That’s the aphorism I’m mulling over from the first EDUCAUSE session this morning. James Duderstadt, President Emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, spoke on “Preparing for the Revolution: Redux.” The irony of the title is worth considering, but I digress. The idea is that we cannot come to grips with the great and worrying possibilities of the IT revolution in education (esp. higher ed) by merely thinking about incremental change and moderate modifications that do not change the essential nature of what we do. Or to put that a better way, we must find a way to affirm the enduring human concerns and ambitions that inform this practice we call education while reimagining the ways in which that practice is carried out.

I am often reminded of the fact that some folks thought a telephone would be a good way to pipe music into houses. Undoubtedly some folks thought radio broadcasting wouldn’t be worth pursuing because it was only one way. It turns out movies didn’t revolutionize classroom education, really, but they did revolutionize the way we think about experience on a much more fundamental level, one that we’re now beginning to understand in terms of what we might do in the classroom with virtual and augmented realities.

And who thought that a portable cassette player with high-quality, lightweight headphones would fundamentally change the way we think about experiencing, reproducing, producing, and selling music?

A butterfly is not just a better caterpillar.

Next blog: I need to write a bit about the wonderful presentation I saw with Diana Oblinger, director of the NLII. Her topic was “Educating the Net Generation,” and it was a terrific combination of reinforcing what we’ve been learning about IT and education over the last couple of years while at the same turning some of that conventional wisdom on its head. Here’s the teaser: Net Gen students want sage and learned faculty, they crave structure, and they also crave informal learning and interactivity.

I love those rich contrarieties and the deeper syntheses to which they (may) point. My hunch is that the ubiquitous and rapid communication computers have provided for us may be a revealing externalization of things we’ve always experienced from the dawn of sentient humanity, though that sounds so grand I have to chuckle at myself. Guffaw, maybe. 🙂

EDIT: I was obviously suffering from altitude sickness when I first wrote this blog–I kept saying “a caterpillar is not just a better butterfly.” Perhaps I was also seduced by meter and alliteration. Thanks to Alice for spotting the mistake and going “huh?” (A full time job around me, but thank goodness someone applied for that job.)