Let’s face it –  the cloud is here!  Does your educational institution or management understand this? Luckily for me I work in a ‘cloud’ environment on a daily basis, whether it is managing my professional data files online, working and communicating in the cloud,  or engaging with students and colleagues in some social media platform or another.

All well and good – but not too innovative if it’s just ‘me, myself and I’!

We need suits in the cloud too – real suits who share information and put a personal face to a media environment. My latest favourite suit is Andrew Vann. Professor Andrew Vann is the new Vice-Chancellor and President of Charles Sturt University (CSU), and unlike the usual new suits, he has already attracted much interest within the ranks. Here is a suit who has moved right into the cloud, and leads the way in adopting social media. Andrew runs a lively update stream at Twitter @drpievann and launched an official blog to engage with the broader CSU community.

 I want to use this blog to facilitate a collegial and hopefully innovative process to establish a clearer sense of where and what we want CSU to be in the future, and later what we need to do to get there.

I suppose there is nothing new about a senior suit launching a blog – but it IS a bit innovative for higher education. If CSU is to live up to being  Australia’s leading online and distance education provider, it strikes me as critical that not only Andrew, but many more of the HE leadership need to hang their suits in the cloud in order to further advance online education and the student experience.  That’s   #justsayin in Twitter-speak!

It’s the same with our subjects and degree programs – they also need to incorporate digital environments not only to improve learning opportunities, but also to make the learning experience relevant to the workplace.

Once again I have found that some of the subjects I have been teaching do connect directly with the student professional experience. These subjects were developed to respond to the digital environment – even allowing some of our students to get their own suits in the cloud 🙂

Today, I was offered an amazing job as Social Media Officer where I will spend my days immersed in social networking! My interest in it through study of this social media subject was noticed by those at the top.

This is the kind of outcome we strive for in the degree programs in the School of Information Studies. This is what postgraduate study should be about! As another student said after completing a subject I have been teaching:

This is the first subject where I’ve actually seen direct relevance to my work.

This is the challenge for ‘suits’! Will you be moving into the cloud some time soon?

Image: cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by -= Hobo =-