Evolution by natural selection has left us with one great advantage and many bad legacies. The one great advantage is that we are, unlike dodos and sabre-tooth tigers, still here. We also are, in a way, at the top of the evolutionary tree.
The legacies of the quintessential organic growth, which is what evolution is, are too many and mostly unrelated with the topic at hand, some however, based in the way we think and perceive the world, are very pertinent to our conversation and go some way, not only to explain why the turkeys go willingly to the slaughter somewhere in early December, but also provide hints on how that process can be changed.
Some of the most interesting things discussed during the EDUCAUSE 2012 conference came padded with a lot of reality checks. Even so and, especially because of the slow pace of change in educational institutions, it appears to me that there are very big problems just on the horizon for the education sector CIOs. There is a set of difficulties that traverse the entire sector and can be summarised into a generic difficulty in connecting with a new reality, which has needs, tools, languages, and expectations that fly in the face of long standing policies and practices. Let’s look at some examples, and perhaps start from the ones highlighted by the four themes I wrote about in the last post.