Malcolm Brown

Plenary Speaker

Director of Academic Computing
Dartmouth College

Constructive Innovation: Investing in Transformation
General Session II, Thursday 2:30pm - 3:30pm, Auditorium






Biography

Malcolm Brown is the Director of Academic Computing at Dartmouth College. His group supports faculty and students the applications of information technology in research and in the curriculum, and oversees classroom technology. He has worked actively with the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI), contributing chapters to the ELI eBooks, helping to plan focus sessions, and serving on the ELI Advisory board. He has been a member of the Educause Evolving Technologies committee and is currently on the faculty of the Educause Learning Technology Leadership workshop.He has been on the board for the Horizon Report since its inception in 2004 and served as Chair of Board of the New Medium Consortium. He is currently serving as the editor of the New Horizons column for the Educause Review.

Malcolm holds a pair of BA degrees from UC Santa Cruz, studied in Freiburg, Germany, on a pair of Fulbright scholarships, and has a PhD in German Studies from Stanford University. He has taught several academic courses on Nietzsche and maintains the Nietzsche Chronicle web site. He is a member of the Frye Institute class of 2002. He has given presentations recently at Duke University, Long Island University, 2008 Educause MARC, Bowdoin College, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Educause Live

Abstract

In a time of rapid and even far-reaching change, how do we best deal with the transformations that seem to be called for on an almost daily basis? Will the cloud somehow consume us? Will our networking be up to the demands for bandwidth? How do we keep up with our students who are so avidly doing social networking? How we learn in higher education continues to undergo rapid and far-reaching change. But all aspects of information technology in higher education are facing similar pressures: what, for example, becomes of our business in an era when Google is emerging as the new Microsoft?

The need to think creatively and to innovate will remain a fundamental part of our work to support higher ed learning for some time to come. Using some recent publications on this topic, we will explore what innovation is and is not. We will look into what helps innovation and makes it constructive, and what hinders it and renders it ineffective.

The goal of the session will be to gain some insight into our own practices and to come away with ideas as to how we can improve those practices.