An EDUCAUSE review

 

EDUCAUSE – A Technology and Key Trend Review

 

My review of EDUCAUSE identified it as a non-profit organization focusing on the impact on higher education through Information Technology. The EDUCAUSE strategy focuses on creating a community of technology, academic, and campus leaders for goal achievement. The EDUCAUSE 2017 Digital Literacy Impact Study (Brief, 2017) identified three (3) digital literacy models: (1) Universal Literacy, (2) Creative Literacy, and (3) Literacy Across Disciplines. I found Literacy Across Disciplines to be the most interesting of the three, primarily due to its focus on interpersonal relationships as part of digital literacy. Another critical aspect of the report was its findings that higher educational institutions should understand and integrate the digital literacy aspects of life experiences, applied skills, and continuous learning. Each of these digital literacy aspects is foundational for a software engineering career.

As I browsed through the articles and special reports, I selected a special report: ‘Artificial Intelligence: Where are we now?’ for this assignment. My dissertation topic includes Big Data capture and analysis for predictions in the electric utility industry. Two foundation technologies and trends are streaming ingestion, distributed storage, prep and train in real-time, and near real-time serving Electric Industry Big Data. This report indicates that Higher Education must move beyond Artificial Intelligence (AI) excellence pockets (Report, 2017). The report identifies AI as a mile wide and an inch deep, meaning that many courses provide an introduction to AI, but no course delves into AI’s depths. The report uses multiple authors, which keeps the various sub-topics interesting with broad thoughts and ideas. The report provides an interesting infographic with 7 Questions for AI in higher education :

What is artificial intelligence?

How does it work?

Who’s doing it?

Why is it significant?

What are the downsides?

Where is it going?

What are the implications for teaching and learning?

As I read these questions, they could relate t almost any innovation and its roadblocks to implementation in higher education. Comments such as why I have to change when I have been successful are prevalent. Often it is the time required to change the current curriculum to accommodate innovations in teaching. However, the reports provide excellent justifications for several use cases of AI in education. This course is giving me hope to see AI innovations shortly.