An entrepreneurial stance towards education of information professionals

Two points I’d like to make up front. First, while I dislike being contrary, I do not think it possible to think forward in any reliable way as to what education for an Information Professional in 2050 will be. How can we do this when in 2007 we could hardly have predicted 2012! Second, my thoughts are going to be highly reflective of the personal experiences I’ve had and learned from – both preceding my time as a dean and the broader perspective I’ve gained in the last 4 years as Dean of just one of the 36 international iSchools. Although my role as the Chair of the iSchool Caucus does impact and inform me – I will reflect much more based on my experiences as Dean of the iSchool at Syracuse – which may or may not be typical of the broader information education arena. So if I can’t do what I was assigned in this position paper – what can I do? If we can’t plan for a future that is 38 years away, what can we do? My answer is that the best thing we can do is to take an entrepreneurial stance. To those who know me, this will not come as a surprise – in fact I describe myself in my Twitter profile, @lizliddy, as “Entrepreneurial Academic”. So the question is, how do we do that, or if in fact have we actually done that, and if so, how? First we need simply to adopt an entrepreneurial mind-set. That is – be alert, stay attentive, receptive, willing to risk, able to recognize and sustain competitive advantage and most of all – be agile. We need to be open to all disciplines, methods, programs, partnerships, problems and new ways of leading our schools. The biggest risk to our schools, our faculty, and our students of not being as successful as there is potential to be, would be if we are not open to new ways of thinking and acting.