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Last year I was invited to a conference to talk about “what constitutes the high road, and what the low road in the use of technology in higher education in South Africa. I ended up not going to the conference, but the I made the diagram below to use in my talk. Every day I hear from friends and colleagues in universities throughout South Africa, and there seems to be a Savonarella-like view of technology among the university leadership. It is reinforced by the box vendors, the software license rental companies, and the so-called 'solution integrators'. It is welcomed by a surplus of fossilized IT support personnel who prefer not to get out of their comfort zone of mindless adherence to the principals of the 20th Century, where their minds and hearts still dwell (click image for higher resolution version). 

You know a university is on the low road, when you hear things like

• Why should a university be writing software (why do we need to write a CMS when we can use Sharepoint), when there are plenty of 'solutions' out there to be implemented (and implementing them costs more than maintaining innovation - this one is particularly indicative of the low road because it indicates the organisation is picking nits instead of curing the lice);
• We can be innovative, but not with technology, that is just an enabler (I hail the worst of the 20th Century's legacy on this one – if technology is merely an enabler in the 21st Century, then the fools have lost the plot completely);
• IT people are hard to find, and hard to retain (this is true when you beat them up for doing their job, and try to turn them into the mental equivalent of prunes);
• Our students are not as smart as students overseas, so we cannot rely on them (I have worked and visited some of the best universities in the world, the only difference I see is the quality of the intellectual environment in which they operate, not in the quality of the students); and my favorite,
• other organisations (supermarkets are often cited as examples) don't innovate, why should we (when have you seen a supermarket have an intellectual engagement with a cabbage, when a senior manager sees a university as being like a supermarket, there is small wonder that higher education is in such a gory mess in this country).

I would like to cite some examples of universities that – in South Africa – are on the high road. There are tiny pockets of high road struggling for survival in many universities, but the sad truth is that there are no universities in South Africa today that are actively taking the high road.