Does your institution standardize on a single internet browser? Are other browsers allowed or supported? Educationally, is that a problem?

My institution deploys on all College PC’s Internet Explorer although I’m not sure which version. I’m not sure which version because I don’t use IE. I’ve been using Firefox for the better part of the past year because I finally discovered the add-ons and how much the development community is able to enhance and tweak the browsing experience through those freely available morsels of technological candy (grin).

I’ve gone one step further though. About 2-3 months ago, I began suggesting to our Technology Services group (in which I work) that we need to begin supporting Firefox simply because of the enhancements and tweaks that are relevant to the classroom. First and foremost among the educationally relevant add-ons, in my opinion, is Zotero: a browser based research manager. If you haven’t tried it yet, I encourage any (a) instructor that does any research assignments or requires notecards, “bib” cards etc or (b) student that must do those assignments. I’m personally using it to manage all of my dissertation research; quite frankly, it does everything I’ve wished in the past that other tools could do.

Now, Firefox has launched Firefox Campus Edition which comes with the Zotero, StumbleUpon and FoxyTunes add-ons already added on.

I’ll do (actually, finish) a more complete post on Zotero in the next couple of days.

I’ve spent my 8-year graduate school career (yes, I know that’s too long ;-) studying educational technologies and their impact on the teaching and learning process, and I’m planning to spend a 20+ year career working with faculty to continuously evolve and improve the teaching and learning process by engaging appropriate technologies.

Since I first engaged the educational technology field almost 8 years ago, I’ve been amazed by the complex depth and breadth of the field; that’s true of any discipline, but educational technology has undergone tremendous growth as a discipline over the last 25-30 years (since the introduction of the PC to the consumer market). While we, as educational technologists, have worked hard to develop our field and the contributions we may make to the quality of teaching and learning in educational institutions, I believe we may have “missed the boat” in one regard.

If we’ve truly done our job as change agents, how is it possible for a colleague in a “more traditional” humanities/behavioral sciences discipline believe it was correct and appropriate to classify and dismiss untold hours worth of instructional design and instructional media development services provided to him/her to develop digital resources for her/his online course as nothing more than, “Oh… that’s just tech support?”

The simple answer I offer is, “Educational Technology, as a field and discipline, is STILL in the library.” That’s at least true in a couple of institutions with which I’m familiar, and I suspect that it’s true in many other institutions as well. What does that mean? What are the implications?

Technology’s impact on the learning environment has changed . . . Educational technology had simple beginnings as a small department consisting mostly of equipment and part-time staff holed up in whatever dark, dank closet in the back corner of the library begrudgingly offered to them by the librarian. The early educational technologies were filmstrips, audio cassettes, and overhead projectors. The training and knowledge required to use the devices focused, and rightly so, on the mechanical use of the system. Effectively using those devices in the classroom required faculty to engage short, how-to, push-button type training sessions before “doing their voodoo” of wrapping instruction and pedagogy around the technology. The pedagogy surrounded the use of those learning technologies in the classroom and relied upon theories of teaching and learning with which faculty were mostly familiar. However, as educational technologies have progressed, the pedagogy pervades the use of learning technologies in the classroom and relies upon theories of teaching and learning with which faculty are rarely familiar. Technology and pedagogy have become inextricably intertwined, but being able to use a technology is vastly different from being able to teach effectively with it in the classroom. Knowing how to set up a discussion forum in an LMS, post a message to students, and reply to their comments is dramatically different from the skill of facilitating an effective online discussion as a learner-centered, constructivist learning experience. Teaching in the online learning environment effectively requires much more than just knowing how to use the proper points and clicks to add an item to the learning management system, and there now exists 25+ years of in depth literature surrounding the use of digital technologies in learning environments that justifies that claim.

Faculty and instructional leadership perception of learning technology has not . . . Despite the growth of educational technology into an entire discipline worthy of career-long dedication, I believe many administrators and faculty formed an understanding of educational technology from the early beginnings, and their perception of what educational technology is has not evolved with the discipline. If it had, my colleague would have known how ridiculous his classification of my discipline as “tech support” was before I explained it to him. If it had, there wouldn’t be entire community college campuses or even systems without a hint of instructional design or technology resources to support faculty. If it had, online courses wouldn’t begin with learners after merely ten hours of preliminary design and development work. Ultimately, if we were to ask a broad number of faculty and instructional leadership to describe what an educational technologist is and does, would the most frequent definition more correctly define what educational technology was 25+ years ago?

What are the potential implications?
Inaccurate institutional understanding regarding the depth and breadth of the educational technology field potentially results in several inefficient or undesirable outcomes.

• Learners do not receive instruction utilizing appropriate contemporary technologies and approaches to teaching and learning. Intuitively, an institution that does not understand the complexity of educational technology and the underlying, constructivist learning theories will not adapt quickly to the needs of digital learners.
• Unreasonable burdens are placed on faculty. Faculty with terminal degrees in other disciplines are expected to produce instructional materials - online or otherwise - that often require skills and a knowledge base tantamount to another Master’s degree (in educational technology).
• Technology drives instruction rather than instruction driving technology - the tail wags the dog. Absent strong educational technology leadership, the future direction of technology in a learning institution will be guided by trends in the IT industry rather than trends in teaching and learning with technology. (I’m not suggesting that IT professionals have less value in educational institutions. I’m suggesting IT’s leading educational technology efforts is as inefficient an undesirable as an educational technologist ensuring the network or data warehouse remains functional and secure.)
• Institutions do not employ educational technologists to serve as change agents. Underestimating the value of instructional designers and educational technologists leads many institutions to underemploy or to not employ experts in the field.
• Training programs are too narrow. Many professional development or technology training programs for faculty focus more on how to use a technology rather than an in depth treatment of how to teach with a technology.
• Training programs are to shallow. Even if a training program explores pedagogical issues, they often do not do so in enough depth across a sustained period of time. For example, many distance learning certification programs offered by institutions to their faculty require as few as 16 and no more than 48 hours of focused professional development.

I’m certainly interested in the community’s thoughts regarding the accuracy of my perspective, and while I have my own ideas, does the community believe there’s a remedy to the issue?

I’ve been reading Indexed for a while now; it’s an entertaining distraction and break among the volume of learning technology blogs that I attempt to keep up with.

With the full-time job being at its busiest time of the year, the part-time job(s) bearing down with deadlines, and the need to work on the dissertation being…. well… the need to work on the dissertation. This image/post caught my attention and I felt compelled to share it here despite the memories it stirred of a college-level Grammar class to which I subjected myself during undergrad ;-)

Check out Indexed; it’s a worthwhile read and distraction.

I disappeared for a week (boooo!), but I’ve been quite focused on my dissertation proposal. That work does raise a question for the edtech community, however. Reading Everett Rogers’ (2003) Diffusion of Innovation, what methods and approaches do different institutions engage to facilitate the diffusion and adoption by faculty of new learning technologies? Does anyone engage a defined, systematic process for integrating a new technology? This may be a round about way of getting nowhere, but take the white pill and follow me into the rabbit hole . . .

Rogers describes three types of innovation-decisions by organizations: optional, collective and authority. For optional innovation-decisions, individuals may make a decision to adopt or not independent of the organization. Collective decisions to integrate new technologies are consensus drive, and of course, authority decisions are those dictated to individuals within the organization.

I think the difficulty for educational institutions - higher education rather than or perhaps much more so than K-12 - lies in the inability and necessary lack of desire by academic leadership to make consensus or authority based decisions to integrate new technologies into the classroom: neither work well within the context of academic freedom. Higher education organizations can not and should not be in the business of forcing or precluding a learning technology’s use in the classroom. Unfortunately, that does not change the desperate need within higher education to organizationally pursue innovative learning technologies and pedagogical methods.

The diffusion of innovation field of research, however, seems to ignore the unique position of educational organizations. Rogers’ treatment of the individual’s innovation-decision process is quite thorough; his influence is apparent, although not explicit, in much of the technology integration literature. However, Rogers’ explanation of the organizational innovation-decision process admittedly “deals mainly with collective and authority innovation-decisions” (402). He “chalks” that up to the fact that those are the two types of innovation-decisions in which the organization is the agent of change.

The challenge for higher education is to organizationally facilitate optional innovation-decisions by faculty. The individual decision process is well defined by the body of diffusion research literature. The literature seems to be devoid of models and methods by which an organization can facilitate the individual innovation-decision process: the exact task with which all higher education institutions are currently faced.

So, back to my original question. What methods and approaches do different institutions engage to facilitate the diffusion and adoption by faculty of new learning technologies? Does anyone engage a defined, systematic process for integrating a new technology? Surrey et al (2005) suggest not but offer a model of factors (RIPPLES) that influence how effectively learning technology may be diffused through an educational organization.

Rogers, E.M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press.
Surry, D.W., Ensminger, D.C., & Haab, M. (2005). A model for integrating instructional technology into higher education (Electronic Version). British Journal of Educational Technology, 36(2), 327-329.