It's About Learning

Ed Tech Projects Fail When the Focus is Technology rather than Learning

Dwayne Harapnuik — January 13, 2015 — Leave a comment

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/4-Lessons-Learned-from-Higher-Ed-Tech-Failures-in-2014.html

4 Lessons Learned from Higher Ed Tech Failures in 2014 via kwout

In the article 4 Lessons Learned from Higher Ed Tech Failures in 2014 Tanya Roscorla suggests that to prevent failure of Ed Tech projects administrators must:

Become smarter about running experiments, which usually include technology
Figure out how to scale innovations that are working
Watch smaller schools to see how they approach technology because they have more freedom to innovate
Recognize that universities are in a turbulent period of time and identify the cost of being wrong about education technology

While these are salient points and should be factors to consider Roscorla has missed the fundamental issue that needs to be addressed if your organization is to be successful in deploying Ed Tech effectively. Ed Tech should be used to enhance the learning environment rather be used as a magic bullet to change the way that students, faculty, staff and administrators work in the educational environment.

All too often in Higher Ed technology is deployed and everyone has to adopt to the technology rather then find the appropriate technology that can be adopted to the learning environment. The starting point for all technology related projects in Higher Ed should be the learning. This means that we look to the needs of the learner and faculty first, then the staff and administration.

Unfortunately, most administrators in Higher Ed do not have enough knowledge and experience with Ed Tech so decisions regarding the selection and support of the technology are most often off loaded to IT departments. Even though IT departments are focused on serving the user their priority is to help the user to deal with the technology that the IT department has chosen to deploy. If the priority is the technology then it makes perfect sense to pay attention to technology testing, scalability, technology deployments at other institutions, and costs.

However, if the priority is the learner then issues like flexibility, usability, mobility and adaptability are paramount because the technology needs to adapt to the learning environment and support the learning. IT should play a support role in selecting the technology but the primary selection should fall upon an advisory group comprised of faculty, students and other learning support staff who understand the importance of putting the needs of the learner first.

The fundamental question needs to be asked–who does Ed Tech serve? The learner or administration and IT. Until we start focusing on the learning we will continue to see significant Ed Tech project failures.

In Technology & Culture Ed Tech, fail, learner, Learning

Timeline of Bad Predictions

Dwayne Harapnuik — January 12, 2015 — Leave a comment

Source: http://www.johntabita.com/tag/technology/

In Quotes future, predictions, trends

The Head Won’t Go Where the Heart Hasn’t Been

Dwayne Harapnuik — January 9, 2015 — 8 Comments

If you really want to bring about change in people then you need to appeal their hearts and not to their heads. The sharing of more information or engaging in more rational discourse on its own doesn’t appear to help people to make significant change but an appeal to values, attitudes, and feelings first can motivate people toward making changes.

The two short videos below will clearly demonstrate this point but society still struggles with this notion and as you will see from the next few paragraphs I too will ironically address this first from the cognitive perspective. Why? Well…Isn’t that what good educators do?

Educational psychologist, learning theorists, instructional designers, educators and many more learning professionals refer to Blooms Taxonomy of Learning which looks at learning from three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.

These domains are also commonly presented in the following relationship:

Cognitive = Head/Knowing
Affective = Heart/Feeling
Psychomotor = Hands/Heard

Bloom intended the taxonomy to be holistic and assumed that all three domains would be included when we develop learning environments. Unfortunately, this often isn’t the case in our educational systems and most other sectors of our society.

The head, is often overemphasized and rational thinkers are held in high esteem, the heart is relegated to artists, musicians or the irrational and those who work with their hands are necessary but are limited to building and keeping our infrastructure running. It only seems rational that if you want to bring about effective change then you just need to appeal to the head–or at least this is what those oriented toward the rational would argue.

But experience doesn’t always confirm this notion. The science community is beginning to recognize the importance of the affective domain. For example the scientists within the Geoscience program at Carlton University recognize that including the affective domain in their teaching can significantly enhance learning or if ignored can hinder or prevent learning. To promote the use of the affective domain they have developed a useful site called The Affective Domain in the Classroom that points to and annotates a wide assortment useful resources and research.

Source: http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/affective/index.html

This illustration of the two domains provides a good visual starting point for considering how the affective domain can be used in a scientific setting.

Enough of the head talk and onto the heart…

How to Change People Who Don’t Want to Change | The Behavioral Science Guys