[Photo credit: London Underground by Joey Gannon, https://flic.kr/p/CzYPCf CC BY-SA 2.0]
With each technology transition, higher education has a short window of opportunity to influence longer-term socio-technological outcomes by quickly developing and mobilising use cases that progress our goals, mission and values.
If we miss this opening, we have to accept the tech solutions that corporations give us, and their consequences.
We missed this window with the transition to web (hence almost all learning platforms are collections of online books), to mobile (the learning apps market is entirely dominated by commercial players), to social (still on X?), and to virtual (those grandiose but deserted SecondLife campuses are still there).
And we are missing this window now with generative AI.
Higher ed has considerable power to influence vendors and the technology ecosystem, not by moaning about capitalism, or sitting and waiting to see what happens.
We have to do it by quickly identifying and aggressively advancing innovative and progressive use cases.
But the window is closing again.
This post is illustrated with a black and white photo of a London underground (metro) train travelling at speed through a station. The photo was taken from a low point of view on the platform, creating a dramatic perspective which is accentuated by the strong contrasts of light and dark.
Matthew Moran 