By Lori DeBoer
From a $40 Harvard MBA to a huge galactic university, participants in the second annual Sedona Conference last month envisioned a host of possibilities for technology’s impact on higher education.
Gathered in Sedona, Ariz., a town best known for its spectacular red rocks and New Age mysticism, more than 200 people from 26 states and 14 countries pondered the convergence of education with technology and entertainment. Topics ran the gamut, from distance learning to digital storytelling, with everyone from college presidents to new media gurus offering their take on the future.
“The purpose behind the Sedona Conference is to provide a venue where educators and people in industry, both entertainment and technology, can look at the way information is going to be delivered in the future,” said Rick DeGraw, conference organizer and head of the Office for the Community Agenda at the Maricopa Community College District in Arizona.
While attendees witnessed the first American public showing a digitized film—Mirimax Fims donated copies of its Academy Award winners “Shakespeare in love” and “Life is Beautiful” evening screenings—unveiling gee-whiz technology was not the central focus of the conference. Most came to learn ow they could harness technology to help their organizations reach students or, as the lines blur between education and entertainment, audiences.
“A number of participants were talking about how technology is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself,” said Tom Lombardo, founder and chair of the Futures Institute at Rio Salado College, conference, one of the sponsors. “And the end is, of course, fundamental education experiences, such as the development of communication and higher cognitive skills. Technology can enrich the educational experience through sight or sound and video and virtual reality.”
Whatever the technology, Lombardo believes that the path education takes will ultimately be steered by values. That point was driven in a hands-on workshop given by Lombardo and Vernon Smith, chair of Foreign Languages and International Study at Rio Salado College.
“We presented a way of thinking through how to create a preferable future for educators in a technologically evolving world,” said Lombardo.
Participants centered on fundamental education values—communication, cooperation, collaboration, personal development—and how technology and other methods could facilitate them. For example, did participants value diversity and collaboration as part of a global society? Did they value education for job training or education for its own sake? What about the enhancement of creativity or the ability of people to continue their growth throughout life?
“Thinking about the future allows you to think about diversity, about globalization, about technology, about higher cognitive skills,” said Smith. “Gearing education to do that is a means of hitting a lot of critical issues in society. We help get people out of their mindset and start looking at possibilities for the future.”
Some possibilities that emerged included: cheap and convenient education, robotic teachers and a wide range of teaching methods and systems to accommodate diverse people, cultures and needs. Within this matrix, content will still be king.
“You can get carried away with the technology and not say anything of great or thought-provoking interest. On the other hand, you don’t need the technology to say something interesting or stimulating,” said Lombardo.
Did the conference paint a rosy picture of the future—or will traditional colleges go by the wayside because of the internet and distance learning?
“I think people are more quizzical than either optimistic or pessimistic,” said Bill Holmes, executive director for community and business relations at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Mich., who has attended both Sedona Conferences. “Things are moving awfully fast right now and higher education has not moved fast since its conception 300 years ago, and it has been able to resist technology-driven change for all of those years. And now we are faced with a technology that won’t go away, and it is changing the way people are thinking about learning . . . and that’s going to play itself out over the next 10 to 15 years.”
If the pundits gathered at Sedona are correct, educational delivery in the future will be highly entertaining—no stuffy classroom lectures. To illustrate that point, conference-goers cozied up to an on-screen campfire with storyteller Dana Atchley, to witness the power of digital storytelling. His humorous tales were accompanied by an interactive graphics menu from which he launched home videos, music and dancing illustrations.
One believer in the notion that technology can make content more interesting is Russell Ferstandig, the president of Mobius Research and author of a marketing campaign that helped propel Miramax’s recent Academy Award winners from obscurity to fame. “If you are in the education field and you say ‘all I am is a professor,’ then you are missing the boat,” he said.
About 55 percent of the attendees were from community colleges, 30 percent were from the entertainment fields and 18 percent came from industry, said DeGraw. Motorola, Adobe, Intel and win-star co-sponsored the conference.
The presence of so many new media and industry leaders at the conference indicates that education in the future will likely be big business. Of course, implementing new technology is expensive, as Paul Elsner, chancellor of the Maricopa Community College District, noted in his talk: “The story of our times may be [that] the race for solutions will be among those who have the deepest pockets and capital resources to throw at educational problems.”
What our view of the future of education, that picture is changeable, said Lombardo, who is writing a book on the topic. One thing about the future to keep in mind is that we are not lemmings plunging off the edge of a cliff,” he said. “We can change or redirect tings if we want to, based on our values and what we think is important.”
Article originally published in Community College Times, May 4, 1999.
