Serendipity35

Tomorrow, I am giving a keynote for faculty at Bloomfield College. It's about how software apps and mobile computing in general is impacting teaching. "Educating in an App World" is still to come for most classrooms.

Sure, "There's an app for that" has gone from being an advertising tagline to being a solution for many software needs. Apps – small, easy to download software for mobile devices – are definitely changing how students at all level are using technology.

Watch pre-schoolers playing with their parents phones and tablets. Have you seen a 3 year old go up to a TV screen and try to drag or pinch an image? It's how they expect to interact with technology.

I have found more apps available for the K-12 world than for higher education. But, we limit the use of mobile devices in classrooms, especially in the lower grades. Teachers are more likely to ban phones than make use of them.

But that IS changing. Apps are changing the way colleges design and deploy software and it is moving into classrooms.

The idea of "disruptive innovation" (which was coined by Clayton Christensen) is that a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market but then moves “up market" and eventually displaces the established competitors.

Disruptive innovation: cellular phones disrupted fixed line telephony; traditional full-service department stores have been disrupted by online and discount retailers; doctor’s offices are being displaced by medical clinics. Maybe the traditional four-year college experience is being displaced in degrees by community colleges, online learning and school 2.0.

The problem is that education isn't business, no matter how much politicians and critics want it to be.

Take innovation. Companies tend to innovate faster than their customers’ lives change. There are newer phones but customers who don't want to upgrade yet. The company ends up producing products or services that are actually too good and too expensive for many of their customers. But in education, those "customers" that we prefer to call students innovate faster than the schools. Students probably have the technology in their hands before we can offer it or have a way to use it in our classrooms.

What is changing in higher ed? Firts, is how students use technology with or without our guidance. That is driving changes in the way colleges design or purchase websites and software. Go back more than a decade and a school had to get a website. Then they had to get a better website. Now, you better have some apps. 

The ways colleges deploy software is also changing. Did your school offer software on CDs? Did it move to downloads? Did it move away from even supplying software or requiring a computer? Will it offer apps?

The greatest change comes when educators can implement apps for teaching. Initially, colleges use it for campus-wide initiatives like admissions, but we are seeing it begin to move into classroom use.

Do you agree with this critic? “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”   That was Socrates on the written word, see Phaedrus, 340 BC.

Welcome to the app world.

Over the break, I was reading The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out and it fits very nicely into my current thinking about the evolution of School 2.0 in the next few decades. 

It is co-written by Clayton Christensen, which is what initially caught my eye. He is considered "the father of the theory of disruptive innovation." His previous books include The Innovator's Dilemma, which examined business innovation, and The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators.  

The Innovative University is at first an analysis of the traditional university that we know in order to get at its "DNA" which then leads to the how (and why) higher education needs to change to have any future success.

From the book jacket: "The language of crisis is nothing new in higher education—for years critics have raised alarms about rising tuition, compromised access, out of control costs, and a host of other issues. Yet, though those issues are still part of the current crisis, it is not the same as past ones. For the first time, disruptive technologies are at work in higher education. For most of their histories, traditional universities and colleges have had no serious competition except from institutions with similar operating models. Now, though, there are disruptive competitors offering online degrees. Many of these institutions operate as for-profit entities, emphasizing marketable degrees for working adults. Traditional colleges and universities have valuable qualities and capacities that can offset those disruptors' advantages—but not for everyone who aspires to higher education, and not without real innovation. How can institutions of higher education think constructively and creatively about their response to impending disruption? 

Throughout the book Christensen and Eyring show what it takes to apply Christensen's acclaimed model of disruptive innovation to a higher education environment. The Innovative University explores how universities can find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions and thereby save themselves from decline." 

Disruptive innovation, a term of art coined by Clayton Christensen, describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then moves "up market" to eventually displace the established form. 

Examples of disruptive innovation include cellular phones disrupting fixed line telephony, and the traditional full-service department store being disrupted by online and discount retailers. Christensen also sees an earlier disruptor of the four-year college experience as being community colleges.

I agree with him that companies tend to innovate faster than their customers’ lives change - newer phones but customers who don't want to upgrade yet - and so most organizations end up producing products or services that are actually too good and too expensive for many of their customers. 

But I don't think that model works for education. 

In education, customers/students innovate faster than the schools. They have the technology in their hands before we have it or a way to use it in our classrooms. And yet, schools continue to charge too much for an inferior product. 

I wish I believed that education was consciously opening the door to “disruptive innovations,” but that is not what I see.  

Christensen teaches at the Harvard Business School. Although he has had health issues the past few years, he continues to write and I discovered that he has a newer book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, that I will need to order. 

It seems that in education, Christensen and the other authors are pointing to "student-centric education" as the disruptor of our current "interdependent curricular architecture." Much of that is made possible through technology. 

He has written about online learning for student-centered innovation and many educators and institutions will be pleased to hear that disruptive technology/innovation in education can help create a new market and value network. 

They will be less pleased to know that it eventually goes on to disrupt the existing market and eventually displaces it. 

Disruptive ideas improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Those services will be designed for a different set of consumers. It will probably lower the cost in the existing market. That might translate into the new, improved School 2.0 made for Student 2.0. And all at a lower cost. But who will be providing that education? Harvard, NJIT, Passaic County Community College, MITx, University of Phoenix, The Open University, Google, Facebook or some new entity that doesn't even exist today?

Books by Clayton M. Christensen

Is there anything truly disruptive in education? To a teacher, "disruptive" has the negative sound of that kid in the back row who is ruining your class. Disruptive technologies are innovations that upset the existing order of things, often in a good way.

It's an idea that comes from the business section of the bookshelves. Typical scenario: a lower-end innovation catches the fancy of the public, for example, Internet video like YouTube. It might suit the needs of people who are not being served by current products - like young people with commercial television. It it succeeds over a long enough period, the capacity/performance of the innovation begins to displace the established product. People stop watching traditional TV.

The real problem for the incumbent technology (often a big company - a Microsoft, a Blackboard) is that they often don’t react to these disruptive innovations until it’s too late. Why would they do that? Part of it is that they view this new market as rather uninteresting because it is low end, low cost and perhaps low profit.

Sometimes the disruptor isn't a small company. Look at the idea that Google is disrupting the office-productivity application software business of something like the Microsoft Office package by making its applications free and available on the Net cloud.

Is there a disruptive technology in education?  Educators might nominate cloud computing or collaborative tools.

What got me thinking about this line of questioning was a book I was reading while having a coffee at my local Barnes & Noble. (SIDENOTE: Has anyone else noticed how B&N stores with a cafe are turning into libraries? There are people there with a stack of the store's books, their notebook, a laptop and they are working. Is this a good business model for a bookstore?)

When I look at a technology like cloud computing and a service like Google Apps, I conclude that people are not using Apps because it is better than Microsoft Office. They aren't better. They use them because - Is it because they are free? Maybe. I use Apps, but I already have Office for free from my employer.

So, that book I picked up in the store was The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business written by Clayton M. Christensen.

Christensen coined the term "disruptive technology" in a 1995 article which he coauthored with Joseph Bower and his book is aimed at managers rather than educators. When he wrote a sequel, The Innovator's Solution, he replaced "disruptive technology" with the term "disruptive innovation" because he says few technologies are intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character.

Christensen might say that some people use Google Apps because of "low-end disruption." The service works for users who do not need the full performance valued by customers at the high-end of the market.

YouTube might be considered a "new-market disruption" because its target audience (though I'm not sure some of these technologies actually knew who their target audience was when they started) are people who felt their needs weren't being served by the existing technology. The Linux operating system (OS) when it was first introduced wasn't "better" than existing systems (like UNIX and Windows NT) but it was cheap and pretty good. Today, after many improvements, Linux might actually end up displacing the commercial UNIX distributions. Is Microsoft afraid? Even if they are not, they better be paying attention.

In education, I can't say that I see one "killer app" that is so widely used that it has dethroned a king or queen. Yes, 16mm projectors were pushed into AVA closets by the VHS players and then by the DVD players. Has streaming video pushed out the DVD? Is that a disruptive innovation or is it just video in new delivery systems?

I'm not alone in thinking about disruption in educational terms. There's actually a paper by Christensen, Aaron, and Clark from the EDUCAUSE 2001 Forum for the Future of Higher Education called "Disruption in Education."

Christensen’s theory, developed in the corporate realm, is based on the constant pursuit of excellence by both businesses and higher education institutions. As the quality of products increases, they often surpass the needs of their consumers, leaving a gap to be filled by a disruptive innovation (a product or service of lower quality or performance that more closely matches consumers’ needs). Other features make the innovation appealing as well, such as being cheaper, simpler, and more convenient to use. Early adopters of the disruptive technology or service most often are the least demanding customers in a market.

That last sentence catches me. Early adopters are the least demanding. They say: "The video quality isn't anywhere near as good as a DVD - but it works and it's free. Google Docs doesn't have all the features of Word - but I don't use most of the Word features anyway and with Docs I can collaborate on a document online easily and never even have to email a file or carry a flashdrive copy of the file."

Look at the early adopters in your school: the ones who are trying out Second Life or signed up to pilot Moodle while everyone else was in Blackboard or were the first ones to try a podcast, create a wiki, or have a blog for class. If they really were early in their adoption, they were probably willing to accept some shortcomings in the technology innovation because they also saw the potential.