 All right, we have the top of the hour here at 2 o'clock Eastern Time Rochester, New York, and I think it's time to begin this week's Future Trends forum Welcome everybody. Welcome to this week's Future Trends forum. I'm Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator Host chief cat her for the next hour of conversation. I'm really grateful to see all of you here today Today is an unusual program and that we're doing one of our two level synthetic sessions That is we have right now 23 people online and we have close to that number here in person here at the open word conference So those of you who are coming in trying to be all quiet if you could just applaud or shout and say hello I'm glad of all you're being here today And if this all looks strange, you're not sure what's going on Don't worry. I'll explain it all and for the 23 of you who are here online Welcome if you're new and welcome if you're not though. I'm glad to see all of you We have a terrific guest this week and we have a great program that is brand new that almost nobody knows about So this is your chance to learn ever since the beginning of the forum in 2016 We've been thinking about how to rethink redesign and improve higher education There are a lot of projects a lot of efforts some businesses some nonprofits and today We have something really really new we have the paradigm project This is a brand new effort that's based in Elon University, but is really a national effort It's led by a wonderful faculty member leader scholar organizer and great thinker David scoby He's the director of the bringing theory to practice and he's the founding director of the paradigm project He's a wonderful person and instead of talking about him and how cool he is I'm actually gonna bring him up on stage and That should be done just a quick Click Greetings, David Hey Brian. Thank you for the kind words and I speak as a proud subscriber to your patreon Well, thank you so much. Thank you for the your kind words and thank you for supporting us Just a quick show in the audience. Can everybody hear us? Okay? All right I mean, I'm a native New Yorker so I can be as loud as I want. You know, just let me know And I will keep bringing together what you'd like to share now If you can't get into Shindig right now, but you don't want to speak out loud We'll have a mic in just a few minutes and you'd like to talk to us on Twitter Please just use the hashtag FTTE or you can tweet it myself and Brian Alexander and we check in Twitter throughout David, you know, we like to ask people to introduce themselves in the forum in a peculiar way We like to ask what you're gonna be working on for the next year and in so answering that You'll also be introducing the paradigm project. So I guess now is your chance to tell us What is the next year of scoby look like and what is the next year of paradigm look like? So the next year of my life will be helping to to lead and organize the paradigm project Which we see is a seven-year project As you said based here at Ilan, but a national project I'm I come to it as the director of bringing theory to practice which is a national initiative that that works for transformative innovation in undergraduate education Grounded in what we see as the core purposes of undergraduate education. So active learning democratic citizenship with the well-being of the whole student meaningful preparation for work and and Equity all students have access to this and the project which I'll tell you a little bit more about in a minute Is our most ambitious effort? I like to say that Bring theory to practice is radical in both the sense of being transformational and being rooted in what we see as core values Excellent. Excellent. Thank you And so with that context of bringing theory to practice What does the paradigm project hope to do and what does it look like now? So to to put it at its most unbelievably grandiose we want to help catalyze Systemic change in undergraduate education That overcomes in a moment of crisis and turmoil And helps to helps to create more holistic more engaged more equitable undergraduate education And to help to create institutions that are themselves more holistic engaged and equitable the It's a response to the situation that I think we are all in in in in higher ed That I would define through four assumptions. The first is that we've been living through an existential crisis in An era of turmoil in higher education, especially undergraduate Education the emergencies in the past two years Amplified those they they brought to a boil crisis that had been simmering for a long time in completion in faculty precarity in financial crisis In a loss of confidence in public trust in higher education That's the first assumption And then read an inflection change The second one is that that's the same years of turmoil have been years of creativity in higher education Unremarked and everything from the development of high-impact practices and new forms of student support a growing commitment to racial equity student well-being The third assumption is that while that that creativity has been remarkable It's also been piecemeal and fragmented Trapped in silos of old paradigms So that for instance folks who are working on racial equity and class equity Find it hard to connect with folks new forms of pedagogy or curriculum or new models of the faculty And and the the last assumption While we're in a moment of an inflection period of change because of all this It's still undetermined in the next 20 years higher ed outside of any institutions will look very different But that story is still undetermined and and it's on us to help make big and positive change Instead of being changed and people we partly need to do that by bringing these fragmented piecemeal Wells of creative energy together not just by adding them up as like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle By using that creative work to develop new paradigms about the student experience and new ways of organizing academic Institutions, that's the kind of framing the the underlying assumptions of this project the project itself And this is this is what the next year will very much be about Braids together three different kinds of activities that we see is necessary To make that big positive change that we're aiming for The first is integrative design. How do we bring together all these different pieces of? creative energy have them be connected and have them Create new holes that are greater than the sum of those innovative part But innovative design best practices new programmatic innovation is necessary, but not sufficient It's what academics have been doing well for the past 20 years We also need to do movement building to create a movement across higher ed that enlists faculty staff, but also students public allies administrators in this holistic vision of change and the creation of new kinds of Models and and advocacy and in communities advocacy networks and communities practice that spread these ideas and advocate That's the second number and the second strand of this very and then the third strand is Shifting the public narrative about the purposes of higher education that that narrative has gotten a shrunk In recent decade, it's now focused only on credentials and job training Important but insufficient for what a great education that serves all students should be and until we shift that public narrative Even the best innovation and improvement work will still be stuck in old models. So Project is about braiding together that kind of transformative integrative design With building a movement with trying to change the public narrative That's a very abstract Description and I'm happy to get into the details of it with with you and with folks and to hear their questions That's that's it in a nutshell Well, excellent. That's a that's a terrific top-level outline and there's a lot in what you just said, of course So I think for this group here in Rochester Describing a movement to accomplish a major change across higher education I think resonates with people who are thinking about open projects and open work in the academy and beyond So for those who are here face-to-face, I'd like you to think about questions that might come Specifically from the open work side as well as questions of tell us more about how this actually works I have a few more questions, but I'm just gonna ask one and then my job is to get out of the way and open the floor to everybody else for questions So one of them is just materially right now What does paradigm look like how many folks are involved and do you have a storefront? Do you have a Instagram account? I mean, what what does this look like materially so far? I will answer that but I noted in the chat Brian that there might be some feedback coming from me Do we need to worry about that right this yeah, is it those you in the audience both virtual and physical is this better now? It seems to be better. Okay. Okay. I just did a little Jiggery pokery on my end and I think that took care of it. Thank you for checking out the chat so Bringing theory practice is a small nimble project. We have a core staff of Four soon to go up to five or six with this project. I sometimes call us a Gorilla rump caucus for change in higher ed But we are at the center of a lot of alliances and partnerships We've worked for many years with organizations supporting civic engagement and student well-being and integrative learning and Events like this are efforts to build out that those networks have changed even more so one way of understanding Who we are is as a hub that's trying to build a larger set of networks and communities of practice For change. We're based at Elon University, but we're we're public-facing work We're national-facing and the coming year and this year's activities Have launched each of those three grades of activity that that I talked about So we have brought together a kind of brain trust of key innovators and thought leaders that we call the paradigm working group Full disclosure Brian Alexander is one member of that paradigm working group. Yeah, but I'm the quiet one We we are starting to harvest and Planning to have a set of communication series but lift up really important stories of that generative innovation Across higher ed new ways of supporting working class and and first-gen students new curricular innovations Curriculum based on wicked problems new forms of support for student well-being part of what we think it's important to do is In our in our web platforms in our bi-weekly letter in a podcast that we do is to make sure that Folks see what is happening that our seedlings Change because right now higher ed is like a gigantic version of that story of the elephant Everyone touches a different part of it. It doesn't understand the whole We are also launching a series of what we're called emerging models Kind of beta is a holistic transformation Some of them say stand on institutions some of them clusters of partnering institutions We all see so also see those as hubs of movement building and network building So a lot of a lot has been launched at the beginning of what has to be a long game of Building change and building relationships and and alliances with a shared vision of change grounded in this core purpose And by long game you said the initial plan is a seven-year one the initial plan is a seven-year one We have financial support for the first half of that and are and are Seeking resources for the rest of it Even if if we are at our most successful this is an even longer project of Building new models and new paradigms not one-size-fits-all models to be replicated But networks of institutions and and and associations and change makers in dialogue with each other Building more holistic less siloed less instrumentalized forms of education Excellent. That's a very very rich answer to my poking question That now I'd like to turn this over to The audience both the audience face-to-face here as well as the audience online And we have a couple of questions that have come in quick clarifying question comes from Melanchol who asks is this is the goal to reform undergraduate education broadly or within specific discipline? No, it's the goal is systemic change Across undergraduate education I'm so glad you asked that because part of our vision part of our assumption is that these values of holistic socially engaged in intellectually engaging It support for the whole person Education is as true for the community college students studying in the health professions as it is For the person majoring in a career-oriented baccalaureate field or in a traditional liberal arts field This is really a bit a holistic vision of undergraduate education itself And I should also say that on the other hand there are a lot of issues in higher education That we are not taking up. We're not looking at graduate education. We're not looking at student debt and financing All we're not looking at faculty research Issues all of which are absolutely key But we often find that when that work is being done by others That the black box of what we want college and undergraduate education to be gets left out We're our north star well, thank you for a great answer and Mel wherever you are can see you Thank you for that great question We have a couple of questions that have come up in the In the question box, I'd like to flash a couple of those up on the screen They come from two great stalwarts of of the program people who have been with us for some time and we're always glad to hear from them John Hollenbeck asks what does success look like terms like national conversation don't really mean much What can or will you do to make a difference? So there's a couple different really great questions in that first of all I want to say that a Term like the public narrative or the national conversation is slippery, but I actually think it means a lot I think we see its marks in what visions of College and of the future of higher education are thinkable or seen as feasible or legitimate I think that conversation has Which gets iterated every time people talk about Income and job training being the dominant force of the dominant goal of higher education or the completion agenda being the only important agenda of Change these are setting limits on the thinkable in in higher education So I think it's a moving target and I agree with John Hollenbeck that it's hard to pin down I don't agree with him that it's meaningless or or without power I'd say just the opposite now as to what success looks like That that is really tricky and it certainly won't happen in seven years, but I would say What would kind of success for our project Is a public conversation that is richer that has more for instance of the Focus on the relationship of education to democracy that say the Truman Commission had when it set the national conversation In 1947 so a noticeable discernible shift In what people think the legitimate questions about the future of higher ed are a wealth a network of exemplary innovative institutions That are not simply doing great small to medium sized Program building which is how I would characterize innovation today But developing interconnected integrated holistic forms of change that that that That advanced the core purposes that I started with seeing and supporting the student as a whole person Preparation for for taking on the problems of the world active and integrative Learning meaningful preparation for work. So not simply a couple of those but a network of those And active advocacy and change networks Taking on what will inevitably be the the next horizon of problems that those successes Have so there's this is not a closed destination, but there will be important benchmarks of success Just a quick question from john to follow up on that. He says, how do you control such a thing? I don't totally understand the question. Does john mean how do we control the The the dynamic of the project itself I think so I think so John if you want to follow that up in the in the chat, please let me know or if you want me to beam me up on stage You'll be happy to of course so I think It's in the nature of this kind of change project That is at its networked and iterative and I think it's it's one of the Great strengths of higher education, especially in the u.s And also one of its great challenges That it does not have a pyramidal structure of control It's enormously Diverse their sources of creativity and different models coming from lots of different places And I think we have lots of we have lots of examples of where Networked collaboration and change making have worked. I think of the work on student homelessness and hunger Already you get that the temple center hope center has helped to lead Networks of activists on racial equity those aren't control But they have a kind of common commitment to shared collaborative experimentation And conversation and I think that combined with changing the overall public assumptions About higher education is how you guide a change process like this. Oh, thank you That's a very inspiring answer and and john has always thank you for a good question We have a question just piling up. Sometimes I have to Ask and plead and demand questions, but here they're just coming up all over the place And this is from our good friend, uh, sarah sangregorio Who is always always a pleasure to see her on a maze that she can make time given all she does Sarah please Is there contact or a possible partnership with the department of education on a state or a national level Possible legislation to start making systemic change and possibly get the port on that level Good question. There's this is a great question and and it's and it's Opening up a really complicated set of issues. We've thought hard about where the kind of leverage points for for change are State systems are especially important Although we want this change to be intersectoral and not simply to be at the level of of state university systems And part of what we're encouraging is collaborations across sectors But excuse me for that for that reason The federal government to my eye has not been so interested in what I would call the kind of black box of undergraduate education They're interested in everything that surrounds that um Class and racial disparities student debt Income after college all important issues But I think it's hard to get them focused on what exactly do we want the student experience and institutions Delivering it to be the other big change man. I'll come back to state systems in a second The other big Change makers that that I would do are leverage points are creditors and we've reached out to them and want to try and be in a conversation With them getting them to think about How to how to measure and support and nudge forward these visions of holistic engaged equitable education state systems are Have the the the strengths and the weaknesses of being big bureaucratic systems and Um, they do a good job of paying attention to certain kinds of outcomes But don't always ask what what are the underlying purposes for which those outcomes are benchmark? And one of the things we want to bring to that conversation Is that learning outcomes and graduate graduation outcomes completion attainment outcomes are important But as benchmarks of these underlying purposes this language of purposes. I think is really important to renewing undergraduate Uh education and and we want to engage at least some state systems And that also brings us back to national conversation. I think um friends we have more online questions. Um, and uh But I want to make sure that the face-to-face audience here feels like they can they can add We have at least one mic And if no one volunteers, I'll probably throw it So you've got to someone better volunteer before it becomes too dangerous Also, if you don't want to speak on the mic, you can just stand up and holler at me and I'll repeat it all loud And just case people that couldn't hear you again This is this is a form for everybody's questions So you can ask a technical question about one thing for example or how many points of control there'll be in a network We can ask broader questions about strategy practice and even as David just said the very purpose of this So anybody here in the face-to-face crowd want to ask a question, especially from the open source side? Is that a question from the john federer look like Well, they're being oh no, we have one from our wonderful host And well, we should belong in many ways. So We're having a very dramatic walk to the podium By our wonderful host Yes I can I can hear you okay, but I may ask Brian to to clarify at the end of your question So Across this of The use of The use of open access journals the the way it works. You are who's been like Aligning with work outside of traditional measures containing our promotion to Pushing vision forward So how about the impact what you're talking about? Ryan I thought most of it, but can you repeat for me? Sure. So the question is based on some of the experience We've had with open access in the scholarly publication as well as open source software development and universities What can what can we learn from all that to help this movement grow? Uh, especially in terms of tenure promotion or you steven. Do I do okay? Yeah so There are I hear two levels in that question that are really important This the the level at the very end about tenure and promotion Also resonates with my own experience in the civic and community engagement movement Where creating protocols and norms and practices To support faculty with scholarship and in tenure and promotion has also been a complicated Challenge I'll say that I think underline all three of those examples the open source and open based research Public scholarship and the work we're doing Is a challenge to Regular protocols of the faculty role based on disciplinary professionalism and the traditional Disciplines that is that is a challenge both to faculty themselves to create new practices And to the institutions to reward Those those new practices So there's there's a there's an ant. There's a parallel that I hear to how much to what I know about the open source discussion in terms of faculty rewards where you need to to enlist faculty in in commitment to a new set of roles and practices whether it's a open source research or attention to to The pedagogy of the of the whole student and the well-being of the student to take one Challenging issue in the work that we're doing And not have faculty resistance to that and not have institutional Resistance to so that's so it seems to me there's quite an analogy There and we're just at at the beginning of a process where Some faculty hear about this project and like literally email me. I'm all in how I can help and and others say Why should I buy into this? Why should I trust the administration? A kind of hunkering down response, I think Change is happening in undergraduate education big change, especially outside of a small group of elite institutions and I think it will be it's not a question of getting institutions and faculty to To make a choice between A steady state and a risky change The change is going to come and it's just and and whether whether that is change that happens to us Or we help to shape that involves new new visions of the faculty role of faculty rewards and and Promotion more generous the second level of the question, which was about Lessons to be learned from the work that's happening in the audience for our work That's a great question. And I only have first instincts about it. It's really important This is this is a community organizing project a project of bringing people together in new relationships to work for change outside of their accustomed institutions or or areas of work So a commitment to open flow of ideas and information Will be is essential To that into our lifting up these stories of change at the same time Institutions are very careful about how they want their stories to be told Especially when you want to learn from their mistakes as well as their Innovative strengths. So I think I think we will have to develop a set of practices That enlists institutions in opening up their work to a broader conversation And I think we have things to learn from the open source movement, but we'll need to translate that Thank you. Again. Thank you Stephen for the excellent rich question And just one note that's been occurring David through the past few days here is that A key aspect of any open project or open work is human engineering Getting getting people to work together and how complex Challenging and rewarding that is We have more questions here. I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask and you mentioned the whole person We have a question from Leslie Harris on specifically that point Let's see Leslie asks Let me bring up on the stage Support for the whole person is a typical philosophy for Jesuit institutions. Are you drawing from that thought traditionally? Very much so I have two thoughts about that First is absolutely you nailed it We're we're working with several Jesuit and faith-based institutions Although and in that case the Jesuit idea cure of personality has been very helpful You know that there are also other traditions outside of faith-based Education that that give important language about that But the other thing I would say is I've also there's a there's a part of my mind That that is wary of Of of overly fetishizing or investing in the idea of the whole person because it seems to me None of us no matter how well formed or adulter on our journey We are Are truly whole in that sense. We we are aspirational And we want we want students to to be in that sometimes uncomfortable place of of being on their journey and and the Language of the whole we want the language of the whole person. I think To be a way of seeing the student in all of her Is their complexities Not a kind of vision of whom we want them to become as a finished project product Great question and and david. Thank you for that answer. I'm glad to hear that in play Looked me in the chat our good friend Roxanne risk and shared a good link to the cure of personalities pedagogy And now since we're showing off all kinds of ways that we make this form work Let me bring on stage for a video question Our good friend and several times guest tom hams. So let me just bring him on the stage And hello tom in the blue room Hey, i'm wearing a green shirt though. So hey david. Good to see you again. Good to see you tom Um, so my question is you mentioned the elephant before and and not seeing the elephant seeing the pieces of the elephant And the question I had was you know, which way do you see things? Is the elephant walking backwards or forwards? Um, and uh, you know, how much panic are you detecting in institutions, especially around things like enrollment declines Uh, and how is that driving change? I mean, there's there's two ways to respond to challenge one is to bunker down And and go back to well this worked in the past. We might need to go back to that Or this is an opportunity for self reflection and forward momentum. So which what do you see? What's your sense of that? So I think let me um, Let me tweak your image. I think there are three ways of responding. I would say Two of them forward moving and one backward or one hunkering down I as I said before I think the hunkering down won't work unless you are truly a well resourced institution Or field that can protect yourself from the winds of change and and even if I were in an institution like that I wouldn't want to be Betting on my capacity to survive other people's Downwards spiral I think um, I mean the elephant Is can move forward or let me take it out of the elephant metaphor There there are really terrible ways forward in my view That are systemic They see education whole But they are building a hole that I think Is is one to be lamented The idea of very transactional instrumentalized What I would call instrumental vocationalism which I would distinguish from education for work and in a meaningful way That's a way forward And and systemic change can produce that and there there are many forces Heading us towards that future We are trying to build an alternative way forward and I actually see that struggle as the main struggle It's not it's not the choice of hunkering down or moving forward. It's which way forward is going to be more powerful and The one you're advocating for you asked if there's panic is Is dept is does definitely not advocating for pain, but Right I'm the The one the one we are advocating for is right now Does not have the the the array of forces On our side, but that's partly because Folks who I think are committed to this these values Have been have had their heads down have been Fragmented or think they can just last out these these the storms have changed And part of the reason why we're focusing on movement building is We think among students and among faculty and staff educators There's an enormous reservoir of commitment to some version or another of these values not not And we want to catalyze that I've got a I've got a term for your negative outcome In-stage educational capitalism Oh That's a great phrase end-stage educational capitalism. That's a great phrase to conjure with that I mean, I call it transactional teaching At a lower level that my students just you know, they want the grade they paid for it Right, you know, but I will if I could just piggyback on one more sound about that is There's a view of uh That I hear a lot in the in the conversations about this project that All students want is the grade and the job and and students are rightfully worried about their future. There's so much precarity, but I think they they They are also they want to be For lack of a better word civic actors in taking on The economic crisis the climate crisis They are cynical about politics because they believe in the promise of politics and so they're I think they they are underserved by Uh to get back to john's challenge to me national conversation that's maybe not universally but largely focused on On immediate job training and the payoff for credentials Yeah, no, I agree with that. I mean I I as someone who teaches politics And tries to ground that to my students I say look, you know, I'm teaching you the skills to navigate politics That's what you need not you don't need to memorize a bunch of stuff You can google about how many people are in congress or something like that But what you do need to be able to do is synthesize information communicate information Oh, by the way, this works for you outside of politics and political discourse as well very useful as an employee um, but that's that's a very different they they It takes a lot of I'm going through the adjustment period with them right now at the beginning of the semester because they're like What do you mean? There's no tests, you know, that's sort of But yeah, I mean that's that's a real challenge and and um one of the things that I've been working on is trying to I Is developing these really fluid models, you know, I think the pandemic should teach us that that We we don't have to drive everybody to class twice a week from 9 30 to 11 You know, that's for a lot of reasons is not an efficient way of necessarily learning And learning on cue, you know How can we leverage all of these technologies and blend things together in a completely different creative way than the way we've been doing? You know and but that's deeply threatening at some level to some of these structures That we've built up, you know, but Yeah, we'll keep up with the good fight and I'll I'm I'm I'm also getting bashed by windmills on a regular basis So Do I got some hands we need you Well, okay, indeed. Thank you. Tom. Kyahote hands So if if you're if you're new to the forum, those are examples of questions that come from video as well as from the q&a box as well as from the chat So we stand open and are ready for more of your questions and comments And of course we're welcome to all of them Again, if you want to be as basic and or technical as you like or as theoretical as strategic as you like We're happy to hear from you Yeah, I don't know where the microphone went. There it is And you've got it What comes up kind of working? one of the questions I think why is COVID rapidly forced educational systems to change And teachers to learn new methods of how to work What lessons do you think you take from that and that process? So what you're trying to do What lessons do we take from the response to COVID for for what we're trying to do? Yeah, for how teachers had to adjust to teaching during COVID do that So I would say One lesson is to dispel the canard that higher ed is stuck and incapable Of nimble change. I think That one should be put to bed For for good. We don't need Some kind of external Archimedean disruptor we need to kind of That bring to critical mass the capacities for For change that that are in higher ed and in our public allies That I'd say the second lesson Is we responded in a way that's quite Impressive To the emergency of COVID with remote teaching and a range of other things unevenly some places did better than others but on the whole i'm Impressed with it, but emergency management is not the same thing as change And I think We we need to step back. So I don't think the story is for instance Now we now We learned that remote education is good and can move forward with that I think I think all the questions about what makes Online education Good or bad are still being explored and and i'm happy to speak to my views on that But I think the third lesson which in some ways may be the most important one Is that education cannot proceed on the part of either students or faculty Under conditions where the well-being of the person is not being supported faculty discovered that What they might have thought of as this palaver about student well-being applied to them Under their conditions of of stress and anxiety And isolation and they saw a lot they got a lot of teaching from students About how important it was to adjust teaching practices. So the student without which students cannot learn So I think it put well-being and the connection between mind, body and heart on the agenda as as now as something That had been pretty pretty well Underattended to especially by faculty before the before the pandemic and there's a really important opportunity to learn from that shift in consciousness Thank you for the great question And and David, thank you for that really really thoughtful answer We have another question or comment that came from the chat from our good friend Carolyn coward who by the way had a great job She's a librarian at jeff repulsion labs, which is pretty amazing And Carolyn says that the school what you say david Reminds her of what people say about library Stuck in the past in need of monitoring Shows slow to change unless there's a catastrophe and i'm curious. What do you see as the role of Academic and or public libraries in the paradigm project? So shout out to carol and coward with whom Been in contact with bring theory to practices work in the past That's a great question. I I want to answer it first of all by saying We spent about a year in the the staff of bringing theory to practice Thinking for ourselves What would it mean to try and make what big systemic change rather than what we felt as the medium sized Change that we had been doing just fine with and one of the examples we researched Was the transformation of public libraries because to our eyes as outsiders The shift in the public library from the place where you got books to the community building multimodal multimedia center that then at least the Many public libraries today exemplify With them in a much smaller way a smaller institution Showed us some of the things that had to change For higher ed My my sense is that the american library association and other allies have helped Catalyze the kind analogous changes to the ones that That that we are thinking of on the question of what and I think we need to keep learning Keep learning from that to the extent that libraries shifted from being highly specialized and functionally siloed spaces To spaces that brought to that were hubs of different kinds of relationships and and different kinds of human development from community from kids learning to skill building to Filling out your tax forms to community debates That shift towards integrated intersectional roles and relationships is something we can learn from I may be over romanticizing The success of the library and caroline can correct me, but that's how I think about it Well, and caroline, please feel free to add either a question or comment in the chat box or to join us on stage I often like to point to the transformation library world by saying, you know You think about the library is giving up the card catalog and then creating, you know, the wonderful mark standard It's nothing quite like that in almost anywhere else in academia But I I do have to push back I think David on one point which is that the american library association played a key role But the ala is a gigantic and almost total organization Uh, we don't have anything like that for under the faculty to teach undergraduate students Is I mean is is a paradigm project kind of trying to do that in a more network oriented way? So, uh, I'll say again This is as an outsider that did some research on the libraries You're totally you're right that the ala is positioned in a way that not even the accreditors or Uh are in this very distributed landscape of higher ed There were also Organizations that I would describe as guerrilla rump caucuses in the library world that are more analogous to what we were trying to do that we're bringing people together and and catalyzing Different kinds of of experiments that that's that's the work that I think we can do But you may be right that There's there's simply no point of leverage That is effective the way that the ala was in the evolution of public library No, uh Thank you, and carolin jumps in by saying is it what like saying that what library did was analyze patron needs Librarian skill set and the intersection between the two So in a sense that's similar what you're talking about of changing student needs changing students as well as what faculty can offer them I think and chris bore Disagreed with me that the ala was a was a positive word said he doesn't know many librarians who agree with that I'll defer to more expert folks chris do you want to Okay, okay um We have uh only a couple more minutes left And I want to make sure that everybody who has a question gets a chance to put it to us So if there's anybody here in rochester, or if there's anybody in the shending space I would like to put up a question either just face to face raise your hand and we'll throw you a mic Or use the chat box or the question box or click the raise hand button to do it virtually I have one question david that that I I have to put as the as the room's futurist here if the succeeds If if the paradigm project manages to help build a network Of a faculty who are interested in reforming undergraduate education if that spreads and grows That the national narrative changes um What does higher education look like in say five or six years? How does it look different from what it is now? So uh I think uh, we we see not only important new models but public and and Cross higher ed attention being paid to those models. Uh, and there there are lots of them out there. I mean the To pull some random examples Dominican university in california has created this Very impressive initiative called the dominican experience that integrates what they call integrative coaching the signature work and community engagement The records university new work um honors living learning community is a new kind of honors program and at newer kids and adults um That combines a deep communal welcoming experience for students who come to college without a lot of the educational capital of other students and community engagement um and skill building and It's transformational not only for the students, but also for the retention and and graduation Rates james madison university is Has an extraordinary design thinking driven set of curricular innovations one Threaded which is called the x labs, but they're not trying to to generalize it In larger chunks of the curricular experience so interdisciplinary wicked problem-based curricula plinth state has as a similar initiative If you're kind of paying attention to the innovation game, you know about these things But and they're very powerful and there are dozens of them And they don't talk to each other yet And the public conversation about higher education Outside of the occasional article in the hekenger report Doesn't lift them up. So connecting them amplifying them learning from them is is key Right doing work like this and thank you brian for providing the forum Or in change magazine where i'll be Publishing an essay or on the outbed pages of the atlantic or the washington post Where many where the folks involved in this program are in this project are starting to work Starting to to kind of shift the public assumptions That legitimize Educational decision makers Investing in the kinds of changes that that this would bring Those are some of the key ways that I would hope Higher ed and decision makers in higher ed would see things different Well, if if if I could if I could take that great vision and I I want to throw it out to the Both the physical and the virtual audiences And ask well, what can we learn from either social movements or from open source and open work successes To help this succeed that sense of for example finding pockets of innovation and lifting them up and reflecting them So people can hear about them and connecting them being able to share excellent Practices and ideas and what what lessons can we learn that we can apply here? I'm curious the people who've worked in open software or who have worked in project development As well as people who have worked on any attempt to transform anything from a computing platform to a society Any practices or tips? Yeah, please Thank you So one of the big innovations at least for me and my teaching was the ability to fork other Practitioners repos both in the academic context and in a corporate context and Work off of other people's policies on the government space where I have now Is really common for one agency to fork a successful open source policy and sort of pick up where the other is left off So I think that idea of forking and building upon previous versions of policy is very normal in software And it's not as common as in the other states Interesting and we don't have anything like github where you can point to and say, well, there's the original and here's my fork of it Could you overhear that? I think you all heard that all right and tell us your name again, please Thank you, thank you So that's a great idea to be able to have a given in this case a given pedagogy or practice Were you lunging for the mic? Please, please go ahead Thank you So I'm I'm Karsten way. Hello community architect from red hat. I mean, what I wanted to some degree Really to reaffirm the the aspect of the program that you're left describing They'll probably do to the last describing of how the focus on on on people who are Who are not represented in the organization to the areas you are so one For a long time for example an open source We talked about the lowering areas Entry is a way to make sure that when people came along they were able to find a good path to be a participant Being friendly and welcoming to people and so forth But when you get down to it before we're talking about accessibility, right? I mean every conversation open source ends up coming down to a question of Inclusion accessibility and the ultimate activity and so by those there's a big intersection places between the work that You just decided on the picture and the work and what's going on in open source at the same time so Making cross connections and there are programs that call it open source that are doing that they're looking to to open source diversity at an inclusion by working with students who don't have that educational background And I Well, thank you. That's fantastic. Thank you very very much for that. I appreciate that So we've got advice from uh from red hat on how to do equity and the importance of that And also of importance from software developing about forking But unfortunately, we have just run out of time. We have come to the top of the hour and I have to I have to say first of all David. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing so much of this In the bottom left hand corner of the screen is a link to the pdf of the project description that people can find And read right now if you like How else can people keep up with this David or participate? so I'm two two or three immediate ways. First of all, I I dropped my Email and my colleague Paul shadow world senior project manager In the chat, we would love to hear from you We would love to know your thoughts about this project We would love to know what you are doing or your institution is doing That you think connects with This project or that would be then our work would be Enriched by and if you're interested in building out these kinds of networks of Folks with shared values who want to join do advocacy work We especially wanted uh to know that the most immediate way you can keep on hearing from us Is by going to the bringing theory to practice website bttop Dot org and at the bottom of the landing page Signing up for our bi-weekly letter, which is called bringing it Which which will keep you connected to our work and where we will start to publish some of these Key stories of that kind of generative positive work that's happening across higher ed well, excellent Thank you so much for that And thank you for everybody for participating in this experiment of having kind of a two level synthetic meeting of face-to-face and virtual together We we've covered a lot of ground and with this I will hit the recording stop and post this up to youtube So you could have access to it later on David. Thank you for leading this project. It's so very exciting. Good luck Brian, thank you for for letting us letting us talk about it And thanks to the whole audience for your interest and and all of the questions and thoughts and comments Happy to happy to If you'd like to keep talking about this We can talk on twitter or instagram using the hashtag ftte Or you can at me at brian alexander or grab my blog at brian alexander dot org If you'd like to look into the past for some previous sessions on these topics tiny url.com slash FTF archive will take you back to more than 300 sessions If you would like to look at our sessions coming up just go to forum that future education dot us And if you would like to among other things expect my good wishes Or accept my good wishes and good luck for this fall semester It's a very very challenging time and i'm glad to do this in combination with so many of you In the meantime take care everybody be safe and we'll see you online