The Right to Technology in Education

Following the lead of geographer, David Harvey (2008), this chapter argues that many contemporary trends in the use of technology in higher education prevent the development of capacities for critical democratic citizenship. Too often, technology is deployed in a top-down fashion to shape student learning. Thus, to enhance the full emergence of students as active, engaged, critical citizens, it is crucial that they be granted access to the right to technology in education.

Impact of Web 2.0 on Higher Education

The chapter addresses the impact of Web 2.0 on higher education institutions. Using Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovations, the authors ask whether Web 2.0 is a sustaining innovation that is creating incremental changes in higher education practices as older technologies have, or if Web 2.0 is a disruptive innovation that is slowly easing its way to meet the needs of specialized audiences but ultimately may drive out the conventional education model or turn it on its head. To tackle this question, the authors briefly review the current state of Web 2.0 in higher education, discuss related issues and controversies, and then focus on the impact of Web 2.0 on human, social, and organizational aspects of higher education institutions.

Technology in the Supervision of Mental Health Professionals

As communication technology is increasingly applied to the training and supervision of mental health professionals, a more robust analysis of how such approaches fundamentally change the relationship between supervisor and supervisee and how these approaches both enhance and limit the outcomes of supervision is sorely needed. In this chapter clinical supervision is defined and discussed and the various technology platforms that have been used to conduct supervision at-a-distance are reviewed along with the supervision outcomes observed in the research literature with each method. The potential for technology to reduce geographic and financial barriers to the provision of quality supervision is discussed. However, the chapter also outlines the potential negative impacts technology might have to the supervisory relationship, the ethical dilemmas posed by technology-mediated supervision, and the ways in which technology-mediated supervision may place limits upon the elements of supervision that rely upon a constructivist epistemology.

Technology Transfer

In the past three decades, economic competitiveness has morphed from an international concern (e.g. outcompete Japan) to a regional concern (e.g. knowledge clusters) to one where individual universities are in an “arms race” with each other for private and public funding (including licensing royalties, retaining star faculty, pursuing academic earmarking, developing technology parks and incubators, etc.). The greatest benefit that Bayh-Dole afforded universities, namely, to promote the utilization of their research for the public good, sometimes seems distant to the perceived objectives whereby universities attempt to maximize their own resources, including commercialization profits from faculty innovations that are ultimately transferred to the economy.

Growing a University’s Technological Infrastructure

This chapter considers concepts, planning models, and related processes associated with infrastructure growth at institutions of higher learning. The author offers various definitions of infrastructure, describes an infrastructure maturity model, and discusses strategies and models for related strategic planning. In addition, the chapter provides portions of actual strategic plans related to infrastructure. The chapter closes with a description of how the author’s home institution has grown its technological infrastructure in order to provide required administrative services, communications, and instruction to a growing student body engaged in an expanding curriculum. The impact of infrastructure growth on the university community is also discussed.

Viability, Sustainability, Scalability and Pedagogy

In a two year project called the Leading Rich Media project, the implementation of rich media technologies in Australian universities was investigated from the standpoints of viability, sustainability, scalability and pedagogy. Over half of all universities responded with several respondents from each institution providing rich data concerning how implementation is planned, funded, maintained and administered. The silences in the investigation were interesting, with the project team discovering a surprising lack of current scholarly publications available to inform their work. Other silences in the data led them to conclude that there is a policy and strategic planning void in many institutions which could threaten best use of emerging rich media technologies such as desktop videoconferencing and other synchronous communications technologies.

The Future of Online Learning in Higher Education

This chapter addresses the future of online learning and online learning technologies in higher education. Our understanding of the use of future technologies can be aided by a better understanding of how we have addressed the use of technologies in our past and in our present. A brief history of the use of technology in teaching and learning serves as a catalyst for a discussion of the near term, mid-range and far term technologies and possible issues associated with them. The authors propose that keeping the focus on human learning instead of specific tools will help higher education take full advantage of online learning in the near and far term future.

Enterprise Resource Planning Systems in Higher Education

Since most higher education institutions have, or will, implement enterprise resource planning systems (Cramer, 2005), it is important to understand how such an implementation will have an impact throughout an institution. In this chapter, enterprise resource planning systems will be defined, and the benefits to the various constituents of the institution will be described. Barriers (and strategies for overcoming them) will be identified, specifically administration-related barriers, resource allocation barriers, time barriers, barriers related to campus policies, human barriers, and product specific barriers. Leaders of institutions at the crossroads, who are determining whether or not to implement an integrated ERP, can better understand the social implications of such projects as a result of consideration of the key issues raised within this chapter.

The Impact of Technology on Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education

This chapter explores the impact of technology on assessment and evaluation in higher education. The impacts on classroom, program, and organizational assessment are discussed. Both formative and summative assessments in classrooms have been impacted by emerging technologies. However, the impact of many of the technological tools developed by measurement specialists has not been as widespread as one would expect given the age of many assessment technologies. Nevertheless, there remains a great potential for new measurement technologies to significantly improve classroom assessment practices. Technology for organizational assessment has continued to boom in light of the dual push for both accountability and continuous improvement by accreditors. The social impacts and burden of organizational assessment and evaluation are discussed. Overall, it is concluded that in order to evaluate the impact of technology, attention needs to be paid to the consequences of both classroom and organization assessment.

Enhancing Clinical Education for Healthcare Professionals through Innovative Pedagogy, Advanced Technologies, and Design Research

Clinical education is a major component of higher education programs for healthcare professionals in fields such as medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, and social work. The increasing complexity of performance in these fields demands new approaches to clinical education and training. The reform of clinical education in colleges and universities must be driven first and foremost by innovative pedagogy (e.g., authentic tasks and case-based learning models) rather than advanced technologies alone (e.g., 3D immersive simulations and social networking tools). The overall transformation of clinical education and training would be best guided by a design research approach.