Small liberal arts colleges face technology challenges
Joey King, executive director of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, understands that prioritizing funding for technology, especially for small schools focused on sharing knowledge and cultivating good citizens, can be difficult.
But students today, more so than any group of students in the past, are constantly connected through technology and expect the same of their schools.
“Students are showing up with laptop computers and an iPod Touch and they expect all these things to be supported,” King said.
King, who grew up in Aledo and lives not too far from Texas Christian University, was named the leader of NITLE earlier this year. He has degrees in computer science and experimental psychology from Southwestern University, in Georgetown, Texas, and also has a doctorate in human-computer interaction from the University of Washington at Seattle.
King’s undergraduate work was at a liberal arts college, he was involved in research early in his career, and he’s been a successful tech entrepreneur. His recent return to academics was to promote technology in a part of society that hasn’t changed much — and that’s one of the assets of a liberal arts college — but is incorporating new ideas to better serve students and tomorrow’s tech users.
“If you go into a classroom at a liberal arts college in 2009 and 1909, hardly anything has changed,” King said. “There’s still one professor and 12 students. The only thing that’s changed is the role of technology . . . and it’s probably the only thing that will change in the next 100 years.”
NITLE was established in 2001 through funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. King said the foundation was getting numerous requests for tech grants from liberal arts colleges, and the organization decided to focus on efforts to promote technology in all of these colleges. The organization was moved to Southwestern University earlier this year, and King joined as director shortly thereafter.
Member universities pay $2,500 annually to the organization and then also pay as they go for additional programs, and about 140 colleges and universities in 30-plus states are a part of NITLE. Although King’s home is in Fort Worth, he and most of his staff members, of which there are about 14, are on the road a great deal to reach out to all the universities.
“Just connecting with them all is a challenge,” King said.
But taking the effort to inform others and brainstorm with them is part of King’s appeal, said Darlene Ryan, executive director of TECH Fort Worth. Before NITLE, King was president of QOOP, a social commerce network that provided images for people — for example, the platform does photo printing for Flickr and Time & Life images online.
When King was working on QOOP, he had an informal office at TECH Fort Worth, Ryan said, and they sometimes referred to him as the “entrepreneur-in-residence.”
“We really haven’t used that title with anybody else,” she said.
Being a tech entrepreneur can be difficult and discouraging, Ryan said, but King was a successful entrepreneur several times over — before QOOP, he was executive director of Connexions at Rice University, an open-education system that grew to be three times as large as the next leading system at MIT, King said.
Ryan said King had started businesses, survived, and was still excited about doing it again as well as sharing what he learned. His attitude was inspiring for others, she said.
“He’s such an enthusiastic guy to have around,” she said.
While NITLE is only serving a niche audience because only about 1 percent of the American population goes to a traditional liberal arts college, King said, the group has no plans to expand because other organizations are out there to promote technology at other institutions. And while the group is focused on the nuts and bolts of technology, like getting servers and networks and hardware in place on a campus, another large section of its work is in education.
Part of the education revolves around teaching students how to be Internet literate, because even though many of them have been using the Web since they were very young, they often are still inclined to believe non-reliable sources, King said.
Another part of the education is for faculty and staff, particularly technology and library staff. Some of the NITLE schools have added chief technology officers for the first time, King said, and some are realizing how technology is now an integral part of research and storing information. No student walks into a library and only looks at books anymore, he said; instead, almost all use computer databases and the Internet as well, and special collections or rare items that were nearly impossible to study in the past — such as a manuscript of Beowulf — are now accessible through computers.
For now, King has a few set goals for NITLE. He’d like to make the organization financially self-sustainable, work to make it more efficient and add services like consultant work, grow its constituency and advance its position as a thought leader in communication.
And although his work is primarily is technology, he’s really focused on communication overall, because the two are intertwined and will only become more integral to each other over time, he said.
“It’s not necessarily technology, because technology has soaked up so much media,” he said.
