Higher education and technology transfer: the effects of "techno-sclerosis" on development.

• Author: Bertrand, William E.

The merging of information technologies through digital transformation has strengthened the potential impacts of technology and education on social and economic development. Today's rapid pace of change and the globalized impacts of those changes reinforce the need to develop a global culture of continuous learning and new models of higher education that will provide a continuous resource for knowledge updating and professional development. I argue that the modern university has fallen behind the pace of technological change and has become increasingly irrelevant to the reality of life in an interconnected and globalizing world. Academic ethnocentrism has evolved within the residential discipline-oriented and tradition-defined higher education system. American universities have not kept up with the challenge of rapidly diagnosing and responding to increasingly complex and dynamic problems such as global warming, health and disaster mitigation. Current initiatives to improve U.S. development interventions fail to recognize the need to radically redesign higher education to implement the development initiatives of the future. A global technology-based educational movement reminiscent of the original concept of the land grant colleges in the United States is needed, which would tie an aggressive research agenda to critically examine the impacts of rapidly evolving technologies to a worldwide network of community-level agents of change that transmit positive results into immediate action. I outline a tentative plan of action based upon emerging evidence of better and more efficient training and educational models that are focused on broad-based sustainable development objectives. By removing the "techno-sclerotic" blinders and challenging the American academe to become more applied and more international, American universities can reassert their relevance and maintain their status as preeminent institutions of social change and innovation in the realm of global higher education.

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Information technology has been at the core of education and development thanks to its ability to move content further and faster via the telegraph, telephones, photography, film, radio and television. The merging of these technologies, through digital transformation has made the close association of technology with social and economic development more obvious.

I argue that the modern university, an institution that evolved, in part, to foster technology and provide direction for its use, has fallen behind the pace of technological change and has become increasingly irrelevant to the reality of life in an interconnected and globalizing world. I contend that disciplinary and institutional arrogance coupled with entrenched structures that resist change have prevented evidence-based change at a time when breakthrough technologies offer the first realistic opportunity to level the educational playing field worldwide. (1)

Building on the experience of the last forty years of development and higher education, I posit that the traditional system of higher education has reacted neither quickly nor well to changes in the relationship with, and access to, information, made possible by the information revolution. (2) While elements of this problem have been known for decades, I suggest that no real initiatives have emerged to address the key barriers standing in the way of rapid change. Academic ethnocentrism, which has evolved within the residential, discipline-oriented and tradition-defined higher education system, needs to be critically examined by educators and administrators and radical action needs to be taken to change the insular culture of these institutions, which are failing society by their inability to adjust. With a few exceptions, this paper argues that universities have been slow to support or even acknowledge changes in technology. As such, they require a new revolutionary paradigm for education and, by extension, development.

What is needed is a global, technology-based educational movement reminiscent of the original concept of the land grant colleges in the United States. This movement would tie an aggressive research agenda to critically examine the impacts of rapidly evolving technologies to a worldwide network of community-level agents of change who transmit positive results for immediate action. This action-oriented educational paradigm implies a fundamental change in higher education, from the existing discipline-centric organization to a problem-oriented, learner-centered framework made possible by digital technology. Global institutions with the capacity to embrace change as a pathway to progress and innovation are needed to face an increasingly interdependent world--one that calls for a population sophisticated enough to make appropriate decisions about our collective future.

Some of my suggestions include an evidence-based approach to the examination of the use of digital technology to improve development outcomes and to feed a new generation of "global university" initiatives, which combine human outreach and extension agents with digital technology enabling resources.

I outline a tentative plan of action based upon emerging evidence of better and more efficient training and educational models, that are focused on broad-based sustainable development objectives. Mechanisms are suggested to rapidly examine development prototypes and quickly build upon effective and functional models through outreach and community-focused, standards-based, future-oriented education.

EDUCATION FOR DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE

Most of our lives are spent learning what other people have told us to learn. In the past, knowledge--what we knew about the world we lived in and how to manipulate it to our benefit--was fairly static and change occurred relatively slowly. Consumption and living patterns evolved gradually and were stable for millennia. Few indicators show this better than the world's population growth over time. The earth sustained relatively slow population growth until the latter part of the 18th century (see Table 1 and Figure 1).

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Technology changed the slow and steady growth pattern to the huge population increases experienced during the 20th century. Human populations evolved from hunting and gathering through the successive technology-driven stages, often referred to as the agricultural, and then industrial revolutions. More recently, the Green Revolution, combining science and aggressive outreach in the major agriculture producing countries, gave us the collective ability to provide adequate food for a rapidly expanding world population.

Although the exact point where the practice of applying science and its methods impacted these progressive waves of change is debatable, few would deny the impact of science during the period of explosive population growth, which led to profound changes in agricultural production and disease prevention. (5)

We are now well into one of the most current, science-driven revolutions--the information technology revolution--, which is still pushing the limits of change, and profoundly impacting both the reality and the rules of our collective world. Some of the dominant institutions of socialization in the United States--family, religion and education--are not evolving fast enough to meet the new challenges of the day.

Major shifts in our ability to control and manipulate our surroundings are typically based on some form of technology. It seems reasonable, therefore, to suggest that technology development and dissemination is not only closely correlated with all other forms of development, but in fact may be substituted as the key indicator for development in general. (6) Accordingly, the survival and growth of human populations throughout history has evolved symbiotically with the development and transfer of technology. In recent years, one of the fundamental mechanisms for the production and transfer of new technology has taken place through the formal social institution of education. Higher education has served as a societal mechanism that drives science and research and then transfers that knowledge to students enrolled in institutions of higher learning.

My focus here is on the last and current information technology revolution, its delivery mechanisms and how it is changing and threatening the paradigm for innovation and knowledge transfer, particularly at the traditional place for education and invention, the modern university. The potential impact of these changes on global social and economic development is the question raised. I wonder whether universities, in their current form, can provide the needed support for an increasingly interdependent world, where rapid change is the rule rather than the exception.

EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

The history of information technology starts with the invention of symbolic language and the progression to writing. (7) Communication and the transfer of knowledge and information were primarily oral, with the tedious manual duplication and transfer of material by scribes or shamans, until mechanized printing arrived on the scene. Printing, the revolutionary technological innovation of its time, has facilitated cheaper and more distributed forms of knowledge and has continued to be a dominant form of transferable knowledge capital.

In the past quarter century, we have seen the meteoric rise of automated digital information technology, and the resulting changes in knowledge generation and distribution. This continuous improvement in communication and information technology has directly impacted the quantity of data available to be communicated. In my view, this becomes the focal point for how our traditional face-to-face educational systems are failing to respond to a globalizing society's pressing needs. This problem is most obvious on the issues of social and economic development for the...