop, in a program I helped get off the ground while working for QU. After this summer the model of course delivery for these courses changed (from fully online to hybrid), and therefore I was unable to keep teaching from New Hampshire. While I've enjoyed having nights and weekends free and clear, I've also missed the opportunity work with adult professionals in the courses I used to teach.

Getting rejected by U of P came as somewhat of a surprise. I have tons of experience both teaching and developing online courses and programs. In fact, part of my last job was to design and run faculty training programs (taught online) for new online faculty. I have the relevant academic credentials. And although the online application form for U of P could not pick this up, I was actually pretty good at teaching online.

In my experience the key to being a good online instructor (and perhaps any college teacher) is to treat your students as you'd like to be treated if you were taking the course. Respect that their time is precious. Invest the same amount of time and energy in working with your students as you expect them to spend in the course. Model collegial attitudes, presence in the online environment, constant communication, and positive interactions. Work with your students as equals and colleagues, help them play to their strengths, and be honored by the opportunity to be a part of their continuing education.

Why would U of P reject my application to teach part-time and online? I don't have any definite answers, but I'll engage in some speculation:

Speculation 1: I wonder if U of P really wants folks like me to teach their courses. People with Ph.D.'s and lots of experience in both developing and teaching online (and on-ground) courses. Academics are accustomed to, and expect, a degree of autonomy developing and teaching our courses. I think this autonomy goes against the U of P model of pre-developed courses and rigorous monitoring and evaluation of its professors. For the University of Phoenix I was, (and am) perfectly willing to conform to their systems and methods, as part of my rationale for applying to teach is to understand and learn from their model. But I'm guessing that "academic types" like me are not worth the hassle.

Speculation 2: Perhaps U of P would prefer to recruit faculty from the ranks of working professionals as opposed to academia. Graduates of U of P, for the most part, will not be looking to apply for jobs or promotions in higher ed. I don't know this for a fact, but I'm guessing that most U of P part-time instructors are not full-time academics, but rather working in the sorts of positions that the U of P students aspire to.

What do you think these speculations for my rejection? Can you add any to the list? Have you been rejected by U of P as well? Have you been accepted?

One good thing that I hope emerges from our whole discussion on curricular video and copyright is an extension of this conversation to include video projects.

The real pedagogical action around video is not viewing, but creating.

Yes, the option to incorporate full-length videos in our curriculum, be these documentaries or feature films, is an essential tool for teaching. Many of our learners learn best from video. Much of the content we want to cover is covered best by video. But it is also true that the options for getting video to the eyeballs of our students is expanding. Between Hulu, YouTube and Netflix streaming, a creative professor partnering with a curricular media specialist, subject matter librarian, and learning designer can find great video to match many teaching and learning goals.

Just because substitutes and options exist to replace streamed videos does not mean that this is the best strategy to pursue. The value of a university video (DVD) physical library increasingly centers on the ability of students to utilize these DVD's as source media for video projects.

I think we will see a large scale move away from video being used in courses as simply another curricular source (along with books, articles etc.), towards the diffusion of media projects. Two things are coming together that will support this trend toward a growth in media projects.

First, we are all gaining an increased appreciation and understanding for the pedagogical value of media projects. The skills that students must learn to create a media project increasingly align with the creative and analytical skills necessary for professional employment. Beyond gaining skills for employment, media projects are great tools to promote active learning, as by definition a media project turns a student into a creator. Media projects encompass key skills, such as writing (the script), collaboration (most of are done in teams), making arguments with evidence and presenting persuasively in a way that holds an audience interest. A fair portion of our students who are visual learners and non-linear creators excel in media projects in ways they never could if the final project was only a term paper.

The second reason I think that we will see an increased demand for media projects amongst our faculty (and students!) is that the tools for creating and sharing these projects have become cheaper to acquire and easier to use. On our campus we have our students create their media projects with iMovie. A new idea we are experimenting with is to have students publish the results of their media projects to YouTube. iMovie strikes a great balance between providing a powerful creation and editing platform while still retaining a relatively gentle learning curve. I'd love to hear about any ideas you would have about other media creation platforms and tools. YouTube as a publishing platform has the benefits of allowing student work to be shared with the world.

One goal I'd like to see us achieve would be the option of a media project in as many classes as possible. Some students may prefer to write a term paper. Some students may prefer to make a video mashup. Both learning styles should be accommodated. Media projects should not only be end-of-semester final projects, but can serve as small projects interspersed throughout the term.

The other goal I'm hoping we work towards is facilitating the transition of curricular video from something to be viewed to something that can be manipulated. Ideally, any video that our students watch as part of the curriculum would also be available for use in their own media projects. The old saying was that we don't learn anything until we teach it. The new saying could be that we don't learn anything until we mash it up.

This goal of turning curricular (streaming) video into raw materials for student work would require a different orientation towards our media collections. We would need to make the files available to our students in ways that they can use for their own editing. What new copyright challenges will this teaching and learning goal bring? How can we proactively plan to navigate the objections that are bound to arise?

Is the debate we are having about copyright and online streaming of course video (behind a password through the LMS) lagging behind new methods of teaching? How do we situate the discussion within the context of wanting our students to have full, unrestricted access to the assigned class videos source files so that they can create their own new works of scholarship via a mashup?

A video mashup project is one in which the student uses video editing software (like iMovie) to create a new piece of work by combing (or mashing up), existing video, new video, images, text and voice-over. In some student video projects a portion of the existing video that is utilized in the mashup is the same video that is assigned as part of the curriculum. The idea is to get students to work with the video, to create with the video, as opposed to acting as passive viewers. A video mashup project is an extension of a more traditional writing assignment, where students incorporate the curricular video into their term papers. You can see examples of student mashup projects for a sociology course I co-taught this past summer on the class YouTube channel.

There is a great discussion unfolding around UCLA's take-down of online video in response to complaints by the Association for Information and Media Equipment (AIME). Currently, the IHE article "Hitting Pause on Class Videos" that broke the story has 37 comments, capturing a lively and informative discussion.

Steve Worona's blog post offers some sound advice for institutions and some excellent links. One of those links is to a blog post by Kevin Smith, "Can we stream digital video - a thoughtful, balanced, and fact filled description of all the issues involved. The comments section for the IHE article also contains a link to a report, "Video and Higher Education Project: Options for the Future," available here, that is worth reading.

Some questions:

What would AIME's response be to schools wanting to provide students with digitized copies of curricular video for their iMovie projects?

What does the law say about enabling the production of video mashups as opposed to the online viewing of assigned videos?

How can we insure that we are pushing ahead in our efforts to promote active learning through course video and mashup projects?

Are we putting ourselves further at risk from groups like AIME if we provide our students the materials they need to create mashups?

Are mashups the next target?

Even my worst days as a learning technologist beat the crap out of my best days in most of the jobs I've had. I've worked food service (Dunkin Donuts), and I've worked retail (ladies clothing - don't ask), and trust me that working in academic technology is a choice gig. Truth be told, I was terrible at any job that required a cash register. If you've ever worked behind coffee counter then you will always, and I mean always, leave money in the tip jar.

Perhaps knowing how hard life is making a buck in the food service and retail world is the reason you will usually catch me on campus with a smile on my face.

If you are lucky enough to get paid to have never left college then you are truly blessed. Educational technology is the best job going in higher ed, as we get to work with computers and software (something we'd do even if nobody was paying us), while trying to use these cool tools to help people learn. We also get to work with really smart people (faculty members, librarians, programmers, media people etc.), most of whom are incredibly grateful for any help, advice, or support that we can provide.

So in the spirit of recognizing our good fortune at being lucky enough to work at the place where education and technology intersect I offer 3 simple rules of the road for learning technologists:

Rule 1 - Be Positive: Recognizing our good fortune should put us all in a positive frame of mind. We can share our positive energy with the faculty that we collaborate with and the librarians we depend upon. We can greet faculty requests with both energy and smiles. We can respond to our colleagues' ideas and plans with support and offers to help. We can jump in where we are needed, knowing full well that our colleagues will do the same for us. We can be generous with our time for anyone who walks through our doors, whether they are an emeritus faculty member or a post-doc teaching her first course. We can do whatever it takes to make the life of an instructor just a little easier, and the learning of a student just a little bit better.

Rule 2 - Be Calm: We don't need to come across as constantly stressed, constantly harried, and constantly over-scheduled. We can, and should, linger over conversations with faculty, students and colleagues. We should spend the time to listen to what they need and what they are doing. We don't need to tell people that we are doing too much without enough resources or people, as I can guarantee that everyone is in that same situation. We can be relaxed. We might be worried about larger financial, resource, or staffing issues - but we should also recognize that we can't control what goes on with endowment or state funding - and therefore should not exude stress about these issues. We can control our level of engagement in our work and our degree of pro-activeness in responsibilities, so our energies should be directed towards those areas that are within our control.

Rule 3 - Be Grateful: Finally, we should recognize how fortunate we are to work in higher education and how lucky we are to work with people who teach us so much. We should remember to say thank you. We should try to listen more than we speak (hard for me - but a goal nonetheless). We should try to the people we work with as they are, not as we want them to be. We should try to own up to our own weaknesses and be willing to share our passions. We should encourage our colleagues to play to their strengths, and try to discourage a system that attempts to correct weaknesses (a goal we should model for teaching and learning). We should be cognizant how fortunate we are to live at a time and in a place that values learning and supports education.

What would your rules of the road look like? Do you also think that you have the best job in higher ed?

Grand Nannie is 92. She wants to be able to speak to her computer to have it do three things:

1) Transfer her paper rolodex into the computer (by speaking) and then be able to retrieve the names (by voice) so she can dictate a letter.

2) Dictate letters.

3) Look at the news.

Yes, I know that speech recognition programs like Dragon NaturallySpeaking can accomplish these tasks. But the problem is that even the best speech-to-text programs require an ability to navigate a computer operating system, open applications, and train the system.

What Grand Nannie needs is a simple box with a screen that contains an OS totally devoted to working by simple voice-commands. This system would do far few operations, but would be able to complete these operations without any computer knowledge or the need to master any computer skills. The system would be able to record contact, transcribe letters, and navigate to a set number of Web sites.

This week I'll have the depressing task of breaking the news to Grand Nannie that she can't do what she wants to do. I'll have to tell her that the technology does not yet exist to allow her to use a computer with her voice. And I feel terrible about this.

What other people are we failing with our technology? I've got to believe that the Microsoft's and the Apple's and the IBM's of the world are missing a huge opportunity in not building devices to serve consumers like Grand Nannie. I think that the technology pieces should all be in place. We are talking about a simple device. What is lacking is an understanding of the needs people who are not young, agile and techno-savvy (although, of course many elderly are as techno-literate as many teenagers).

The fact that Grand Nannie does not have a computer that can work for her also means that she is closed out of the expanding universe of materials for lifelong learners. You could imagine a computer that would allow her to say, "show me a lecture on particle physics" - and the computer would give her options to choose (by voice) across a range of colleges and professors.

Does anyone know of a device of bundled hardware / software that would meet the requirements of my grandmother? How would you get close to this idea with the hardware and software available today? Why has this device not been manufactured? Are the barriers we are running up against technical or cultural?

One of my colleagues jokes that when she retires from her academic tech gig that she is going to start a consulting company solely focussed on guiding ed tech vendors in improving their webinar demos. Webinars are the product demos given over WebEx (or some other synchronous tool) that have largely replaced the campus visit for at least the initial company show-and-tell.

The demo webinar is a method of communication between companies and schools in serious need of a re-think. My guess is that us folks on the education (customer) side are as much to blame for bad demos as the companies that give them, as we have failed to provide clear signals about what we need. What follows is my effort to provide these guidelines - I hope that you will join the discussion to improve this list:

1) Purpose: Your webinar should not be about your product, service or company, but about the problem that your product, service or company solves for your potential customer (us). Whoever is planning and delivering the webinar needs to work with the local person organizing the meeting to figure out what the problem(s) motivated the planning for the session. The presentation should start with the one, two or three problems that the school needs to solve (never more than three), with the presentation built around how the product/service addresses the specific and individual needs and issues of the department, school or institution.

2) Content: The only slides that you should show during the webinar should demonstrate that you understand and have absorbed what the problem/issue needs to be solved by your product/service. Please get rid of any slides that show either: a) why your company is so wonderful, b) a list of current customers. In fact, resist the urge to give any PowerPoint presentation and be willing to jump directly into demoing the application. If you want the audience to know anything that cannot be shown in an actual product demo than send a one-page sheet along to the local organizer and ask that this sheet be passed out before the webinar. The "on-screen" webinar time should be demoing those parts of the product/service that directly addresses and solves the problems and needs of the school and the people who will be running the product. Don't show everything - but be willing to show the features and solutions that the audience (us) wants to see.

3) Audience: Most webinars that I've participated in are aimed way too low in terms of technical details. If you are presenting your LMS or content system or web learning tool or presentation capture platform than the audience is most likely experts in these technologies. We are already running our own system or have run similar systems. We don't need the sales pitch about how this or that technology, application or platform will lead to better learning, more efficiency, more productivity, whatever. If we didn't think that the application/system/platform is important than we wouldn't be spending our time in your webinar. In fact, any sales pitch will turn us off. The demo should be directed at a high technical level, with the assumption that the system engineers and learning technologists in the audience are experienced and comfortable running comparable platforms.

4) Presenters: Make sure that you have included your system engineers, developers, and product managers on the webinar. There should never be an instance where you say "I'll have to have the technical folks get back to you on that question". They should be in the room … and I think in many cases running the presentation. This takes practice, as it is important that anyone presenting avoid a monologue and that the presentation be a dialogue and a conversation. What you want is your engineers and our engineers to talk in a short-hand. You want them to jump around and debate the technology. The product managers are important because they can answer questions about features, design decisions, what's been left out (and why) and what is coming next. The product manager should also be able to bridge any gaps between the customer needs and the technology. A decision maker around product design and features giving the webinar is essential. This is the best way to get your engineers and product managers close to your customers, and the clearest signal that everyone in your company has skin in the game when it comes to sales customer relations.

5) Competition: You need to assume that your audience is comparing your product/service again your competitors. This means that you need to be willing to make direct contrasts and comparisons about why and how you believe that your platform/application/service solves our needs to a greater extent than your competition. You don't need to claim, and should not claim, that what you are demoing is better than your competition in every area. Rather, you need to demonstrate exactly how what you are selling is better for the specific issues, needs and problems that we are facing. (Again, your demo webinar should not be about you but about us!) This requires that you have an in-depth knowledge of your competition and that you are willing to share your knowledge. In demoing a particular feature, function, service, or model you should be prepared to talk about how your product differs from the competition (in specific terms). Don't be afraid to admire what others are doing. In any audience you will probably find people who like and admire your competition. In fact, we might be current customers of your competition. Honor and understand those choices and preferences for other companies and products, but make your case forcefully as to why it makes sense to either switch or go with what you have (again - bringing it back to solving our problems).

6. Pricing: Talk about costs. Be prepared to give very specific information on what your product/service costs. What it costs to buy. What it costs to maintain. Talk about direct and indirect costs. Understand that if we buy your product or service that we will probably not get more people to install, run, maintain, train or support it. Recognize that everyone is understaffed and operate in a condition of increasing demands. Tell us how your product/service addresses this issue. Be prepared to compare the costs of your product/service with your competition. Costs, fees, and comparisons to the competition is one place where showing a slide is fine.

7. Sandbox and Pilots: Make sure that anyone attending the webinar has full access to play with your product or service prior to and after the webinar. Be generous in extending free trial licensing. Be generous in supporting and managing pilot programs. Take away needs to have systems locally hosted by hosting pilots on your servers.

8. Preparation: The webinar should be the culmination of discussions and hard work with your campus contact, rather than a first introduction, and should demonstrate that you have strong understand of the campus issues and problems that your product/service can address. Ideally the whole webinar should be given a run through with whoever is arraigning the meeting on campus. Remember that whoever is arranging the meeting is spending some of their capital in getting people to the meeting (no easy task in an era of overlapping and growing responsibilities), and may be your best advocate. If you make the webinar demo about your company and your product service, as opposed to being about solving the particular problems or issues faced by your potential customer, than you will make your local contact look bad.

What would you add or take away from this list? If you work for an ed tech company how does the demo webinar process look from your end? Does this list apply to in-person demos as well?

Jim Groom is dead on - I'm pandering to the iPad. Why stop now?

(But seriously….stay tuned for a full blog post responding to Jim's comments yesterday - I think he is on to something and I have the links of open learning resources at UMW to prove it).

Back to the iPad pandering.

Will the iPad let me get away with not buying Mac laptops for my students? And when I say "my students", I mean the 5th and 7th grade students that live in my house. My daughters are desperate for their own MacBooks. They have a good case, as a great deal of their homework has migrated to the Web and Apple applications. At school they work on Macs and use Apple applications such as Pages and Keynote. All of their homework and school assignments go through Moodle.

So far, we have been forcing them to use the family iMac. They take turns, waiting for our kitchen based computer to be available. When really desperate they borrow Dad's MacBook Pro (which I'd like to avoid). Using Mom's computer is basically a non-option, as neither her work Dell (Windows XP) or her Dell Netbook (ubuntu) can work with their school apps.

Our students' parents have up to this point been too cheap to buy another Mac. We keep thinking we will need to get a MacBook, but we are not sure how any new coveted laptop will be shared. Dropping a thousand bucks on a kids' computer seems excessive, but increasingly necessary.

Which brings me back to the iPad. Could the $500 iPad serve as a "good enough" computer? My understanding is that it has a version of iWork (what we need) that can also read and transfer files to the regular iWork. Is this accurate? Could my kids sync with the kitchen "mothership" iMac to an iPad, updating files to be worked on.

If the iPad can serve as a computer to work on Pages or Keynote documents than I could see it working very well. My girls spend only some time on the iMac working in their Apple applications. They spend lots of time watching YouTube videos, surfing the web, chatting with friends, etc. etc. The iPad seems ideal for those functions. The iPad could also become their media hub, the place they watch videos and listen to music. Downloading and reading books on the iPad would be a bonus.

So what do you think? Can the iPad substitute for a laptop give the conditions I've described? Is this a bad idea? Can the iPad replace a laptop and a Touch, as long as a family has at least one desktop to do the syncing?

To make the higher ed. connection, do you foresee the day when students come to campus having had their main computing experiences on something other than a full OS equipped laptop? For our future students will the browser and the app be the only computing experience they really know?

The risk of the iPad for higher education is that the device will prove a "sustaining innovation" in learning technology.

Sustaining innovations, as explained by Michael Horn in his amazing talk at the 2009 EDUCAUSE ECAR Symposium, increase the quality of the service or product but also drive up the cost. Higher education has been moving through cycles of sustaining innovation, where improvements in facilities, amenities and technology have increased the fidelity of the campus experience while simultaneously driving costs (and tuition) faster than inflation.

The iPad could drive a new round of sustaining innovation as institutions seek to design specialized campus and educational apps for the new platform. We will want to design these learning and campus apps, and invest in tools that allow our university content to be accessed by the iPad, for the best of reasons. These reasons include the desire to stay relevant to our students' experience, to compete for their scarce attention, and to use the iPad to reach multiple learning styles.

We will see the ability of the iPad to digitize curricular texts and aggregate curricular media as progress. We will be excited that students will be able to easily sync up a syllabus' worth of course content, consuming the materials via the iPad's gorgeous interface. We will be excited by the possibilities of students engaging in formative assessments and collaborative work (wikis/blogs/discussions) through the browser, without the need to sacrifice the fidelity of reading (iBooks) or media viewing.

The possibilities for learning, student interaction and enhanced campus services that the iPad unleashes will all come at a price. Nothing about a tool as wonderful as the iPad will lower the cost of constructing or delivering education. We will need to invest in buying iPads, developing apps for iPads, and experimenting with new pedagogies and training around iPads. Perhaps the iPad will be a disruptive force for lifelong learners, as they will be able to sync up the lecture content from iTunesU, pair it with book content, and than engage in discussions of the material (through the browser) with other autodidacts.

It might be unpopular to say right now (and I'm sympathetic to the Edupunk movement), but an argument can be made that the LMS was a disruptive innovation for higher education. The LMS allowed, for the first time, hybrid and online learning to scale. Prior to the LMS any pedagogical innovation enabled by technology required custom development and a high degree of faculty technical proficiency. Faculty could make course Web pages, but they needed to know HTML. Assessment and collaboration tools could be built, but they were built one-by-one and by hand. The low technical threshold necessary to maintain and utilize and LMS opened the door to pedagogical innovation and a disruption of the status quo higher ed model. We are still struggling to walk through that door. (And yes, we can and should be debating if Web 2.0 tools have supplanted or complemented the LMS as catalysts for disruption -- but that is the topic of another discussion).

How can something as uncool and unsexy as the LMS be disruptive for higher ed, while something as cool, sexy and elegant as the iPad only be sustaining? And what do we do with the recognition that no matter how wonderful a sustaining innovation can be, the end result is to increase costs as quality also rises?

Do we stop adopting sustaining innovations?

Do we only innovate with learning technologies that can increase quality (active learning) while decreasing costs?

I have no idea, but while we figure all this out I'm totally excited to get my hands on a shiny new iPad. How about you?

Nicholas Carr writes that he "… feel(s) sorry for the kids at Cushing Academy." Cushing is the New England prep school that is substituting digital for print in its school library. In an open letter Cushing parents, alumni, and friends, Headmaster James Tracy writes:

"As a natural and integral outgrowth of the school’s strategic commitment to becoming the national leader in 21st-century secondary education, Cushing Academy is replacing, over a two-year period, the library’s printed books with electronic sources. This transformation places Cushing in the forefront of a pedagogical and technological shift."

I'd be the last person to argue that our university libraries should follow Cushing's lead. The printed books in our academic libraries are all precious and irreplaceable. The process of wandering around the stack to discover new treasures bring true joy. Your college and my college should not follow Cushing's lead.

But not imitating Cushing is different from not celebrating its willingness to experiment. We need institutions that are willing to take risks and go "all in" to push innovation. The Cushing experiment may fail miserably, but it also might be a great success. Either way, we are all going to learn something. And this learning would not occur if Cushing hedged its bets. If Cushing kept half its books, then the librarians, teachers and students would not be forced to think of creative ways to thrive in a purely digital world. Cushing is doing total immersion. This is how the CIA teaches its recruits a foreign language, the only method that has been demonstrated as a successful means of rapid language acquisition.

Carr should not feel sorry for the kids at Cushing because these kids are part of a great experiment. These students are perfectly situated to be part of this experiment, as being the privileged bunch they are it is doubtful that they will be left behind. Who knows which of these students will be influenced from their experiments living digitally to develop passions and careers around in publishing, media or education that otherwise would not have been relevant?

Are we engaged in enough high risk / high return experiments in higher ed? What are the examples that we can point to of jumping into an experiment in learning and technology that the rest of the world thinks is nuts (and would not want to copy), but is sure to yield new and surprising findings? In an age of declining endowments and reduced state support the biggest risk is that we stop taking risks.

What risks are you or your institution taking? Can anyone point us to the high risk / high reward educational technology experiments in higher education? What experiments in learning and technology would you like to see?