When I read Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, I enjoyed Clayton Christensen and his co-authors’ application of the potential of disruptive innovations to the K-12 classroom.  As a result, I looked forward to reading his new book, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out.  It didn’t disappoint me.

Christensen and his co-author, Henry J. Eyring, take a different tack in this book.  Approximately 60-75 percent of the book provides a narrative of two institutions of higher education, Harvard University and Ricks College, now BYU-Idaho.  While many observers of higher education may not consider Harvard an innovator, decisions made by its presidents over its several hundred year history have influenced the direction of American higher education.  Whether it’s the four-year baccalaureate degree, the creation of various majors, the design of a baccalaureate degree to include general education courses, professional schools with a requirement that applicants complete a bachelor’s degree before matriculating, faculty tenure, the “publish or perish” culture for faculty, or athletic programs; most of those foundational principles that we take for granted today had an evolutionary turn at Harvard.  Christensen and Eyring make the case that the problem with higher ed today is that most four year colleges and universities aspire to “be like Harvard” but only five percent have a realistic chance of pulling it off.

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I had planned to followup my article about Apple with an article about the differences between my generation of computer users and my children’s generation.  The impetus for my original plan was watching my eight year old daughters search Google the other morning for the term “cute baby animal pictures.”  When I saw that Google was able to synthesize that request and deliver links to some very cute baby animals, I thought about the term Digital Native which I had first heard a few years ago from West Virginia’s First Lady, Gayle Manchin.  Gayle is a former elementary school teacher and is passionate about learning about ways in which technology can be used in education to assist teachers and children with the process of learning. 

The term she referenced originated with Marc Parensky, founder of Games2train and considered to be one of the world’s foremost experts on the relationship between games and gaming technology and the learning experiences of today’s young people.  Parensky holds Masters degrees from Yale, Middlebury and the Harvard School of Business and has been an advocate for the use of technology in classrooms for years.  Parensky has even worked with the Department of Defense to establish an educational program that embraces the use of games as positive educational tools.

The lesson I learned from observing my daughters at play was that children who have access to technology are able to utilize it and to think, act, and learn in ways that are vastly different than the way we learned years ago.

Today’s issue of Inside Higher Ed features an interview with John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, authors of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, which focuses significantly on data collected at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where both work.  The two explore the digital context in which today’s young people are learning and analyze the impact of their digital environment on their learning experiences.

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