Day 2 Keynote: "A New American University for Next-Gen Learners" Adrian Sannier, UTO of ASU

(The whole presentation was recorded for streaming and should be available soon. I would recommend everyone see it when ready, I'll put the link in when I get it. My summary is below.)

For those who have attended conferences in the past, it is customary (and hoped for) that the opening Keynote address should excite the audience, be energetic, perhaps be controversial. If this is the case, then the Keynote address this morning was a huge success. The presenter has been the University Technology Officer of Arizona State University for 3 years. He is a dynamic, funny, often controversial presenter who prowls the stage, uses his mobile device as a tele-prompter to get quotes right, and has an almost evangelical energy to his speaking.

But there is substance and much to think about behind the "showmanship." ASU's vision, stemming as much from the President of the University as anything else, is to invent a radically New American University designed for the Next Gen students now hitting our campuses. This New University has three goals: Access, Excellence, and Impact." The first one shoudl ound familiar to NYiT. In discussing this material, he emphasized the need for for more students to get a legitimate college education...not a "high school with asterisks" The current university model was devised in the 20's and 30's and was highly selective. Those who couldn't get in could work in manufacturing...but there isn't much manufacturing around, so more people need a higher education. It needed to be excellent...an excellence that the American Higher educational community used to take for granted but is now being overtaken by other countries.. As for impact, the education we need to give our students shouls allow them to impact the next century, one that allows them to appreciate how amazing this age is (something we often miss since the changes seem to have snuck up on us. He made a neat comparison at this point. He said that the invention of the telegraph linking west to east was astounding to everyone who heard about it...someone could "text" about 8 lines across the country almost instantaneously. Now, students of this generation take for granted communication so ubiquitous, it might be compared to telepathy...contact anyone, anytime, point to point, instantly. He also mentioned the development of wikipedia in four years, compared to the years and years it took to create the encyclopedia britinica. To highlight this change in perception, he showed a graph outlining the time from invention to ubiquity.

His next point was the most telling, and the most controversial, probably, for it was his rationale, his defence if you will, of some of his more radical decisions as head of IT at ASU. He argued convincingly that, while Universities used to lead the way in technological advances in the 40's and 50's, we have fallen hopelessly behind the corporate sector which is producing so many new "things" so fast, and at such a scale, that universities could never hope to catch up. So his solution was to "ride the wave" of the corporate expansion. At ASU, he has outsourced most IT services (e-mail, applications, even data storage and retrieval, to corporate entitites, many of whom almost give it away. All ASU students have Google portals, google e-mail accounts, access to Goggle docs, etc. Google was able to scale up to all 65,00 students in two weeks, with little oveerhead or outlay from ASu's part. The same goes for security. He compared the banks of the turn of the century and putting money in your mattress to college's thinking they can offer better security of data with a staff of five when compared to Google.

To sum up this approach, he discussed the matching concepts of the rule of 1 and the rule of 0. I noticed this evening that he had a blog entry on this very topic so instead of summarizing it, I include the link here:

Rule of 1 and the rule of 0

He ended by delineating 6 transformation universities have to make to create the New American University. I will list them here and wait for the slides or video to elaborate:

From Context to Core
From Information to Intelligence
From Cattle Car to 1:1
From Cop to Concierge
From physical to digital
From traditional to hybrid.

And this was just the key note...

I'll d another entry tomorrow.