Final Thoughts from CASE Summit 2009

This week I joined in a planning discussion for the 2010 CASE Summit for Advancement Leaders. Our planning committee discussed a number of themes, issues and possible speakers to make the conference relevant and useful to our profession. Preparing for that discussion I reviewed my notes from last summer's conference, some of which I blogged previously. 

As I expected, there were a few more worthwhile ideas that I had jotted down last July, almost all of them comments from Tim O'Reilly. Here they are in bullet point form:

• Tim O'Reilly, in the discussion about what role institutions can play in their constituents' lives, said: "If the job is relevant [to students, alumni and donors], the institution will figure it out. It's not about 'how do we protect the old ways we used to do those jobs?'"  

Right on. This reminded me of Clay Shirky's comment in Here Comes Everybody, that professions must often redefine themselves. Most journalists, for example, didn't believe that user-generated content or Web 2.0 was a threat to their business model: "We're in the journalism business – bloggers aren't journalists!" Maybe, says Shirky, but the journalists defined their own profession inaccurately. They are in the communications business, and so are bloggers and anyone else "publishing" content online, no matter how informal or personal.

• O'Reilly again: Traditional higher education will suffer if it can't adapt to new attitudes toward learning, to new people doing things in new ways (his examples: the University of Phoenix and Canada's Athabasca University). "We may remember how things used to be and remember those who suffered. The parvenu companies that did something 'crazy' may end up as the leaders." 

• O'Reilly defined publishing as "spreading the ideas of innovators" (a not very subtle reference to the fact that he owns a publishing company). Universities should ask, "What do we really do? For whom do we do it? Can we do it better with the aid of new technology?" 

His point was that we should go back to first principles. Instead of automatically doing the same thing using new tools, we should first ask whether what we do should change, not just how we do it.

• Asked whether internet-based news was "dumbing us down," O'Reilly replied astutely that he's given 90-minute interviews to newspaper reporters who then quoted him in a single sentence that misrepresented his main point.   

• Finally, O'Reilly echoed something I mentioned here long ago: "The internet is just a user interface." I quoted Cem Sertoglu in January 2008 to the effect that the "internet is the dumbest network of all."

And in a typical instance of converging thought-patterns, Shirky again surfaces on this exact topic: 

...[T]he internet itself is just a vehicle for moving information back and forth – it's up to the computers sending and receiving information to make sense of it....The internet does not know what it is being used for.... [Here Comes Everybody, p. 157]

This provides us with the ability "to design and try new communications tools without having to ask anyone for permission." Like...the World Wide Web!

Final note: Despite a decidedly technical flavor to many of the sessions at 2009's Summit, there was no wireless access in any of the meeting rooms at the Hyatt hosting the conference in San Francisco. Not because CASE didn't request wifi for attendees; apparently Hyatt doesn't even have the ability to deliver internet access in its conference rooms. I find this mind-boggling. Last time I checked, the hotel's business offices had internet, as did the guest rooms. Let's hope the Marriott in New York gives us better online access next July.

HDR photo of Times Square from Nimo Photography via Creative Commons. That's the Hilton though – the CASE Summit will be at the Marriott.