The 2005 Educause Policy Conference is in full swing, and Chip German, the University of Mary Washington’s CIO and VP for IT, is attending on our behalf. Via email, Chip files this report:

I’m detecting among governmental relations people (as well as the IT folks here) an interesting theme that, if not new in this arena, is newly and accessibly phrased:

America’s competitiveness in the future depends on everyone’s recognition that the next generation’s natural means of interacting with information and of learning is changing at an astounding rate — far faster than it has before (perhaps in all of human history) and clearly much faster than the folks who are currently delivering information and education are perceiving it.

That simple statement (admittedly, my words, representing an amalgam for thoughts from the day) is both thrilling and chilling: there is a plaintive cry here from folks looking to the future for us — higher education — to recognize this and adapt to it (that’s the good part), but as I look around the room, I’m not sure I see significant understanding of the implications even among many of the higher ed IT leaders.

I think the piece that has dawned on me here (dense as I am) is that this argument is one that educators can’t dismiss as current trendy hype. It is an early anthropological observation that anyone who observes the current generation of adolescents knows is not exaggerated one bit. The point is not what it is today, but that it is clearly part of a permanent change that is unfinished — this genie isn’t fully out of the bottle yet (by a long way).

Adding to that feels impertinent, but why should that stop me this time?

I really do believe, as I’ve tried to say many times in this blog, that Doug Engelbart’s notion of third-stage augmentation, in which we improve our processes for improving, is at the heart of what we mean by education, metacognition, “critical thinking,” “empowerment,” and all the other words we use to describe this vital cultural enterprise in which we as a species are engaged. These augmentation efforts are not new, but information technologies extend and intensify them to an unprecedented degree. And it breaks my heart that the institution of education lags so conspicuously behind other human endeavors in coming to grips with these new instruments. Can it be that the failure of information technologies to revolutionize education is not about the failure of information technologies at all? Has the institution of education become an obstacle to “garnering compound interest on … intellectual capital”?

Time to change the metaphor. We should not struggle with innovation, or come to grips with IT, or engage new paradigms, or push the envelope, or be on the cutting edge or the bleeding edge or on edge at all.

We should be virtuosos of augmentation.