This article takes professors to task for not making greater use of technology, but never provides any reason to believe the use of blogs or web management tools provides any educational benefit beyond her own faith based belief. Come on, if you are going to criticize someon for not doing something, at least explain why they should be doing it.

Your analysis is shallow and uniformed.

According to the author I am a luddite because I don’t have a blog or use Desire2learn for more than posting materials. But I have been advocating that students be required to have a laptop computer for nearly 20 years. The second wave of internet access on my campus was driving in large part by me. I was an early adopter of the internet for communication with faculty colleagues across the country and soon the world.

I’m a Luddite?

I spent 8 years doing human computer interaction research and I learned that the first rule of good interface design is to use the computer when it is approprate, not just because it is what the “cool kids” are doing. Blogs make no educational sense. Desire2learn is a poor environment for teaching–it isn’t even properly designed for online gradebook usage never mind serious education. (For a certain, fairly narrow, range of courses D2L does some beneficial things. But for most courses its best use is as a fancy webpage for posting info and providing an online gradebook.)

Show me a technology that makes educational sense, and give me the support I need to implemented it, and I’ll adopt it in a second. (As will 90% of the college/university faculty I know.)

I was an early adoptor of clickers, but administrative support for needed infrastructure never materialized so I had to give them up despite their potential benefits. (It is easy to criticize professors for not using a technology, but better research might have showed you that lack of administrative support and resources are very much to blame in many cases.)

Math folks on my campus are screaming for more SMART boards, but there is no money to purchase/install them. (I’d like to use a SMART board but I’ll be retired long before enough classrooms have them in place for me to use one. And I am years away from retiring.)

But I don’t, and will not, blog. Blogs are vanity/advertising tools, not serious conduits for educational content.

If this blog’s author wants to be taken seriously she might want to take the time to familiarze herself with her topic.

As an adult eduction specialist whose focus is socially constructed knowledge, I see the use of technology as another tool in a process that starts with the willingness to ask questions and seek answers. Productive learning can and does occur in low-tech settings as well as high-tech settings. Critical evaluation is the key. As Sui Fei observes above, one can easily get lost in the social setting.

Would there still be many myths about technology based learning in an open networked learning environment? Are there boundaries between teachers and students relating to technology based learning? Many of our students still “believe” that they could learn better in a “safe and closed 4 walls classroom” environment where they pay their fees to “listen and learn” from their expert professors. There may be some “truth” to this for young learners who have little or no experience in online and networked learning. Is it the belief in some of our (your) students in HE? How could we move forward to help them in understanding the needs and expectations of “future learning” in a more open learning environment – the internet and social networks?

Do you think measurements of good teaching should include metrics on effective use of technology?

Based on my experience only, absolutely not. I think “good teaching” is typically evaluated based on standardized evaluation forms, which are basically simplified customer satisfaction surveys.

Ultimately, I think we’re talking about a change and how one supports and drives change in an organization. Higher Education organizations tend to be rather unique given the shared governance structure found in most of them (for-profits are clearly an exception). The control faculty have over policy and business issues, I find, add an additional layer of complexity in driving change in these environments. My “secret recipe” for addressing this “change challenge” is to focus on three primary change drivers. (1) incentives; (2) support services and (3) policies. For example, I’ll work to provide faculty, especially early adopters, with financial rewards or work to get their use of technology considered as part of tenure and promotion…these incentives help build up a critical mass behind the change. I’ll also then make sure that there are significant support resources in place so that as faculty experiment with new technologies and new teaching methods they will know that if they hit a problem someone will be right there to help. And finally, I work with upper administration to implement policy change, such as requiring that online courses be designed to specific standards, that push folks to change.

Change of this nature takes time and I find 3-5 years is often needed to really get faculty to adopt new teaching tools and use them in ways that transform their student’s learning experience.

Josh

Interesting stats. But not really surprising for me. In fact I would say it was worse than they show. The LMS stat shows 72% of professors ‘use it at least some’. When LMS usage stats for a typical university are analysed they show that (being generous) maybe 15% to 20% of course shells are being what might be called actively used and maybe only 3 or 4% are using what might be called the advanced features of the LMS.

Often this is treated as a technology problem by universities but really it’s a people and processes problem. Wearing my fantasy Vice Chancellor/President hat I would do the following:

1. Make it clear when faculty are employed that the university expects their teaching and learning material to be made available under a CC license as part of an open learning initiative.

2. Current staff would be given three years to convert their current material into open learning format.

3. Base promotion within universities not just on research output but on the output of open educational resources based on their research and use social and professional reputation benchmarks based on the dissemination of learning not just through traditional peer reviewed journals but through blog posts and social networking links.

4. Allow groups of staff to develop innovative online, flexible teaching models that provide some benefit to the staff either financially or through a redistribution of their work load through the year to allow them to focus on the things that interest them most. That is to say, a model for some courses that may not fit the traditional semester pattern.

5. Allow the Schools, Colleges and Departments to benefit directly from innovations in online delivery. At the moment there is very little incentive for a Head of School at a traditional university to encourage innovation. In fact it is a risk. The organisational structure of universities and the budget processes fundamentally inhibits innovation.

6. Allow staff to be flexible in the technologies they use and avoid locking them in to one solution where possible. I agree with Doug Holton’s point here.

Essentially this is an innovation diffusion problem and what we see is the same proportion of early adopters year after year engaging in innovative online teaching practices. There is no mainstreaming of the innovation. That is largely because there is no perceived benefit for majority of professors innovate.

I could go on and on here I’m afraid. But I’ll leave it there for now.

Cheers

Mark
@marksmithers

I feel like “Never heard of it” is a weirdly dismissive phrasing like something your parents would say, “What is this ‘The Facebook’ that the kids are talking about?”