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Vision 2010 Interim Report to the Carnegie Foundation
November 1995 |
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Vision 2010 Interim Report to the Carnegie Foundation
November 1995 |
During the last decade, digital information technologies have become an important part of higher education, and it is clear that they will continue to develop rapidly. They will change in revolutionary ways the nature of knowledge, teaching and learning, the very core of higher education. As yet, though, we are far from understanding just how these changes will occur or what they will mean.
Recognizing the implications of these new technologies for scholarship in the next decade, the Commission on Preservation and Access, with funding from the Carnegie Foundation, asked the University of Michigan School of Information and Library Studies to lead Vision 2010. This project brought together scholars and others interested in higher education to create visions of research, learning and teaching in the next decade. Its goal was to visualize the impact of digital information and collaboration technologies on the mission of higher education by considering creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge using those technologies. Vision 2010 intended to stimulate new views, leading to provocative discussions and the generation of ideas, as a means to assist higher education institutions in planning their future.
This report describes how we went about our work, the issues that emerged, the products that we developed, and the lessons that we learned. It concludes by suggesting a second stage for the project.
A small project Steering Committee from the Commission on Preservation and Access and the University of Michigan decided to employ a multi-phase process in order to involve a wide a range of participants. They began in October 1994 by discussing Vision 2010's purpose and goals with an invited group of 20 that included presidents of institutions belonging to the American Association of Universities, a representative of the U.S. Office of Science and Technology and the chief scientist of Xerox Corporation. This group identified the key issues which Vision 2010 should investigate.
To stimulate visionary thinking, the project Steering Committee decided to employ the scenario-building process described by Peter Schwartz, President of Global Business Network (GBN), in his book, The Art of the Long View.1 Scenarios are stories generated to identify those forces which will shape the future. Jay Oglivy, a GBN partner, agreed to facilitate discussions of two working groups.2 The participants, selected by the Steering Committee in order to assure breadth and diversity, included university administrators, faculty, and a graduate student; computer and publishing executives, and librarians. Their discussions generated four scenarios.
This description of the scenario-building process has been synopsized from The Art of the Long View and is contained in the Vision 2010 User's Guide, written by Frank DeSanto.
The process first identifies a central issue or question. In the case of these scenarios, the focus was almost predetermined: what will--or should--higher education and scholarly communication look like, given the flood of digital information technology?
The second step lists those key factors in the micro-environment that may directly affect the central question. For example, what factors within and between universities will determine how digital information technologies affect the academy?
The third step moves Step Two to the macro-environmental level. What forces within the larger environment may affect the central issue? What forces lie behind those key factors listed in Step Two?
Step Four ranks the forces listed in Steps Two and Three. These forces are weighted for their effect on the central question. Which factors most determine the answer? How certain are they? Sure bets will probably occur in every future. But significant factors that are highly uncertain may help us differentiate among the scenarios we should create.
This leads us to Step Five. Here we identify the forces that are most significant and most uncertain. Clustering them may clarify why they were chosen. These forces, we believe, will decide our central question. We can then plot each of these forces along an axis according to its uncertainty--one end of the axis and the factor turns out one way; the other end, and it turns out just the opposite. By choosing the two most significant such axes, we can create a grid or matrix. Each quadrant of this matrix represents the conjunction of one answer to each critical uncertainty. Each quadrant also represents a different future, and--if we have picked well our critical factors--the four quadrants represent the most different futures which might answer our central question.
Now that we have captured the driving logic of each of the four scenarios, we can move to Step Six and flesh out the details. What will the world look like in each quadrant? To answer this, we return to the key factors we identified in Steps Two and Three. How will each of these factors play out in each quadrant? Which way will the uncertainty in this key factor go in quadrant I? In quadrant II? And so on. This is where our decisions set off cascades of implications. These implications begin to form a plot--the narrative structure of a scenario.
Remember that, in creating our matrix, we are trying to plot out the four corners of the future world to be as different from each other as possible. So, our scenarios will be exaggerated in opposite directions. This is what we want--to chart the outliers and encompass the possible.
The final two steps are the payoff. Step Seven looks at the implications of each scenario. What strategy would stand us in good stead in several--or even all four--of the scenarios? Step Eight searches for early indicators: what developments will indicate that we are heading into the northeast quadrant rather than the southwest? The earlier we can identify these, the sooner we can take appropriate action.
Initially, the Vision 2010 Steering Committee defined the project's focus as the intersection of digital technologies and scholarly communication. However, as the Phase 1 Group framed the central issue, it broadened the project's scope. It decided that the focal question should be:
How, by, and for whom will higher knowledge, information, skills and values be produced, distributed, stored, discovered, evaluated, interpreted, protected and financed in the year 2010?
Underlying this question was an assumption that digital technologies are changing teaching, learning and research.
Group 1 then proceeded to delineate and weight key factors leading, after extensive discussion, to the following matrix.
The x-axis, labeled New Literacy, captures the group's characterization of the new knowledge and skills, the new orientation of scholarship, resulting from the imbedded nature of the digital signal. They agreed that there may be profound differences in the way learning and teaching take place as a result of digital technologies. One participant captured this idea as a new "sociology of learning"; another described it as the shift from the textual codex book signal as the primary medium of scholarly communication to a multimedia digital signal.
The group labeled the y-axis, Competition. This axis included both internal competition for faculty and students among universities and external competition from new businesses offering services traditionally maintained by higher education. As one participant summarized: "It's no longer Yale versus Harvard; it's Yale versus Microsoft."
Phase 1 allowed us to draft four scenarios reflecting the extremes of the matrix along a timeline of three five-year periods ending at 2010. In keeping with their purpose, the scenarios were intended not to predict the future but to imagine four plausible ones. The stories that resulted appear exaggerated because the process aims to plot four widely different views of the future through which to capture outliers while encompassing the possible. The draft scenarios were then presented to a second working group, Phase 2, to critique and expand. These participants were also asked to identify early warning signals.
Since scenarios are intended to be compelling stories, eliciting response from their readers as a good novel does, the project director asked Frank DeSanto, a professional writer associated with the University of Michigan Department of English, to rework the original drafts. He also asked Richard Lanham, a UCLA professor emeritus and a participant at all of the Vision 2010 meetings, to produce a commentary to accompany the scenarios.3
These documents were presented to a group of American Association of University provosts in the fall of 1995. Did they consider the scenarios a useful planning tool? This meeting returned both expected and unexpected answers. In general, the provosts felt that the planning horizon of 2010 was too long. They wanted a shorter period, and one divided into even shorter sub-units. As the provosts talked, it became clear that they define their roles in very different ways, and understand digital information technologies very diversely, too. Some thought they might increase the efficiency of their campus community; few thought that they would fundamentally change learning, teaching, and research. One provost, however, asked to test the scenarios on his campus and these have been provided to him along with the User's Guide. The provosts also challenged the Steering Committee to identify the core essence of the university, which distinguishes it from other social institutions and which can not be changed without irreparably damaging higher education. Plans for responding to this are underway.
The scenario-building process yielded rich dialogs by all of the groups as they considered the focal question and project goal. Certain issues consistently appeared across groups, while others surfaced in only one phase. All sessions were tape recorded and the transcripts summarized. Four scenarios and a User's Guide have been prepared. These are now being tested at Tulane University and the University of Illinois. A commentary by Richard Lanham captures the struggle that the Phase 0-2 Groups experienced as they wrestled with the complexity of higher education and the potential dramatic change in 2010, brought on by a digital society. Lanham concluded that the New Literacy and Competition axes meet at the vital intersection identified in Vision 2010's goal, namely "the convergence of technological change."
The technology itself, especially the World Wide Web, enables links across the discussions so that issues and themes become more apparent and useful. The Web also offers the possibility of obtaining comments from diverse readers of the scenarios, allowing the project to stimulate responses from many different constituents interested in the focal question. As a result, initial planning for a Vision 2010 Web document is underway. If the Steering Committee approves its implementation, it will be available in mid-winter, 1996.
In addition to developing scenarios, research leading to a select bibliography of sources relevant to the goal of Vision 2010 has been undertaken. The initial effort appears in Appendix 4. Work to refine the list is necessary.
Both the scenario-building process, itself, and the themes and issues that emerged, provide valuable insights that should help higher education answer Vision 2010's focal question.
Generally used by corporations for strategic planning, scenario-building is not easily transferable to higher education, particularly in conjunction with the type of global problem Vision 2010 sought to address. The process does stimulate thoughtful and provocative discussion but, primarily because of the heterogeneous characteristics of colleges and universities, offers little help in particular cases. Moreover, the scenarios posed another kind of difficulty. As one of the Steering Committee members remarked, it is difficult for essentially quantitative thinkers to consider discursive narratives as planning tools.
The value of the approach, then, inheres in the process itself. If implemented on a campus, it provides a structured way to an institution's unique issues, key indicators and early warning signals. Pierre Wack, writing about scenario-building in the Harvard Business Review,4 divided scenarios into two types, preliminary scenarios developed purely as planning exercises; and executive scenarios that encourage managers to question their own model of reality and change it when necessary. The Vision 2010 working groups enjoyed the challenging discussions and put forth a wealth of ideas about the future of the university and how it would be affected by digital communication. We did not go beyond Wack's preliminary scenarios, however. Individual institutions must create executive scenarios to produce real managerial changes. Developing these executive scenarios, we now see, involves a much larger undertaking than the 2010 enterprise as presently conceived.
New Literacy. Several key issues and themes emerged during Phases 0-2. First, visual learning was recognized as a new dimension of scholarship. The presidents captured this as a movement from the analysis which has characterized 20th century scholarship to something more like artistic creativity. Group 1 embedded this theme in their categorization of new literacy. They suggested that the visual space of knowledge may bring about very different ways of learning, teaching and research. Such learning will occur within virtual communities rather than fixed physical campuses. Combining this idea with competition, the other axis, they envisioned new organizational forms for scholarship emerging. Drawing on these ideas, Group 2 suggested that learning would be characterized by individual choice, that it would be personalized and customized. All of the groups suggested an increasing tension between the "knows" and "know-nots," those fluent in the new literacy and those not. And they hypothesized that this tension may be most severe between students (knows) and faculty (know-nots).
All of these ideas stand at the center of the New Literacy axis on the scenario matrix and reflect the groups' grappling with just what the digital signal will mean to future scholarship. This question surfaced repeatedly within and across groups and remains a puzzling concept. It certainly puzzled the provosts.
Competition. Particularly from the private sector, competition became a central force for both Groups 1 and 2. They identified a weakening of higher education's current monopoly on credentialing as commercial enterprises and professional societies used digital technology to offer alternative avenues to certification. They even suggested that individual faculty members, capitalizing on their knowledge and entrepreneurial instincts, might use the Internet and other technologies outside the university structure to offer instruction on their own. Indeed, the groups worried more about external competition than intra-university struggles.
Stability. Concern for institutional stability, adaptability and flexibility occurred in discussions of governance, departmental and discipline structures and the history of the academy. Some considered the digital signal as a primary liberator breaking down barriers of time, place, institutional affiliation, spawning virtual communities; others saw in it the power to create new outlets for faculty individuality and creativity within the institutional structure. Most agreed that only flexible and adaptive institutions would survive.
As a counter view, one provost argued that universities are not hierarchical corporations but communities that have special purposes. One of these special purposes is to provide a stable foundation for individual entre-preneurs, called professors, who choose the direction of their work. Those professors don't want that foundation to change. They think the university administration's business is to protect them from change, not to encourage it. This view prevailed among the provosts and also dominates much of the current managerial debate in higher education.5
Reflecting on this diversity of opinion, Richard Lanham observed:
The debate about the "competition axis" came back again and again to a central question: "What is your theory of the institution?" "What is your core competency?" "What is the non-negotiable center of the enterprise?" We should not be surprised at the question. Digital technology has asked it of just about every economic activity in America. Why do we have so much trouble defining what business we are in? Because it has changed and grown so over the last 50 years? Certainly, but I think the difficulty runs deeper. It runs to our departure point, the digital revolution. We are trying to define ourselves in a new kind of society, an information society rather than an industrial society. Peter Drucker wrote in a recent Atlantic Monthly article that we need "systematic work on the quality of knowledge and the productivity of knowledge." Neither, he argues, have been defined yet. The confusion clustered around the y axis all came from this undefined category--the productivity of knowledge. Until we understand what the productivity of knowledge means, we will not be able to define the theory of the institution.6
Finances. Uniformly, though not unexpectedly, the presidents and the working groups identified financial concerns as a primary force in determining the future of universities. Their discussion ranged over declining public esteem of and support for higher education, demands for accountability, and the substantial investment costs of digital technology. The economic picture was also clouded by increased non-academic competition, by changes in federal funding, and by increasing political pressures.
In his commentary, Richard Lanham argues that an understanding of the "productivity of knowledge" constitutes the critical next step in Vision 2010's charge. By enabling a broad discussion of "academic productivity," leaders in higher education will stimulate an essential debate of the definition of the institution within the digital society. Such a debate should lead to a clearer understanding of higher education's core competencies and values. Moreover, it should assist the academic community to truly define the new literacy and, with it, the implications of the digital signal for scholarship, learning, teaching and research in the 21st century.
It is clear that the original Vision 2010 goal was too narrow. On the one hand, it failed to cover the complex, tangled issues driving higher education, issues introduced by the university presidents at our first meeting. On the other, it failed to recognize that an understanding of the productivity of knowledge work underlies an understanding of the information society and, consequent-ly, the implications of the digital signal for scholarship. As Lanham suggests, a debate on academic productivity will facilitate the identification of the unique values that higher education can bring to a digital society. It will also describe more clearly the "new literacy" and how to achieve it. Beneath that must come real understanding of what the digital signal is. Armed with this knowledge, university communities can develop action plans for creating their future rather than resisting it.
FOOTNOTES:
1 Schwartz, Peter. The Art of the Long View, Doubleday, 1991.
2 The Steering Committee considered the presidents' meeting to be Phase 0 of the project, and the working groups to be Phase 1 and Phase 2. The first group met in January 1995 and the second in May.
3 Section III of this report contained Lanham's commentary, the rewritten scenarios, and a User's Guide.
4 Wack, Pierre, Scenarios: uncharted waters ahead, Harvard Business Review, September-October 1985 and Scenarios: shooting the rapids, Harvard Business Review, November-December 1985.
5 See, for example, Cole, Jonathon, editor, The Research University in a Time of Discontent, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
6 From the commentary on Vision 2010 prepared by Richard Lanham for the meeting with provosts, Newport Beach, California, September 1995.
Vision 2010 Carnegie Report -- November 15, 1995
