We live in a connected global environment, Graeme Harper says, so why does the sector act like it’s 1911, not 2011?
A really interesting post, which identifies with the paper that John Naughton gave at ALTC2011. Is the HE sector in danger of making itself redundant?
In higher education, you would think this would often determine our activities and institutions’ formal policies regarding teaching and research. Given that the sector is meant to be the site of educated leadership, that would make perfect, appropriate sense. However, in so many instances this turns out not to be the case. What we find instead are outmoded, outdated, inward-looking policies that suggest not a higher purpose to what we are doing, but rather a determination to support systems of nation-state education and exchange that do not match the world we are living in and that deny the interconnected daily exchanges with which most of us are now so familiar.
Such a statement is, of course, a generalisation: undeniably there are instances of higher education institutions embracing the 21st-century global. But why then do we continue to deliver so much university education as if much of the world were not linkable 24/7 by contemporary technology? Why have we built entire campuses in other parts of the world to export what are largely national attitudes to higher education? Is this purely market opportunism, or do the imperialist overtones hide something more altruistic, more humanly valuable? Regardless, is any of this the best we can do to lead the world in delivering the most advanced forms of education?
Worth reading the full story.