FreeBox: Students, Visionaries, Citizens Collaborate, Everyone Wins

The FreeBox: Where Where High-Tech meets High-Touch, and Colleges Win

Smaller, innovative schools can re-emerge as educational and technological thought leaders through collaborative research and enterprise  -- without breaking the bank

By Mary Lin

How ready is your college or university to take advantage of or even respond to the following scenario?

Jared P., junior at Alternative U., decides during the college’s three month summer service semester in Kenya to captureaudio and create video recordings of all of his experiences during his stay. On his return to his studies stateside, he creates a virtual learning environment at a major virtualization site(VLE), complete with three-dimensional representations of all he encountered during his studies. He includes a collaborative publication on service learning opportunities in Africa, an electronic portfolio with embedded video and podcasts reflecting on his stay, and a less formal blog site where students, NGOs, community- based African organizations, funding agencies, and governmental bodies from local to national levels can dialogue on the challenges and opportunities of intercultural partnership.

Within days of going onlinelive his virtual siteVLE and blog have become a hotbed of creative sharing and activity, with all of the aforementioned groups represented. Within a month grad students from a sustainable management program at another university approach Jared about co-sponsoring the collaborative publishing venture with their owninstitution.

If your educational institution is like many small colleges, it’s likely there would be one crucial party to the dialogue absent at the table: you.

The colleges where this kind of student-led initiatives are taking place are the lucky ones. At least these schools have clear articulations of student needs demonstrated in projects that drive innovation from the bottom up.

But educational institutions and educators at all levels from preschool to postgraduate find themselves under pressure from without and within to provide education that is not only state-of-the-art,  and relevant in the short and long terms, but enjoyable.

Multiple realms of technology and inquiry are converging at warp speed, creating a time of significant challenges and opportunities for progressive, alternative, and experiential educational organizations. As technology pervades our lives, the processes by which technology is developed, used, shared, and developed have become more intuitive – if you will, more lifelike.(1)

Students seek educational options and products which that are more personalized, socially -connected, fluid, creative, relevant, and flexible both in terms of application during the educational process and relevance in terms of job skills andincreasing their opportunities after graduation. These Wii -playing, cell phone sporting, YouTubing, Facebooking, blogging, and always-connected students/consumers increasingly demand that education and its attendant skills be anextension of the highly-elaborated technological environments in which they live.

Students and their parents increasingly demand not  only that education be immediately relevant in terms of ensuring employability upon graduation, but assurance that their education will develop the creative and flexible mindset and “deeper skills” necessary to navigate an ever-evolving workplace. With thousands of options to choose from, these generations of natural-born consumers  also demand that it be engaging and interesting –“fun.”

Opportunity for  Colleges, Universities, and Other Innovative Learning Environments

These changes in technology pose significant challenges to many institutions, and a special challenge to those institutions that identify themselves as progressive or alternatives to the mainstream.  These tend to be smaller schools, many of them relatively young, having been created in the cultural ferment of the 60’s. They include colleges like the members of CIEL, the Eco League, and the ersatz Union for Research and Experimentation in Higher Education, which gave rise to the University Without Walls movement. These schools are well known for producing not only self-directed, confident, articulate, visionary, creative individuals who are able to move adeptly between realms of inquiry, but also whole new directions in education and culture.

These schools are self-selecting in terms of applicants. They often attract the best and the brightest;  students with whom the typical education simply can’t keep up, who are often more engaged in real-world problem solving, and those who seek to develop themselves and their skills in interdisciplinary, integrative, integral, cooperative, collaborative environments. Often, these same students seek to live more simply and sustainably, and help create a world where resources are understood, used, and shared in a manner that’s more in keeping with natural law, of ecological economies.

The irony in all this is that many of the institutions who have given rise to philosophies of and approaches to education which focus on the development of the individual, social skills and connectivity, self-directed learning, immersive learning environments, and other innovations, the progenitors of the “high touch” component of the new alchemy of educational success, are some of the least technologically savvy.

However, there is a silver lining. By applying their own guiding principles of collaborative and self-directed learning, these colleges can encourage students, staff and faculty to emerge whole new directions in education and culture. While many of these schools have trudged along turning out extraordinary thinkers, a parallel universe of collaborative, visionary, often altruistic productivity and shared learning has emerged in the freeware and open-source technology movement.

These schools can wed high-tech and high-touch to implement existing tools and technologies, many of them extant in the open source realm, to provide for themselves and each other the tools of relevance needed by students and faculty to keep pace with, and as often as not, pull ahead of more technologically- and financially- endowed institutions which may not be blessed with the unique creativity and vision of the students, staff, and faculty of these smaller and in many ways more innovative schools. (see attachment for rest of article.)