TIPS Online - June 1998: Commentary-Organizational Change and the New Technologies
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 Volume 2 Issue 6 June 1998

COMMENTARY:

Organizational Change and the New Technologies

The information age is over. Memorization and recall are not the strategies. The age of communication, collaboration, and action is emerging. What worked in the cloister model - come, sit at the feet of the master, hear the stories, and return to your villages to spread the word - turned on the need to spread the oral history of a people. What worked in the industrial model - everyone on the same page in the same book on the same day - turned on the need to produce assembly-line products.

With new technologies these models no longer work. The histories and details of almost anything imaginable are available at the touch of a button and can be carried in a coat pocket. Assembly line learning produces people who accept little responsibility for their own learning; they simply wait for someone to tell them which page to turn.

The community colleges need their brightest thinkers to attack, from as many directions as possible, the problems of learning. The system that has previously allowed faculty to simply state what shall be taught must now be turned around to ask new questions: What must the students learn? In what time frame? How will that learning be validated? What are the rewards for this validation?

These questions bring a whole series of patterns into question. The financial pattern rests on a seat-time model. The system asks, “How many students have been retained for how long?” as opposed to, “What has the student learned?” The patterns of the semester assume that learning occurs within a set time frame. Patterns related to assigning credit are related more to endurance than to the process of learning.

What issues do the new technologies allow the system to grapple with? First, the communications technologies allow for widespread and deep discussion of arenas that need to be challenged. Faculty, who could not participate in these discussions because of their chosen commitments to classroom teaching above other options, are no longer denied a voice. Neither time nor geography denies participation. Second, the new technologies allow a dramatic extension of the system’s reach. The reach is to the designing of corrective approaches, the describing of interactions that must take place, the experimenting with interventions that strengthen the system, and the sharing of physical and human resources. Third, the new technologies allow learners to be included. The learners themselves must be added to the collaborative efforts; their stake is in their future.

Whether they are students, faculty, administrators, employers, or concerned citizens of the communities, the learners must determine the actions to be taken. The future demands the action. Talking about tomorrow is difficult. Talking about yesterday is easy, but it is not enough. The unanswered question is, “Where is the starting point?”



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