I have always assumed that the Academic fraternity has always seen itself as early technology adopters.  In my past life, my old employer had a staggeringly impressive list of University clients with whom it traded on a regular basis.  And yet over the past few weeks as Trovus has found itself involved with pitches and introductory meeting with seats of learning around the county, an interestingly contradictory picture is emerging.

What I had assumed was the Universities have the "perfect" mix of ingredients to allow social applications to flourish in their midst.  Tonnes of Gen Y all zapping away on multiple communications devises and an institutionally ingrained desire to experiment and innovate.  

The contradiction that I think I see is that whilst the desire to innovate is clearly there, showing itself in the research that they are undertaking into this market and in certain cases the applications they have bought to take advantage of this phenomenon, the implementation and adopt seems to be missing.  This has to be as a reaction to the culture impact of this technology on an institution that has such a wide spread of generations, albeit a concentration of the Gen Y'ers who are showing us the way.

In one case we are aware of their retrospective desire to understand why they have invested heavily into an enterprise class social networking platform.  In another they are 100% clear, through their research, that these applications will be business critical applications of the future...future being roughly when their current undergrads get jobs in the work force (so not long) ... but they are not managing the cultural impact of having implemented platforms and therefore the value is being lost.

In a remarkably frank admission by one senior researcher, a confession related to the fact the there are probably still too many baby boomers on the teaching staff and they are simply struggling or refusing to try and embrace the technology, could be a clue to where the difficulty lies?

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Jon Mell, 7 months ago

Ed - that's interesting. Someone sent me this link http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/studentexpectations which is a study of what IT facilities students expect when they arrive at university. It makes for interesting reading.Also, I know that at least three years ago Edinburgh University were distributing all their medical lectures on video podcast so that they could be consumed 'on demand' - and essays/projects/coursework was submitted by uploading a document to a server - rather than printing it out and handing it in.As with businesses different education institutions will be at different stages of maturity. What the study linked to above is trying to find out is to what extent this will affect students' choice of where to study.The next question is whether an employer's provision of IT tools will similarly influence where these newly graduated students choose to work.

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