James Clay, Programme Manager at Jisc asked me to write a post for the their Developing Digital Capability blog on developing institutional digital capability. It goes something like this:
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. .. from your perspective what are the institutional enablers and blockers when it comes to growing the digital capability of an organisation?” asked James Clay in a recent post on this blog. I rather flippantly posted a comment to James’s post saying “Culture is a big issue, but I think over reliance (or expectations) that technology alone will somehow wave some magical digital fairy dust and everyone and ergo the institution will be “digital” and digitally literate.” This post is my attempt to elaborate that comment.
We know that systems alone will not alone won’t make a difference. But there still seems to be hope (or perhaps more accurately there is still a lot of commercial potential) in pitching and selling systems using the magical “d” word. Over the past couple of years in the context of unpacking the notion of the digital university, I have written a number of papers with Bill Johnston and Keith Smyth called “moving from e to / We used this title to reflect the change we have observed around the move from things have an “e” in front of them to now having “digital” as a prefix. Is there really a difference between “e-learning’ and ‘digital learning’ or indeed just “learning”? Digital is an incredibly powerful and at the same time ill defined, meaningless word. That said, there does seem to be something of the zeitgeist around digital that is pervading all of society, not just education. So how can we harness the power of the “d” word to actually make a difference and impact institutional/organisational capability? . . .”
You can read the full article here.
