Those of you who like change and thrills and such may be a little disappointed to find the new site looks essentially identical at this point – one day I’ll be adventurous, but today is not that day.

Now, I realise that, like everything else, the guest speaker market is demand driven. People who punk the system don’t get speaking gigs (with the possible exception of @deangroom). But it was extremely frustrating to see absolutely no effort made to counter common misconceptions about social media – Facebook is a distraction/procrastination tool, kids who use it get poorer results etc etc. I don’t care how market-driven your career is, there’s really no excuse for reinforcing ignorance (rant here). And pulling someone out of the audience to log into their Facebook on the data projector to make the point that you should only post appropriate stuff? Ridiculous.

A few minutes were spent talking about how you could use Facebook to communicate with students. The advice? Make two lists of students, one with whom you interact as a superior (for student who need an authority figure), and the other with whom you interact as equals. This is the problem with non-educators speaking to educators – more often than not they completely miss the point. I suspect I had a bit of a ‘wtf’ face on at this point.

The only other social media tool (and I have my doubts about it actually being social media, but I realise most consider it to be) mentioned in any sort of depth was LinkedIn. The strongest message pushed in this seminar was that one should get thee to LinkedIn, stat, and make sure you have tons of testimonials. Now I know a good portion of my PLN use LinkedIn and find it a really useful networking tool, and I think in more corporate spheres it probably is. But to advocate its use purely as a place to have an online presence built on testimonials? This was lost on me. In edu circles, it’s not what you say, it’s what you do that counts. And nobody I’d want to work for would consider anyone who simply had a profile full of fluff and no evidence of actual interaction, networking or research.

After skimming over Facebook and LinkedIn, the rest of the session appeared to consist of low-level behavioural analysis and psychological examination. We were instructed to answer, then share, questions such as these, under the umbrella of identifying what our values are (no, I don’t know why either):

• What do you fill your space (home/office) with?
• How do you spend your time?
• How do you spend your money?
• Where are you most disciplined (ie persevere with things you don’t want to do)? Quote of the day here came from @chatdv8, who responded ‘my marriage’.
• What do you spend your energy on?
• What are two of your quirks you could make public?

While I imagine this is not a recent trend at all, the advent of social media (etc) seems to have spawned a genre of niche employment that involves saying a lot but not really doing anything. Social media strategist, engagement entrepreneur, experimenteur, catalyst of magic and so on. One can find any number of testimonials espousing the wonders of these people, but very little evidence of what they actually do. It highlights the fact that in digital media, it is very easy to build a cardboard castle for oneself – a presence that seems impressive but it based on very little of substance.

For example – one might imagine that a social media strategist has very active, rich social media profiles and behaviours. Yet our speaker tomorrow has a website that is essentially a parked domain, a Twitter account that follows 21 and has two tweets in the last month, and a Facebook page with three thousand ‘likes’ but only three posts in the last month, all just photos of media appearances. Her LinkedIn profile is also very telling.

I wonder for how many people this must be sufficient for in order to have achieved apparent success? A digital footprint should be about substance, not presence. I suppose if you are not familiar with how the online domain works it’s easy to be charmed by a few buzz words and world events presented as case studies. But if the information academic staff are getting in these over-hyped media events is that setting up a profile is enough, how are we going to shift thinking?

Stay tuned – I hope I am proved wrong. I don’t think I will be.

For those of you not familiar with Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory, the basic premise is that there are two types of innovation – sustaining, which improves on systems and procedures but does not fundamentally change the way they are undertaken, and disruptive, which may not initially seem like an improvement (cheaper, less robust etc) but completely changes the way in which systems and procedures happen, and opens them up to new markets.

Therein lies the rub. Most advocates of online education cite the fact that online education is available to new markets, and initially seemed like an inferior way of delivering education, but has become massively popular. Now to the last point, I won’t argue that online education is a huge market, and I certainly won’t argue that people often think it’s inferior to face to face learning. But to the first point, have we really made education available to new markets online? I know there’s a lot of song and dance currently around OERs and the likes of Khan Academy, but in terms of formal tertiary education, I don’t believe we are accessing new markets at all.

The reason? Online education in its current form isn’t disruptive. It allows education to be delivered in more or less the same format it always has – lectures, readings, essays, exams. It certainly isn’t cheaper (perhaps to deliver, but students don’t pay less to take online units), and it’s not taking the lower end of the market by storm. Until we start designing online learning that is truly disruptive – that is, completely changes the way in which education is delivered – non-traditional markets are not going to engage with higher education, online or not.

For some food for thought on what real disruptive online learning might look like, check out @jimgroom‘s DS106 course, or @jokay and @deangroom‘s Minecraft project.

The comment was made – students are so obsessed with Facebook and twittering and so on, and they think they’re having real and connected experiences, but they’re not. Who cares what they’re doing online – it’s not real. Why would we continue that disconnection with a virtual world?

It frustrates me no end that not only is my entire way of working maligned, it is completely invisible to most. The rich, vibrant, engaged and connected (and very real) community of educators, students and – yes – academics in which I work does not even exist to people who are unwilling to spend a few minutes delving further than Ashton Kutcher’s last tweet or the latest Facebook media bashing. The connectivity I experience is completely disregarded by those who will not acknowledge that there are other equally valid ways to experience interaction.

Consider the counter argument. For some, it is a terribly inadequate experience to sit in a lecture theatre for a set period of time, do nothing but listen and have no opportunity to voice their own perspective (hence this blog post; question time was cut short and only directed at the presenters). It is terribly inadequate for some to have to navigate social norms in order to interact face to face. To some, the lecture experience is disconnected. It’s not ‘real’.

The comment was made – why would you show them a virtual Sistine Chapel when they could go see the real thing? I want students to hear a real cello, not a synthesised one.

Perhaps I am unaware of the capacity of students to afford trips to Europe. Perhaps the commenter is in fact able to play all instruments and would never play students a recording (which, although not synthesised, is still only a representation of the real thing). However, I continually struggle with the insistence that the only valid experience is the one tied to geography. If words and descriptions and simulations had no value, we would have no books, no art, no film and no recorded music. I have no intention to malign the tactile, in-person experience, but to assume there is no value in experiences outside of this is spurious at best.

What frustrates me the most is that comments like these come from a mindset in which any opportunity to remain ignorant is welcomed. Every article on cyberbullying, every report of a child coming to harm via social media, every instance of plagiarism is a point in the favour of ignorance. Every article and conversation about digital natives is an excuse to say I don’t need to understand (or worse – I can’t understand). Every joke made about me as the token under-30 in the room and my iPad (which ‘of course’ I have, I’m young and I get that kind of stuff) is not really a joke. Every technical issue or counter-example in the data in an edtech research project is held up as a reason not to. Every head that nodded along to the above comments reinforced the ignorance that keeps true innovation out of higher education.

So now, I’m going to hit publish and tweet the link to this post. It will probably get a good number of views before the day is out, be retweeted a few times and might even get a pingback or two, maybe a couple of comments. It will show up in various RSS feeds. At a conservative estimate, 50 people will have read this post by tomorrow. Disconnected? Not quite.

We all know that the vast majority of lecturers are rather ludditical - but identifying that fact is only half the story, and probably less. Talking about digital natives and immigrants misses the point (not going to link here, you’ll all have Prensky somewhere). What has become very apparent to me recently is that most academics do not have a metalanguage for talking and thinking about their experiences with technology, and simply operate via a series of learned processes. They also lack a conceptual framework for transferring skills from other domains to the technology domain.

Let’s take metalanguage. You or I (making some assumptions about readership here) are able to talk about the context in which technology operates. Most academics are only able to talk about processes. It’s the equivalent to being able to create a sentence but not understanding how to talk about how the sentence is created. As an example, how would you answer the following question?

How does email work?

The answer you or I give might include some mention of a server, we might draw a nice diagram or talk about SMTP. Most academics would likely respond by describing the process in some way (eg you write an email in Outlook, put in the recipient’s address and it gets sent over the internet to their computer). Few understand the concepts behind the process in a way that they can articulate concretely. Some have adopted terminology that they have come across without really knowing what it means (the IT Crowd episode with Jen and ‘the internet’ springs to mind here). The problem here is twofold – one is that a lack of metalanguage to describe technology experience means that academics are ill-prepared to approach new technology, and as a result the current expectation that any new technology be accompanied by training has come into play. Which leads to the second problem – processed-based training (‘click here and do that’ training, which constitutes a majority of staff professional development workshops) does nothing to overcome this.

Let’s talk about conceptual transfer. If I asked anyone at all, they would tell me it was absurd to leave my car running all the time, or to only ever use the left indicator. That it is absurd to never service my car, leave groceries and luggage all over the interior instead of putting them in the boot, or park in the middle of the street instead of learning to reverse park. Yet people will routinely never shut down their computer, never right-click (a scary number of Mac users don’t realise they can, despite mighty mice being out for a good number of years now), never update software or run maintenance, save everything to the desktop instead of filing it and print documents out instead of learning to share them electronically. Computers and technology seem to occupy a status of ‘other’ which is exempt from concepts that apply in all other areas. It’s another issue training is not addressing. How do we facilitate moving across conceptual domains? How do we build the frameworks so academics can navigate a new domain competently?

We talk about the need for change in teaching and learning, but it’s not just about upskilling any more – how do we start really rewiring brains?

[NB: I've referred to 'academics' in this post, but the above can equally apply to any educators]

While interesting, and certainly a topic worthy of attention, it’s not something I initially thought would relate to my thesis research on the lack of disruptive uptake of technologies in the HE sphere. However. The lack of disruptive influence of technologies is painfully, glaringly obvious in the meeting and administrative processes on campus. Multiple trees die every meeting as printed handouts are passed around, despite many attendees having either a laptop or iPad. Documents that are distributed electronically are done so via email – even when collaboration is required. Meetings are invariably face to face despite easy access to Skype and Adobe Connect. Notes and minutes are taken by hand then typed. And then during these meetings, we discuss how to get lecturers to ditch paper and Powerpoint and teach dynamic, tech-rich online courses.

We can’t expect technology (or culture or frankly anything) to disrupt teaching, leading by counterexample. The more academics are exposed to inefficient, old-school admin processes, the less likely they are to make connections in the teaching domain. A large proportion of an academic’s time is spent in meetings, sitting around a table, looking through paper documents, making handwritten notes and digressing from agendas. 

Replace the word ‘meeting’ with ‘teaching’ and it becomes madness. We have long recognised this as a substandard scenario in teaching, and the educational/academic developer genre has developed in response to review then design effective teaching and learning. So let’s pretend, for a second, that a university employs administrative developers. What would you do if you were one of them and asked to review the meetings you participate in? How would you design a more effective experience?