The LTD Project Blog

This is a quick-and-dirty reaction (ultimately to be revised) of a recent Educause article suggesting technological gaps between learners and educators, analyzing challenges that educators might face, and proposing strategies for responding to such challenges and bridging said gaps. It begins with a large chunk of food for thought from the source, which ploddingly challenged readership with pdf representation through page and column formats:

… [M]any faculty members today have become so inundated with digital communications from students that it is not unusual for communication protocols and limitations to be specified in course syllabi. Most faculty members have home access to campus resources and use a course management system. But have faculty embraced and utilized technology to the same extent as students? Most evidence, though limited, indicates that this is not the case.

Students live in a separate reality from faculty members, who are typically not motivated or rewarded by institutional incentives to change their practice. However, as higher education institutions struggle with limited budgets to support faculty and to move courses online, technology seems to change daily. Given the demands of teaching, service, and (for most) research, faculty are now expected to embrace learning technologies along with everything else, challenging the institution to help them make sense of what works and how to work it.

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, p. 30)

Granted, students may have at their ears and fingertips a host of protocols and practices for high-speed communication. However, what research suggests that they are using it, easily, or could or would want to, for higher educational purposes? For example, while getting by acquiring and compiling information for personal use may be quick and easy, synthesizing it and putting it to problem-solving or conflict-resolving purposes in environmental or social domains remain challenges that only attitude, skill and value development, not tooling up, can address.

Nevertheless, McGee and Diaz (2007) suggest a host of challenges that educators might face in order to get on the same wave-length as learners – if ever they’d want to: for starters, the over-abundance of digital tools and paucity of models for effective applications of digital communication technology in education. Other challenges include:

• disintegration (if not incompatibility) of tools;
• diversity of learners’ abilities, expectations and needs;
• instability, overly rapid or slow evolution of ed-tech infrastructures; &
• discontinuity of financial and technological support.

In spite of those challenges, McGee and Diaz contend that Web 2.0 tools “hold the most promise because they are strictly Web-based and typically free, support collaboration and interaction, and are responsive to the user” (p. 31). Their typology of applications ranges from communicative to interactive, with stops at collaborative, documentative [sic] and generative. However, blogs, virtual communities of practice, and virtual learning worlds are the only “tools” listed in more than one category along their alphabetical way (Table 1, p. 32).

All in all, it seems that integration and sustainability of educational technology is likely to occur only within adaptive communities or across virtual worlds, rather than as consequences of institutional-level tool evaluations, adoptions, training and subsequent dependencies. Yet McGee and Diaz suggest that the onus is on “institutions and faculty members” to sort this all out and devote necessary resources to it:

Given that higher education finally has some technologies actually designed for teaching and learning, institutions and faculty members alike need to determine the value of these tools and how they can best support learning. It is vital that the institution provide services and resources while also supporting the range of faculty members’ skill, expertise, capability, interest, and motivation.

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, pp. 32-33)

As means to discover what’s at issue, they suggest surveys, focus groups, observations, document analyses, more surveys, interviews, software tracking, self-reporting and shadowing. That’s calling for a whack of resource commitments already, and the process of “matching pedagogical value with [theoretically and experientially grounded] teaching and learning behaviours” (p. 36) is just beginning – then throw in all the variables for technological adoption, spread and support! What large, cash-strapped research university diverts such considerable resources to sweeping introspection?

(Cutting to the chase, if I may, just to get this post out there in a blogosphere and walk home before dark, …. Oops, too late!)

In spite of recognizing learner and educator diversity, McGee & Diaz suggest values of facility in “using technology consistently across programs” (p. 36). Hmm, what next? Standardization across institutions surely would make tools easier and cheaper to acquire, and support services easier to provide, too, wouldn’t it?

If viewed in bright light, their article seems to wind down with a flurry of platitudes regarding technology selection and implementation: Educator, know thyself, those you teach, and what challenges you; keep the ends in the fore; gather information that serves as evidence for what you do, or want to; take on or assign only doable tasks, and support those who have to achieve them.

It might also be possible to interpret McGee and Diaz’s technology selection strategies from a technology-neutral or negatively biased position, for they conclude that tech-savvy, if not technophiliac, educators are beginning to ask appropriate questions, although perhaps not in the right order (rearranged for this blog post):

• Do emerging and innovative technologies actually result in an improved educational model [or improved educational models]?
• How do these technologies map to instructional problems?
• Which technologies actually improve learning?
• How are these technologies implemented and sustained?

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, p. 38)

Reference

McGee, Patricia; & Diaz, Monica. (2007). Educause Review (September/October), p. 30. Retrieved September 14, 2007, from www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0751.pdf

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Tags: tech-savvy, web 2.0, education, technology, adoption, support, digital, communication, CMC, research

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 6:43 pm and is filed under BloggingCommentary, CommunityGroup, InformationLiteracy, andragogy, blogospheres, blogs & wikis, tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.