I’m reminded of something George Siemens said at a symposium on distributed tool strategies: that schools should be in the business of managing data flows rather than in supporting an end to end user experience. We can only dream what might result if the energy going into the campus-wide LMS’s would go into creating flexible and easy to use 'syndication buses' or to addressing pragmatic instructor challenges to using the 'small pieces' approach — things like student management tools, gradebooks etc. And what about providing the service of institutional archiving and data backups to mitigate the risks of using third party tools?

Comments: Interesting. You still need a plan, you just need a kind of plan that is different than what we've always imagined a plan to be in the past. You need a plan that creates frameworks and opportunities rather than that dictates solutions and products. You need a plan that empowers leadership rather than merely "defining" it. You need a plan that has some ability to "self-heal" and adapt. Ultimateley, a plan like this has values and vision at it's core, not answers.

What I worry about is that if we push the conversation about the potential of technology to it's current limit, then we ultimately need to push our converation about higher education to a similarly precipitous limit. (And I worry that we're both not doing this or we are doing it and then not knowing where to go next.)

We need to question our values, not about technology, but about education, learning, knowing, sharing, community, activism, citizenship -- and we need to find a place for higher education to occupy in that conversation that makes the use of its inherent strengths (leadership, knowledge, passionate commitment) not its weakness (administration, management, standardization). Increasingly, we play the game in higher ed. of trying to fix our weakness isntead of trying to value our strengths, and in doing so we dilute ourselves and we allow a conversation to emerge around us about what we're doing (and if we're doing it well) in which we play little role.

Technology could be the transformative agent in this conversation. It could help us shift the conversation back in a rigorous (but not stifling) direction. Instead, more and more institutions seem to approach technology merely as an administrative panacea or a tool for collecting, analyzing, and regurgitating more data and information in a desperate attempt to justify our existence.

Kudos to Keene for wrestling with these issues.