yabber

I just went to a presentation on “The MIT iCampus Outreach Program: Innovating Education, Sharing Technology” which was designed to encourage my institution to become a hub in wheel of the MIT Campus Outreach program and Information Commons and share their tools.

Apart from the strong sense of being at an Amway presentation, two things really jarred …

1. the fact that being part of the iCampus project seemed to be almost entirely about branding, and having our university being able to claim some sort of brand association with MIT (which has its very own special alliance with Microsoft)

2. the reminder about the academic mission of the university to share and collaborate, the constant use of the terms “sharing” and “collaborating”, when in fact what they mean is exclude all the non-partners … if it is part of our mission to share and collaborate, why do we need any Memoranda of Understanding to share only with particular people?

The scariest bit was that nobody seemed to know:

a) the educational benefits that would accrue to our students
b) the research benefits that the university would reap (that it would otherwise not be able to achieve)
c) what toolset we could access and what that would allow us to do that can’t already be done