Collaborating with Scary Monsters and Super Freaks featuring Professor Mark Brown
Channel: Center for Online Innovation in Learning
Date: 17/08/2016

In this COIL Fischer Speaker Series presentation, Mark Brown, Director of the National Institute for Digital Learning, confronts and uncovers some of the “scary monsters” and “super creeps” hidden within new and emerging, unbundled models of higher education. Who are the scary monsters? Where can they be found? What nightmares are they telling us about the future? Should we be scared? Just as importantly, what aren’t we being told? What horror stories or alternative futures are missing from the current higher education nightmare?

In endeavoring to answer these questions, Dr. Brown challenges the dichotomy between dream and nightmare scenarios too often presented to us. In looking at the bigger picture of educational technology, he describes a more complex, entangled and interwoven image of the higher education landscape with a number of competing languages of persuasion promoting quite different views of the future. Framed around a networked model of educational change and ecological understanding of digital resilience, he argues that institutional leaders often have to form strategic alliances and collaborate with the enemy in order to redesign a better future with a less scary ending. Importantly, such crucial work needs leaders who are ‘future makers’ with the courage to embrace the marvelous and shock the system from the inside, as opposed to ‘future takers’ uncritically accepting the unbundled digital world being presented to us.

The question is if not you, then who? If not now, then when?

Professor Mark Brown is Director of the newly established National Institute for Digital Learning in Ireland. He is based at Dublin City University. Before taking up this position at the start of 2014, Mark was Director of both the National Centre for Teaching and Learning and Distance Education and Learning Futures Alliance (DELFA) at Massey University, New Zealand.

Over the last decade Professor Brown has played key leadership roles in the implementation of several major university-wide digital learning and teaching initiatives, including the enterprise wide deployment of Moodle, the original development of the Mahara eportfolio system, and the conception of Massey University Worldwide which involves a major online initiative specifically targeting international students living overseas.

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