Philadelphia University Provost's Office

Learning platforms

We had a number of excellent whiteboard sessions about the future of higher education at the last Transformation Imperative event. During these sessions participants frequently worked with the concept of platforms. I am following up here with a few more thoughts about platforms and their relationship to learning.

What is a platform?

A platform in the broadest sense is something we use to do something else. Platforms allow us to perform a set of desired actions that take place beyond them. In the most literal sense a diving board is a platform; its primary purpose is to help us to spring into the air beyond it.

The strength of a platform should be measured by the extent to which it enables us to do the things we want to accomplish with as little presence and resistance as possible. The ideal platform would be transparent. For example, an iPhone brings together a software framework and hardware architecture to create a platform for doing things (listening to music, texting, shopping, etc.) with a minimum of intrusiveness. The power and success of the iPhone platform is that it enables us to do so many things “beyond it” and (most of the time) not get in the way.

Platforms fail when their presence impedes our ability to act beyond them. How many times have we had to close all applications on our computers and restart them in order to install a software update? I find this process very disruptive since it prevents me from using the platform to get my work done. Here the platform (operating system and hardware running it) calls attention to itself instead of enhancing my agency: it fails the transparency test.

Courses as Platforms

What if courses were designed as platforms? In other words, what would learning look like if the primary purpose of a course were to allow students to accomplish things beyond it?

The implications are vast. Think about it: the content of the course would focus on the knowledge, skills, habits of mind, and tools students need to reflect and act beyond the walls of the classroom. In a sense, our core Integrative Design Processes course is a species of platform. It provides students with the knowledge, skills, habits of mind, and tools they need to identify opportunities for adding value to the world beyond the walls of the classroom.

Distributed learning

If a course became a platform it would be designed from the ground up to facilitate and leverage student efforts to access knowledge beyond it. In fact, learning would occur by students interacting with a network of distributed resources: other colleges and universities, cultural and scientific institutions, media, outside content experts, and so on. Students often informally gather knowledge this way now, but what would be the curricular and pedagogical implications of intentionally building a course as a fully integrated platform?

Applying knowledge to context—and doing this together

The knowledge students brought with them into the world would often be insufficient to effectively act in particular contexts.  They would have to learn on demand and sort out what happens when general knowledge collides with situated practice. Practical reasoning (see reference at end) would become a fundamental learning literacy.

Since effective action often requires the intellectual and political power of a group rather than the strength of an individual, platform learning would require students to understand how to share knowledge and align actions; in other words, collaborate and work in teams. Therefore, an essential component of such a course would be to deliberately (structurally) channel the power of actual and virtual peer networks into the learning process.

Co-creating

Acting is a precursor to making. Therefore, platform learning would be about producing things: authoring actions (often as a group), and taking responsibility for them as they change the world. In this way, platform learning would always focus on co-creation, in part by leveraging peer networks.

Platforms and the Role of the Faculty

What would be the role of the faculty in such a world? I don’t have final answers to this question, but I can speculate. Faculty members would, of course, be central, but their roles might shift away from primarily delivering content to providing context and added value to the content learned outside of the classroom. This trend is already underway with flipped-classroom teaching models (see reference below) and the results are clearly promising. The critical element of the platform course would be providing students with the knowledge they need to effectively use it. Another way of stating this is that the instructor would be teaching the students to learn in a particular framework. It would also follow that the faculty would help students critically reflect on the unfolding process of using knowledge to accomplishing things beyond the classroom and the effects those accomplishments have on the world. This process could powerfully exercise the abilities of students to analyze, synthesize and iterate in an ethical framework.

A final thought experiment. What if the platform concept included courses, but was applied beyond them to entire programs and the University as a whole? I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

 

A few interesting references and links:

Regarding the concept of practical reasoning:

Sullivan, W. M., Rosin, M. S., & Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. (2008). A new agenda for higher education: Shaping a life of the mind for practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. [Note that co-author Bill Sullivan has visited the campus twice to help us redesign our general education curriculum.]

Game frameworks are often platform based:

http://www.instituteofplay.org/work/projects/quest-schools/quest-to-learn/

An interesting learning model with many platform characteristics:

http://connectedlearning.tv/infographic

Flipped classroom teaching model:

Hughes, H. (2012). Introduction to Flipping the College Classroom. In T. Amiel & B. Wilson (Eds.),Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2012(pp. 2434-2438). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of January, we had an extraordinary group of visitors to campus as part of the Transformation Imperative series. In fact, each guest was at the forefront of a relatively new credentialing movement referred to as open badges. Our visitors conducted workshops, presented to the faculty and served on a panel that resulted in a lively response from the audience.

What are badges?

The term badge is borrowed from digital games where players are rewarded with badges for scaffolding through defined areas of learning often to qualify for the next level of play.  The Mozilla Foundation (think Firefox), with support from the MacArthur and Gates Foundations, translated the badges concept into an open (and free) infrastructure that any organization can use for creating, certifying, and displaying badges. True to their roots, badges are optimally oriented toward certifying defined areas of learning that can be assessed against clear outcomes.

A few reasons universities should pay attention to badges

Universities could deploy badges in a number of ways. For example, an academic program might use badges to certify that students had mastered outcomes that required integrating curricular and co-curricular components over several semesters or even years. Perhaps a badge in teamwork and collaboration would require students to finish a group of prescribed courses, participate in particular kinds of internships, take webinars outside of courses, and independently complete a major project as a team member.

In this case, the criteria for each badge and the assessment procedure for meeting them would be clearly inscribed in the badges background meta-data.  The open badges system would then allow students to digitally display their badges, and possibly integrate them into learning portfolios, using the Mozilla open badge infrastructure.

The same general framework could be applied at multiple scales, from university-level badges to those issued by individual instructors as part of the learning outcomes stated in their syllabi. Badges assessed at the academic program and university-levels might be listed on a student’s transcript, thereby providing future employers and graduate admissions committees a kind of learning narrative of a student’s interests and capabilities.

A few thoughts on badges

I believe that badges, or other disaggregated credentialing frameworks, have the potential to transform how we understand the university transcript and degree, but it is important to be critical. For example, one could criticize the conceptual shift from a monolithic, comprehensive degree (such as a BA or BS) to a series of disaggregated credentials accumulated over 4-years. Followed to their logical extremes, badges and their variants might eventually represent the total learning experience of students, much as a bachelor’s degree does now.  If this were the case, would badges represent the commodification and fragmentation of knowledge into consumable chunks? Would badges signal the further erosion of Enlightenment-inflected ideals about what constitutes a coherent and well-rounded undergraduate education? Questions such as these are critical, but I believe the logic and potential of badge-like credentials makes their adoption at various scales inevitable. Why?

• First, badges are outcomes-oriented and assessment-friendly, and therefore support the current drive on campuses across the nation to make progress in these areas.

• They could provide instructors with new tools to communicate central course outcomes that are both qualitative and quantitative, and motivate students to more independently integrate the knowledge that results from pursuing them.

• As mentioned above, badges accumulated over a student’s undergraduate years could also more richly communicate to employers and graduate schools what a student had achieved, what those achievements meant, and, taken as a group, tell a story about his or her experience.

• One of the very exciting aspects of badge credentials is their potential to integrate curricular and co-curricular experiences, which many universities (including us) today strive to do.

• Finally, badges could begin to blur the distinction between the university experience and the life experiences that follow it. Many of us have heard some variant of the phrase, “many jobs freshmen will fill after graduation might not exist when they enter college.” Our contemporary economy produces new career opportunities at an astonishing rate, but can just as quickly render obsolete entire professions. This economic condition is structural; it is not going away anytime soon. It demands that workers constantly seek educational experiences throughout their careers as they prepare to take the next step in their professional journeys.

Already badges, or badge-like certifications in areas like software development, account for these experiences. The trend is rapidly expanding to other sectors. Someday the badges students earn in college might simply be part of an ongoing portfolio of badges they achieve and curate over the arc of their careers.

Although badges are, at this early point in their development, often focused on professional education, I believe they could present equally interesting opportunities for innovating with curricula and pedagogies in the liberal arts and sciences, and more broadly general education.

What do badges mean to Philadelphia University?

Here at Philadelphia University we should critically evaluate badges and determine if they do indeed represent opportunities for substantive innovation that would enhance the experiences of our students. I suggest that we experiment and craft prototype badges that affect various scales of a student’s education and rigorously assess the outcomes.

During the past few days, a number of executive deans and faculty have asked about next steps. In the coming weeks, I will convene a small taskforce to create a simple framework or “tool kit” to help our community prototype badge implementation.

Finally, I would like to thank our visitors: Kevin Carey, Director of Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation; Emily Goligoski, Design and Community Manager at Mozilla Open Badge System; Joanna Normoyle, representative of Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at the Agricultural Sustainability Institute, University of California – Davis; and Kyle Bowen, Director of Informatics at Purdue University.

 

The end of the semester is always a whirlwind of creative energy at Philadelphia University, but particularly so the past week. I would like to report on several creative vortices that I was swept into at the DEC Center.

Vortex 1: Ethnographic Research Methods Presentation

The team designing the new Ethnographic Research Methods course for the DEC Core made a compelling presentation and conducted a workshop in one of the DEC Center studios. Its members did an excellent job of translating what could easily have been a graduate-level course into a rich undergraduate learning experience. They managed this feat while creating a teaching and learning framework for the course that could be creatively adapted by faculty with divergent backgrounds and interests. Indeed, the participants in the studio included a broad range of faculty from architecture to the health sciences. I would like to thank everyone involved on that multi-disciplinary team and who supported its work, including our consultant, Lisa Di Carlo (Babson and Brown), Sharon Kornelly, Marcella Deh, Rick Shain, Philip Russel, and Gwynne Keathley.

Some of you reading this might be less familiar with the DEC Core curriculum and the Research Methods course, so I will present a quick summary here.

As you recall, the DEC Core curriculum brings together close to 1600 students in 16 majors to experience what we refer to as “one course with five phases” which unfolds over the entire undergraduate experience. Each phase is itself a course tightly interlocked with those following and preceding it. The course phases are: Integrative Design Process, Business Models, Systems Thinking, Research Methods, and the Capstone.

The team developing the Research Methods core presented on Friday. This course is a crucial component of the DEC core because, as stated in the course syllabus, it focuses on “researching people and social interaction where they occur, when they happen, and as they emerge.” This course represents the humanistic grounding of DEC in the world as we experience it. It creates the rock-solid basis for finding opportunities to add value by asking students to venture out into the often-unruly world and critically experience the human condition as it unfolds.

The observations made in this process reveal often unanticipated opportunities to create value by imagining new ways we might interact with the setting we are researching, then modeling and prototyping those ideas, and ultimately implementing the final designs, such as services, organizational models, spaces, products and forms of communication. The process of observing and distilling field research in this way empowers students. It gives them the confidence to both reflect on the world and act in it. It also causes them to ask who they are and be critically self-aware of their perceptions and biases—to be empathetic.

I left the workshop thinking that the kind of engagement encouraged by Research Methods course could be thought of as critical empathy—an important form of critical thinking deeply rooted in the human condition as it is actually lived by those around us.

Vortex 2: General Education Outcomes Workshop

The ad hoc Re-envisioning General Education committee outdid itself by designing a workshop experience that engaged faculty from across the University in a process of conceptualizing and visualizing the relationships between liberal education outcomes (as defined by the AAC&U), and the accreditation outcomes in the professional majors.

The committee defines general education as a group of educational outcomes that are shared by our College Studies program and the majors.

The workshop, which took place in the triple studio of the DEC Center, was ingeniously designed. The Committee had pre-printed on individual strips of paper all of the accreditation outcomes associated with our campus professional programs. Every participant was given a random sampling of these professional outcomes and asked to group them on the walls, so that they clustered into coherent topics. Then teams reviewed the outcomes defined for a liberal education by the AAC&U. and posted them, when possible, next the corresponding outcomes defined by professional program and accreditation bodies.

It was powerful to create the clusters collaboratively with faculty from a number of different disciplines, and to see the results so concretely on the walls. When the process of grouping outcomes was complete, it was clear that many if not most of the liberal learning outcomes were similar to the professional outcomes. In a number of cases the clusters suggested new kinds of outcomes.

The exercise helped to erode what is in my opinion a false binary that isolates liberal learning and professional education in separate silos. It also created a new space for campus discourse about the roles of the professional majors in achieving liberal learning outcomes and vice versa.

The workshop had a valuable second phase that I will not elaborate on here other than to say that it led us to begin defining the unique outcomes that represent a differentiated academic value proposition for our current and prospective students.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the workshop, especially Ron Kander, Tom Schrand, Tod Corlett, and the members of the ad hoc Re-envisioning General Education Committee who conceived and ran this workshop.

Randy Swearer

I have written earlier in this blog that higher education is experiencing broad-based imperatives to reform. Some of this pressure is due to the escalating tuition levels driven by legacy models that determine how a university should operate and what it should aspire to do.  However, the transformation imperative is also caused by fundamental socioeconomic shifts in this country that either threaten the normative path-dependent university or present it with remarkable opportunities to innovate.

One of the most interesting of these pressures is the challenge of what I will call disaggregated credentialing, or assigning students specific credentials for defined areas of learning. I offer this conceptual backdrop before I pursue this idea further.

The normative, “brand-x” university came of age in the industrial era where the production of goods was standardized and limited. Large investments in production for machines, factories, and labor produced volumes of goods that were typically updated in long product cycles. Production did not change quickly, because the associated capital investments were very high and the rate of technological change was relatively slow. Knowledge too during this era (especially instrumental knowledge) had a relatively long shelf life. The instrumental knowledge we were taught in high school, the university, or on the job could often last much of a lifetime.

This era is largely over and has been replaced, at least in this country, by more fluid manufacturing and delivering services and experiences. Products (bits, atoms) can now be customized and economically produced in small batches—or manufactured in mass quantities in rapid production cycles. Not only do the things we produce evolve very quickly, the underlying production methods and creative processes themselves transform at dizzying speeds. The practices driving the creation of new services and experiences are constantly in flux as they respond to socio-economic and cultural developments. Instrumental knowledge now fluidly morphs and this is why we hear much quoted phrases that go something like, the job you get after graduation might very well not exist today.

Here is the problem: traditional university degrees assumed a fairly stable body of knowledge that was accumulated over several years. The university invested heavily in the infrastructure to produce these degrees and students invested significant time and treasure to receive them. Accrediting bodies certified that degree-products were, to some extent, standardized between institutions. While universities continued to operate with this model, students and parents more frequently questioned the value of the conventional degree and the aggregate worth of the learning it represents.

All of this means that there are many cracks in the system of “industrial” knowledge production and learning that modern universities were built to facilitate, teach, curate, conserve and credential. And like a fine piece of Japanese pottery where delicate cracks were sometimes filled with gold, each fracture creates an opportunity for innovation.

A particularly interesting crack is the assumption that a monolithic credential like a bachelor’s degree can meaningfully represent and communicate the changing flows of knowledge students must navigate today. Disaggregated credentialing points toward a possible solution by certifying with badges that essential competencies, defined by clear outcomes, are certified as the student masters them. For example, in our case badges might be awarded for student learning inside and outside the classroom in areas central to the Kanbar College of Design, Engineering and Commerce core curriculum, such as opportunity finding, ethnographic research methods, systems thinking, or modeling value creation.

Each badge would appear on the student’s transcript and become a chapter in the broader story about a student’s learning experiences. While the badge movement in higher education is just now gaining momentum, I believe that in some future iteration it could pose a direct challenge to the certifications universities currently use, such as bachelor’s degrees.

However, many questions remain. For example, some foundational knowledge is more stable and requires years to learn and integrate into a worldview. I am thinking of the liberal arts in areas such as ethics, history, understanding the various facets of citizenship and democracy, and so on. How could a new and less aggregated credentialing framework recognize and communicate this kind of stable and non-instrumental knowledge alongside badges?

Many of the leading thinkers and drivers of the badge movement across the country have generously allowed Vice Provost Gwynne Keathley and me to consult with them about badges. Based on these conversations we think there is tremendous potential to innovate and customize the badge framework at Philadelphia University. We were grateful to Sunny Lee, Open Badges Project Lead, and Emily Goligoski, Design and Community Lead, of Mozilla who spoke to us about the origin of badges and the Mozilla infrastructure. The Mozilla Foundation (Mozilla designed the Firefox browser) created an open infrastructure for creating badges, certifying them with metadata and displaying them. We were referred to Mozilla during a discussion with An-Me Chung, Associate Director of Education for U.S. Programs, at the McArthur Foundation, who was also very helpful. We learned about how fledgling badge systems are being implemented during discussions with Joanna Normoyle and Tom Tomich at the University of California at Davis, and Kyle D. Bowen, Director of Informatics at Purdue. Kevin Carey, Director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, who has written extensively about badges (http://newamerica.net/user/478), spoke with us about the broader educational context into which the badge movement nests.

We found these conversations so interesting that we want to share them with you. The Provost’s Office plans to bring a number of these thinkers to campus in the spring to open a dialog with our community about disaggregated credentialing and the opportunities and challenges it represents. Stay tuned—and please attend the events!

Last week Roger Martin, who I consider to be in the top tier of academic leaders in North America, announced that he will step down this summer from his position as dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Roger’s work has had a transformational impact on business education in particular and professional education in general. As an innovator and thought-leader, his interests resonate with our efforts to transform Philadelphia University into a national model for critical professional education. His work has also influenced our academic programs.

I would like to take a few moments to reflect on several of Roger’s many contributions. His interests are wide-ranging, but much of his work is driven by a passion for understanding how modes of thinking, and the kinds of knowledge they generate, can be brought to bear on complex problems. In the most philosophical sense, his inquiries are driven by an applied epistemology. He asks how systems of inquiry seeking approximate truths, or solutions, can be optimally structured to address specific problems encountered by individuals and institutions.

An excellent example of Roger’s passion in this area can be found in The Design of Business, where he uses the concepts of mystery, heuristic, and algorithm to investigate how knowledge is formed and applied. The same passion can be found in his elegantly written book The Opposable Mind. In this work, Roger pursues a powerful idea: when reasoning about a complex problem containing multiple solution-models, it is often best to synthesize the models to create integrative knowledge rather than choosing between them. The resulting knowledge contains elements of the alternative models embedded in the problem, but is far superior to them.

Roger is naturally focused on business issues, but many of his writings have implications far beyond the world of commerce. During my last trip to visit him in Toronto, he asked me to sit in on one of his classes co-taught with his writing partner and Rotman graduate, Jennifer Riel. This particular class was about applying integrative thinking to topical business issues. At one point, the lecture broke into small discussion groups where students grappled with real-world situations by integratively reasoning about them. I was deeply impressed with the ways they negotiated the complexity and ambiguities of the problem with which they were presented. I remember thinking that perhaps this kind of learning might be a new kind of literacy for the 21^st Century: the liberal art of practical reasoning.

Roger has been very kind to me and, by extension, Philadelphia University. When we first began to develop the concepts for the groundbreaking Kanbar College of Design, Engineering and Commerce, I connected with Roger and met him for dinner in Toronto with his wife, Sandra Blevins, and Heather McGowan who was then Assistant Provost. We had a remarkable discussion about thinking and knowing, managing transformational change, his experiences at Rotman, Canadian wine and more. Since that trip we have met a number of times, and he invited me to be on a fascinating Design Management Institute panel concerning innovation in higher education with Jeanne Liedtka, influential author and proponent of design thinking in business, and Joel Podolny, former dean of the Yale School of Management and now dean of Apple University.

I’ll finish by pointing to a very direct way that Roger’s work has influenced one of our most transformational initiatives at Philadelphia University. Our first of 4 transdisciplinary core courses for all 16 majors in the Kanbar College is called Design Process and Integrative Thinking. A major branch of this course’s conceptual genealogy can be traced back to Roger’s creative mind. Indeed, the title of the course evokes two of his best known books: The Design of Business and The Opposable Mind.

Given these connections, it is appropriate that Roger will be our keynote speaker on January 9, 2013 for the academic opening of the new building housing the Kanbar College.  You can find more information here.

Roger will continue to teach at Rotman and run the Prosperity Institute that bears his name. He will also, to our benefit, focus more on writing projects. I wish him and Sandra all the best for this new phase in their lives.

Regards,

Randy

We’ve been thinking a lot in the Provost’s Office about the future of higher education. It is clear that a range of factors, including cost, perceived value, relevance, and responsiveness, is challenging traditional models of colleges and universities. I predict that the next 15-years will be a period of significant disruption in higher education. We will see the role of the faculty shift, expectations of campus life will change, new forms of credentialing will cause us to reconsider traditional degrees, and there will be considerable pressure for academic programs to be more responsive and flexible.

We are sponsoring a group of activities this year to explore new models in an effort to generate discussion on campus about the academic future of Philadelphia University. Yesterday evening, the Provost’s Office held a soup and salad event to view and discuss Anya Kamenetz’s TedX talk on the future of higher education. The discussion following the video was excellent. There were both critiques of Kamenetz’s presentation and creative responses to it.

Another event on October 30^th, sponsored by the Re-envisioning General Education ad hoc committee and the Provost’s Office, will bring together a number of innovators who are directly or indirectly challenging various aspects of the normative university model.

The event will consist of a panel discussion that includes brief presentations by the participants. Workshops with the speakers are being held that day: one in the morning and two after the panel. Emily Goligoski will present the Mozilla Foundation’s work (also supported by the MacArthur and Gates Foundations) on an open badge system that credentials defined areas of learning as it occurs. Dale Stephens, a Thiel Fellow and founder of Uncollege, will discuss his experience in college, why he left, and his skill-sharing learning platform. A representative of Occupy University, an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, will present its position on education and a learning approach called horizontal pedagogy. Finally, Kevin Carey, influential journalist on developments in higher education, will present his perspective on the future of the university. You can find more information on the workshops and speakers here:

http://philau.edu/provost/Initiatives/Re-EnvisioningGeneralEducation/UpcomingEvents.html

Please RSVP to the panel and attend what promises to be very thought-provoking event. I look forward to seeing you there!

Randy

Several weeks ago I attended the Global Innovation Leadership Forum in Como, Italy sponsored by Alta Scuola Politecnica and Stanford University. The Forum invited 25 innovators from around the globe whose work is having a significant impact in their fields. I was deeply honored to represent our collective innovation efforts here at Philadelphia University.

Our goal was to develop models for a virtual global innovation college, which would link leading universities, governments, non-profits, and industries. Our approach was to shape new initiatives for catalyzing organizations (governments, intergovernmental institutions, think-tanks, etc.) that were, or could be, developing a new class of globally aware innovation leaders as a critical need.

We made considerable progress on this ambitious project, but I want to highlight some of the stimulating side-conversations with the group of extraordinary attendees. For example, I had an interesting discussion with Francesco Profumo, the Italian Minster of Education, University and Research, about the imperative that innovation curricula and pedagogies become embedded in higher education at the national level. This conversation related to another chat I had with Willem Jonker, Director of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, in which we discussed a very creative distributed educational model for teaching innovation across Europe. I had a fascinating discussion with Anne Josiasson of the Danish Design Center and Just Gitte, CEO of Copenhagen Co-creation, in which we talked about the development of Danish design approaches that drive innovation by using co-creation strategies, leveraging social network technologies, and information mapping.

Banny Banerjee, Director of the Stanford d.school, and I continued our ongoing discussions about the need for fundamental change in the structure of traditional universities if we are to graduate true innovators who can positively impact civil society and shape the future of our economy. My dialog with Banny linked to conversations with Fawwaz Habbal, Executive Dean of Education and Research at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. We discussed opportunities and strategies for embedding innovation in the policies, cultures, and organizations of traditional universities. Finally, I spent much of dinner on the second night in a fascinating conversation with Jeffrey Schnapp, Co-director of Harvard’s metaLab at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The underlying theme of this discussion was that transdisciplinary research represented one of the richest areas in the academy today for addressing complex humanistic problems.

If I had to distill the essence of these conversations (and many others) it would be that innovation, driven by entrepreneurial agency, was a fundamental literacy for high-level global leadership in this century. And most of my colleagues at the conference believed that the academy was unable, for structural and cultural reasons, to adequately integrate this literacy with teaching and research. Although Philadelphia University’s journey toward a new innovation model for higher education is still in process, I left the conference feeling very proud of our remarkable progress, collective courage and willingness to chart new territory.

Regards,

Randy Swearer

The Faculty Social in the Hospitality Suite on Thursday was a wonderful time to informally chat, learn about the rather amazing things our faculty is doing, and just relax after a long day. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

One of the extraordinary projects is the creative collaboration occurring between Evan Laine (Director, Law and Society), Karen Albert (Director, Gutman Library), Frank Baseman (Director, Graphic Design), David Kratzer (Associate Professor, Architecture), Donald Dunham (Assistant Professor, Architecture), Sarah Moore (Curator), and Rob Skomorucha (Director of Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations). They are working on a major multi-disciplinary Warren Commission Exhibition utilizing our newly acquired archives of Senator Arlen Specter. The Exhibition will focus on the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. I was very impressed with their boundless creativity, enthusiasm and deep commitment to working in a way that foregrounds transdiscipinarity.

I had many other interesting conversations as well that ranged from tattoos (Evan Goldman) to Phil Tiemeyer’s very thoughtfully conceived course that will take place in South Africa.

Thanks to everyone for coming!

Randy Swearer

Four of us from Philadelphia University just attended the Business Innovation Factory-8 (BIF) Summit in Providence, RI. BIF brings together major innovators and change-makers from around the world. The presenters included distinguished innovators in areas of design, business, science and health. A few of our favorites were:

Robin Chase, Founder and former CEO of Zipcar, spoke about a “peer incorporated” organizational model that builds symbiotic relationships between organizations and users to generate economic and social value.

John Donohue, Director, Brain Science Program, Brown University, spoke about the power of entrepreneurial resiliency and interdisciplinary teamwork to support advances in medical research. He is developing BrainGate, an implant and interface that permits patients with paralysis to operate prostheses with brain waves.

Carne Ross, a distinguished UK diplomat/reformer, believes that modern democratic political institutions need to be reconsidered. He argued that the collective agency of citizens in a democracy, aided by social networking technologies, would be more flexible, less mediated, and more responsive to the remarkably complex transnational problems we face today.

Susan Schuman, CEO and Partner of SYPartners (http://www.sypartners.com), who was a product manager for Apple’s ill-fated Newton project, reflected on her failure to manage her team. Now a business consultant for Starbucks, Facebook, IBM, Schuman advises on how effective teamwork contributes to thriving institutions. Organizations often focus on top leadership, but they don’t focus on what she called “the forgotten middle” and its critical contribution to achieving greatness. She has developed tools to help more comprehensively build teams and organizations.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Albert Einstein (presented by Jeff Lieberman, Host of Discovery Channel’s Time Warp)

Our take-away for education:

How do we achieve the critical innovations that colleges and universities will need to survive in the coming decade by building more dynamic and transformational relationships with our primary users: the students and alumni?

How do we build dynamic and interconnected teams vertically and horizontally throughout Philadelphia University? Perhaps our new college system with its matrix organization offers a path forward.

The most important take-away: the fundamental importance of experimentation and prototyping or getting your ideas out there. We must be less afraid to fail and take risk and we must develop robust ways of learning all we can from the experiments and prototypes we launch. Essentially, we must greatly increase the rate as which we innovate for this is critical to our future.

 

The Office of the Provost hopes to keep you up-to-date on the progress of our initiatives. We also wish to share with you any helpful resources for teaching and learning here at PhilaU.