I’ve participated extensively in Boise State’s mLearning pilots, as an mLearning Scholar 1.0 and 2.0, then as co-director of an mProgram initiative in a graduate program, and now as a participant in the iBooks Author pilot. From what I’ve seen, the instructional designers in the IDEA Shop do an exceptional job of meeting the needs of faculty participants. Although I’m going to propose some alternatives today, nothing I say here is meant as a critique of their work or methods. Rather, I’m looking to both expand and/or refocus how we might identify and pilot emerging instructional technology.
Before we even begin to talk about emerging and future technologies, we need to figure out what future ed looks like. What do students need now that they may not be getting, and what might they need three or five or even ten years down the road? This is not an easy question to answer; the Horizon Reports, for example, can help us identify emerging tech, but they’re less useful in answering questions about student and faculty needs.
Fortunately, there are ed tech futurists who can kickstart our thinking by pointing us in smart directions. Two of my favorites are Bryan Alexander, who publishes the monthly report Future Trends in Technology and Education, and Audrey Watters, an ed tech journalist who aggregates her thoughts at Hack Education, as they address larger social and cultural trends and predict how those might affect students’ needs as learners and as users of technology.
One of Watters’s common laments—and she’s not alone in her disappointment—is that too many university faculty seem stuck in the age of content delivery. She argues—correctly, I think—that in the 21st century, however, students need to be able to find, analyze, synthesize, remix, create, and share content on their own. But she goes beyond that assertion; she writes that students need not merely find resources, say in a library database, but they must make connections with people—one another and people outside the classroom.
In this call, she is in line with the philosophies of connectivism, a theory of learning born in the digital, networked age. A few principles of connectivism, which was articulated by, among others, George Siemens and Stephen Downes circa 2006:
- Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources. A learner can exponentially improve her own learning by plugging into an existing network.
- Knowing where to find information is more important than knowing information.
- Nurturing and maintaining connections is necessary to facilitate learning. Connection-making provides far greater returns on effort than simply seeking to understand a single concept.
- The ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
- Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning.
- Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate impacting the decision.
- Learning is a knowledge creation process…not only knowledge consumption. Learning tools and design methodologies should seek to capitalize on this trait of learning.
My belief that connectivism lies at the heart of the present and foreseeable future of education informs pretty much all my teaching these days, and it underlies a good deal of why I tend to argue for particular kinds of technologies over others.
So. . . let’s get to specifics.
I see two approaches to piloting, both valuable.
In the first approach, someone—an academic technologist, instructional designer, faculty member, or college president—suggests a particular technology might be valuable. Speaking from the faculty side of things, I can tell you that I learn of such pilots via e-mailed calls for proposals.
When I receive such an invitation, I try to figure out if the proposed technology might be interesting to me. Note I did not at first say useful or in line with my courses’ learning objectives. This is a personal failing of mine, but I don’t think I’m alone in exhibiting it.
So, for example, when I received a recent call for faculty to try authoring ebooks, I was delighted, as I’d been wanting to scratch an old design itch as well as find new ways to incorporate public domain, Creative Commons, and open access materials into my classes. (Plus, I am apparently unable to pass up any IDEA Shop mobile learning initiative.)
Only once I began to look over the application did I pull out an old syllabus and consider how the pilot might align with an upcoming course’s learning objectives.
The faculty developer in me knows this is not the ideal order for faculty to consider technological adoption. But let’s be realistic—many instructors’ first reactions to technology often come from the gut or piqued interest, not from a thoughtful consideration of learning objectives.
Honestly, I’m loving the ebook authoring pilot. Lana and Amber are fabulous mentors. And yes, I’m scratching that design itch. And I’m finding all kinds of new content for my public history graduate students.
However, part of me wishes I had taken a big step back and considered my larger learning objectives, the ones that underlie just about every course I teach: connecting students with a community of people passionate about the course subject, including disciplinary practitioners. Over the past couple of years, these have included legions of digital humanists, a dozen Boise Bench dwellers, an antiracist sociologist, curators, app developers, librarians, archivists, and others. You know. . .history stuff.
And I wish I had proposed that instead of delivering content to my students—which it ends up is a lot of work in the middle of an already very busy semester—that my students author an ebook for undergraduates or emerging professionals, in consultation with experts in the field. It would be a better use of my time, and likely a better use of their time than poking at the various “interactive” widgets in the ebook.
. . . which brings me to my vision of a different kind of pilot, one that might make some people in this room uncomfortable because it could end up requiring a broad spectrum of support.
What if, instead of saying, “Hey, we’re going to pilot ebook authoring!” we identify a common learning objective—say, asking students to find or gather data, synthesize or analyze it, and interpret it for a specific audience on a platform of the students’ choosing—and bring together faculty to help them best identify the technologies that best facilitate this process in their fields. For some, that means sharing a paper on ResearchGate; for others, it is constructing a wiki or a blog; for yet others, it means creating an exhibition or an app or a video or using social networking platforms to network their way to assembling a conference panel.
Of course, this objectives-first approach doesn’t mean we can’t also intrigue faculty or spark their imaginations through technology petting zoos or showcases of the amazing things that are happening here and elsewhere. As I myself have confessed, sometimes the shiny thing—the iPad, the 3D printer, or the cool new app—seduces us into trying something new and pushing at the edges of our pedagogical practices.
So, let’s consider another example, another category of technology for a moment because we’re also piloting one solution as we speak: e-portfolios. I wasn’t privy to the conversations that let to the Digication pilot, but let’s pretend we’re still in the very first stages of considering e-portfolios.
Like many technologies, the moment we begin considering them, we run into some interesting competing interests at the university. Let’s work through those for a moment.
What do students want and need?
- Evidence of learning (content and skills) they can present to faculty, organized by class
- Evidence of learning (skills and content) they can present to employers, organized by skill or area of expertise rather than by course
- The ability to find and perform relatively well paying, project-based (consulting, freelance) work in a world where such work is becoming increasingly common—because the alternative may be falling into Idaho’s morass of minimum- or low-wage jobs
What do faculty want and need?
- Ways to understand what and how students are learning
- Effective ways to intervene when student learning is slower than expected
- Efficient, easy-to-use, always-on systems that do not add to their workload. (e.g., Digital Measures is a significant additional workload)
What do professional staff and administrators need from faculty and students?
- Analytics, accountability, better graduation rates, more well-employed graduates
- Scalability of what works
- Cost-efficiency
How do we decide among these competing interests? (Discussion ensues.)
The take-away of this process is this: While I appreciate a good, efficient process as much as the next person, I tend to come down on the size of democratization of knowledge and technology over bureaucratization. That doesn’t mean I don’t see the value in, say, a campus-wide LMS or in a relatively one-size-fits-all solution like clickers. Those technologies have their place, and they’re popular with many, many instructors. But while Learning Technology Solutions and OIT are the providers to the 80 percent of faculty who are relatively mainstream users, I think the IDEA Shop is ideally positioned to serve the 20 percent who are pushing at the edges of ed tech.
I am, however, suggesting that we re-center student needs when we adopt emerging technologies, and that we push faculty to broaden and deepen their techno-pedagogical practices accordingly.