my brain hurts

The Gartner update

Gartner are a huge IT consultancy outfit that we subscribe to. The speaker was trying to pack in something like a week’s worth of material into a 40 minute session.

Some of the interesting stuff:

The people who think they run IT in universities don’t understand that they don’t own the technologies any more, the students own them now – years ago when you went to university you watched TV in a common room, shared one payphone etc etc. Students now bring everything they expect to find in their bedrooms at home.

People in elearning tend to become a bit immune to the new stuff, and the only way to stay sane is to be managers of change.

The biggest problem in HE at the moment is wishing to be more open, and at the same time, more secure.

Then, for the second time today, we went into latest research into the brain. I am sure Louise will write elsewhere about what Ray Kurzweil had to say, but the Gartner guy talked of how:

• Change is pain – it provokes sensation of physiological discomfort
• Behaviourism don’t work – the stick of the carrot
• Humanism don’t work – connection and persuasion doesn’t sufficiently engage people
• Focus is power, expectation shapes reality – peoples conceptions have a significant impact on what they perceive
• Attention density shapes identity

And backed it all up with recent research involving MRI scans of brains.