A comment on George Siemens post plus a few more comments

I just tried to post this comment on George Siemen’s http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2011/09/01/the-narrowness-of-thought-in-higher-education-reform/ blog post but not sure it ‘took’ so I am posting it here.

Thanks for this George (I also made a comment over at your slideshow).  One of the reasons that I came into the field of Learning Technology (if indeed it is a field) was to play a part in letting lessons learned in earlier organisational applications of technology benefit what is happening in education.  This requires us to reference disciplines such as Information Systems (my home discipline), Business and Management, as well as Computer Science and Education.
Last year I was the commissioning editor, facilitating a Special Issue of ALT-J edited by 3 significant figures in education and you can see the articles here  
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet26/ajet26.html.
You could say that the articles mainly cover additive change but that issue and the whole wealth of research into transforming institutions within a huge business and societal sector like education is a huge challenge.  I agree, we need to broaden our thought (and read around), but also ‘go canny’ as they say in Scotland.  Whatever the future will be, we are unlikely to predict it with accuracy, and will need to nudge our visions along the way.

We at ALT-J are experiencing change, with our name having changed from what sounds a bit like a keyboard shortcut to ‘Research in Learning Technology’, and Research in Learning Technology moving to Open Access publication (without author charges!) from January 2012.  This has been a process of change, with reflection, consideration of options along the way, including publishing back issues in ALT Repository (within copyright agreement) see http://www.alt.ac.uk/publications-and-resources/publications/alt-journal-research-learning-technology