http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tENKD_lpGa0
This video echoes much of my thinking about culture and technology.
Category Archives: stuff
I can’t ignore the ignorant
In my job there are days when I could do a little dance on changing the way someone thinks about and approaches the use of learning technologies and improves the learning experience for their learners. They start to use learning technologies to solve problems they are facing, make things better for their learners or even just to do things differently to engage the learners.
Then there are days when I think… really… I start to realise that the journey my college is on is on a long and winding road…
Let me tell you a story.
In my job I am in charge of the libraries as well as learning technologies and now and again I sit on the desk and help learners and staff using the library to find and use a range of learning resources. I find this a useful way of seeing how our learners use learning resources.
A lecturer came into the library the other day and asked where the journals were, we’ve just had a refurbishment, so I guessed that she didn’t know where we had moved them. So rather than point in the general direction, I took the opportunity to show her where they were and maybe also get her to think about using the e-book collection or other online resources we have.
We found the journal she was looking for and she asked about back copies, I said we have a few on the shelves, but knowing that we subscribed to Infotrac said we also (probably) had an electronic archive. She had not heard of Infotrac, so we went to a computer and I showed her how to access the collection on the web.
She seemed impressed how easy it was to find the journal, the back issues and find archived articles. She then said that she would recommend using the service to her learners.
Just as I thought, yes success, she said,
“I normally tell my students not to use web sites”
I must have looked a little shocked as she then added pointing at Infotrac,
“That website is okay as it is a journal, but I don’t like my students using web sites”.
Then off she went….
Sometimes in my role I think yes we are changing the culture and then a member of staff says something like that dismissing the web out of hand and I think I still have a long way to go!
I really feel sorry for her learners who in the real world will be dealing with web sites all the time with excellent content and here was their lecturer dismissing the web out of hand out of pure ignorance and a lack of understanding of how the web is used for academic research, teaching and learning.
How can anyone be so ignorant of progress and change? How can anyone be so backward in their understanding of how the web is used in their profession?
Back in the 1990s there may be an argument that content on the web, well sites on GeoCities anyhow, were probably not “useful” for teaching and learning and there were issues with the authenticity.
I wouldn’t be surprised by an academic in 1997 making these kinds of assumptions, but fourteen years later haven’t we moved on?
Today even Wikipedia has value (especially in the references) and can’t just be dismissed, there is also a huge amount of valuable content on the web that learners can use to support their learning. There is some “dodgy” content on the web, so learners do of course need to have information skills to find, judge and use web based material. There is also curated content from information professionals. Think of all the open access journals now available as well as online collections of digitised resources, journal articles, and e-books.
From experience the academic in this story is quite rare in my institution, but they do exist, they are ignoring the change that is happening around them, they are not attending the training, reading the communication about the new possibilities that learning technologies and the web can bring to teaching and learning.
Part of me says that it doesn’t matter as someone who has such entrenched views will probably never change regardless of what I say and therefore I should not worry about them, ignore them and work with practitioners who are more open to the possibilities. However part of me thinks about the learners and the fact that they are losing out on the potential that the web can bring to their learning, to make it better, easier and improve accessibility. I can’t ignore them, therefore I can’t ignore the ignorant.
Newspaper Boy
In the past (over forty years ago) you needed to be a post graduate student to access old newspapers in the newspaper and library archives. They would need to go through the newspapers one by one until they found the articles they needed.
Twenty years ago, undergraduates could access newspapers on microfilm in their university libraries. They still needed to go through paper by paper, however microfilm allowed access to a wider range of newspapers and was in many ways faster than leafing through an actual newspaper.
Ten years ago, learners in colleges and schools could access newspaper articles on a CD-ROM using a computer in their classroom or library. The text was searchable and could be easily copied into a different medium.
Today, archives of newspapers from the last two hundred years can be accessed via a web browser on a mobile device or from a computer in the home, workplace or at college.
In the past the process of researching past newspapers was time intensive, expensive (travelling to archives) and exclusive; there was no way newspaper archives and university libraries would allow college students or school pupils access to their collections.
In the past learners would be dependent on text book interpretations of newspaper articles or even the author’s interpretations of events based on other sources. Today primary school children can access a range of newspaper archives covering the last two hundred years and that alone can and should have an impact on the delivery of learning.
Maybe it isn’t the harvest….
Those of you who have heard me present in recent years may have heard me talk about how we have a culture based on “we do what do, because we have always done it that way” and talk about the start of term in September and the long summer break and how this is because in the past we needed to let the children get the harvest in…
So I did enjoy reading Mick Water’s column in the TES in which he talks about the long summer break and that getting in the harvest is a bit of a myth…
There are many myths about the school year’s provenance. The pattern of the harvest is a favourite but not very solid: the people who drove the beginnings of our public-school system did not really need their children home to help with harvest as they had workers for that. The universities, though, needed time to assess the results of their entrance examinations so that they could organise their new autumn intake. The school holidays mirrored the pattern of Parliament, with the long summer break for the wealthy of the time.
Indeed, the long summer holiday was essential for public schools so that children could do proper things with their parents like go on the grand tour of Europe, join a safari, learn to shoot things, and visit museums and theatres. After that, schools would “top up” the pupils’ education by teaching them things beyond their families’ scope.
Well going to have to now go and edit my presentations and remove all those harvest pictures.
Even so the point I was making still stands, we do things, because we have always done them that way. The origin of the long summer break isn’t the important point, the point is that we continue to have long summer breaks, because we have always had long summer breaks. We don’t even really know why we have long summer breaks, but we continue to have them, because we have always had them.
Culture of organisations and the people within those organisations is often based on doing what they have always done. They continue to do what they do, as they have always done. There is no reason or incentive to change. Generally change only comes about when there is a shock to the system and we are forced to change.
As a learning technologist I see myself as an agent of change. However I see my role as changing the organisation, not just individuals. It is more challenging to change the culture of an organisation, but the impact will be greater.
On a final note (and I am sometimes guilty of this as much as the next person).
The summer break remains a chance to learn about the real world. The broader a child’s outside school experience, the easier it is to learn in the artificial world of the classroom.
Just to point out, though we sometimes think this, school, college or university is the real world and we should stop thinking it is something different, it sends the wrong message to learners, the wrong message to parents and the wrong message to politicians. If we think school isn’t in the real world then where is it? Mordor?
Does the Web Kill Creativity?
Really interesting piece from John Cleese about how when one is busy it can kill creativity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGt3-fxOvug
Is the web making you be too busy to be creative?
Visitors and Residents
Still talking about Digital Natives, time to move on and talk about Visitors and Residents.
This is Dave White’s presentation on his Visitors and Residents model and his work on this for JISC.
Read Dave’s original blog post on Visitors and Residents.
Life after Death by Powerpoint
Don McMillan has released an updated version of his Life after Death by Powerpoint sketch which was originally an internet hit back a few years back.
If you haven’t seen it before, he does make some useful observations on how people use Powerpoint for presentations, oh and it’s quite funny too.
Can I be your friend?
…but I’m a technophobe!
One of the issues with embedding technology into teaching and learning is the resistance to the embedding by practitioners.
Many factors are discussed for the reasons, from fear of technology, to a lack of time. These discussions fail to recognise that there are many practitioners for whom embedding technology is something they can do in the same time as everyone else. Can time really be the issue, isn’t it much more about priorities than a lack of time?
As for the fear, I am sure there are some real technophobes out there, those for whom technology is a really scary thing that needs to be feared (like dragons) and should never be used. These people probably don’t have a television, a microwave, nor a phone (let alone a mobile phone). These true technophobes do exist I am sure, but as a proportion of practitioners in education, they must be a very small minority, less than 1% for sure and probably a lot less.
So what of the others? Those that say they are fearful of technology?
Well I suspect that these use technology on a day to day basis and probably don’t actually consider it technology. I recall one practitioner been quite proud of the fact that she was a technophobe, however when questioned further she not only used the internet, but used IM and Skype on a regular basis to talk to her daughter in Australia! What is apparent talking to many practitioners who don’t see the need or feel they can use technology for learning, in their day to day life use technology all the time for their own needs and in their non-work life.
One issue that appears to be a barrier is that these practitioners have issues in transferring skills they have built up in their day to day life to using these skills to support teaching and importantly learning.
The same can be said with learners and a recognition that learners who use technology all the time, don’t necessarily know how to use technology to support their learning.
So how do we get teachers who use technology on a daily basis to be able to transfer their skills into the effective use of technology in the classroom?
That is a question that may take a little longer to answer.
The importance of dull technology
Over the years I have gained a reputation at my college (and out and about) of talking about shiny stuff. I even called a mobile learning project Shiny as a result.
Though one thing that came out of a recent conversation with some extremely clever and bright people at a JISC symposium was the importance of dull technology. Dull as in not shiny rather than, dull as in boring.
For those of us involved in extreme e-learning or technology enhanced learning, we sometimes focus on the innovative, the exciting, the new, the shiny stuff. Well it’s where we want to be isn’t it, cutting edge and all that? We want to be using iPads, Android Tablets, the latest and best Web 2.0 tools and services. We get so excited at times that we even do projects and research on them, before writing it up, putting the stuff on a shelf and moving to the next new shiny thing.
I don’t think that there is too much wrong with that, some people do need to be at the cutting edge, they do need to be the blue skies thinkers, the people who innovate and create new ways of learning, inspired by changes in technologies and thinking.
As a result it can be very easy to forget the dull, the stuff we were using last year, two years ago or five years ago. We can even be dismissive of these dull technologies, pointing out how old they are, how useless they are “now” and that they are dead!
The main reason why dull technologies are important is that the majority of practitioners within an institution will not be at the cutting edge, will not be using all technologies innovatively. This means when planning training and staff development it is vital that dull technologies are included and allowed for. Just because we are bored with something doesn’t mean that someone else in your organisation will find it exciting and just the thing to solve the particular problem they are facing.
Photo source.