Hi everyone,
First thing’s first: I hope you have some wonderful long weekend plans and manage to take some time for yourselves as you transition formally to the “back to school” week for some next week and officially to September for all.
It’s exciting to begin to see blog posts come through to my RSS feed and to read your reflections. Two quick housekeeping items before I get into the content of my note:
· Don’t forget that you can see all deadlines and synch session timings in our course Schedule – all the activities are linked there as well with details under each Unit heading, for example Unit 1 is here.
· In order to make sure that your posts show up for peers who may have used the LRNT523-specific OPML file, please remember to add the lrnt523 category to your blog posts and make sure you set your blog reply settings to either no moderation required or if you would prefer to moderate them, please do so in a timely manner.
Now, onto histories
Weller writes about higher education, but the history of the use of technology in education spans lifelong endeavors, from kindergarten to old age. When considering the use of technology in education more broadly, outside of a pandemic, it may be helpful to consider not just technological, but other factors. In other words, the potential that a technology for enhancing education is only one factor that explains why technologies are adopted/ignored and why they might succeed/fail. Take wikis in 1988 as an example – a topic which Weller covers in chapter 5. What may be some cultural or social tensions that might have posed obstacles to adopting wikis at the time? Think of Wikipedia in 1988.
A sociocultural tension might be reflected in the belief that because anyone can edit any Wikipedia page, the information posted on Wikipedia can’t be trusted - this belief might limit Wikipedia’s use in educational settings. Or, it might be that because computers in K-12 have generally been used in passive ways, a participatory technology like wikis that allows students to create content - not just read it - clashed with the culture of how K-12 is organized and didn't "fit" within the school environments. For these reasons and others, even if wikis were powerful technologies, even if they had pedagogical potential, even if they were free to use, even if they were accessible, they weren't widely adopted. For more on the use of technology in k-12, see a classic - Larry Cuban’s study on the use of computers in US K-12 classrooms which is a powerful report on the reasons that guide technology use..
Some of you have reflected on how things have changed and highlighted the tension of promise/expectation and the reality of implementation – and the power of a systems viewpoint. For those of you who may have not yet bumped up against systems thinking and complex systems, here are a few resources that might be useful:
From the RRU Cascade Institute (2021).
1. Introduction to Complex Systems: https://cascadeinstitute.org/complexity-curricula-video-1-introduction-to-complex-systems/
2. Complex Systems Behaviors: https://cascadeinstitute.org/complexity-curricula-video-2-complex-system-behaviours/
Another systems reading that might be useful include:
https://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/larsenk/learnorg/senge.html
In other blog posts some of you are beginning to grapple with the fact that the use and integration of technology in education is complicated and uneven as she explores Wikipedia. Access to technology is uneven. But, also, the ways that that same technology is used may be uneven. Knowledge is uneven. For instance, while two institutions might have access to Wikis, one might employ educational technology staff with the knowledge and abilities to support instructors to implement them in creative ways, while another might not have such employees. Or, they might not have enough employees to support everyone who might want to use Wikis in their classrooms. These issues go beyond particular technologies and speak to those broader factors Weller mentions including societal needs, pedagogical theories, and economic influences. Building this critical lens helps us as we consider the impact and implications of the myriad of educational technologies available to us as we make evidence based decisions related to learning. We can see a real life example of this is happening right now in K-12 in several provinces where cell phones are being banned at school. and tech companies are now having to reframe their safeguards.
Some of your blog posts also dapple with showing how binaries are problematic. We (instructors, learning designers, educational technology professionals) have choices other than open vs closed, constructivism vs instructivism, in-person vs. online. So, it's not just that technologies are "good" and we should all use them. The important questions to ask are: For whom is technology (whatever form it is taking today – for example wikis) good, and why? In which situations might it work and why? What do we know about how humans learn and what we need to achieve in the learning environment we are creating that can be supported by which technology? We could also just as easily take out wiki from the above sentence and substitute in elearning or online learning. This touches on the history of DE which is more than just what has happened in the past 25 years. I have put some resources in my comment on her post that might be interesting to those of you who would like to dig deeper into alternative methods (TV, radio, print) methods of DE that are still being used effectively today. I have also put a resource in our companion Moodle shell that speaks to the history of DE in K-12 in Canada. As Weller and others have pointed out, there is a wealth of history in the field of ed tech to draw upon as we help organizations move forward, we just need to know it exists, and then use it as needed to help plan a way forward. Part of this history is a recognition of the “first attempts in learning” (FAILures) that have paved the way for the next iteration.
For those of you who have not yet had a chance to read or reply to some of the blog posts for Activity 2, enjoy reading and responding this week. There’s a lot more to uncover as we keep exploring Weller’s book.
This week (Aug 31 – Sept 7th) Activity 3 invites us to apply what we are reading to our current context and provides some prompts to consider. I mention this in the course but wanted to highlight it here too….
Don’t forget to engage with the lessons learned that your colleagues posted. Remember that the goal here is not merely to post your own content and move on to the next activity. Engage with your colleagues and ask clarifying questions, suggest solutions, explore problems from a different angle, propose alternative ways to view a “lesson or idea”, and so on (LRNT 523 Unit 1).
If you are using moderating posts on your blog, please do check daily and respond in a timely manner.
I’m looking forward to reading the writing and comments that the rest of you share! Have a great weekend and I'm looking forward to discussing all things Weller et. al in our synch session Book Club #1 next Tuesday afternoon.
Ciao,
Elizabeth