New technologies can be engaging in themselves, but do not necessarily translate into desirable learner engagement. We often describe them as ‘enabling technologies’ – and then forget to specify just what it is that they are supposed to ‘enable’. Or we seize upon the label ‘disruptive technologies’ as if the mere potential of disrupting older paradigms of learning will automatically replace them with new (and better) ones. And don’t forget ‘social software’, with its implicit assumption that all the lone wolf learners out there will magically be transformed into a happily collaborating learning community by the mere availability of the technology …
Don’t get me wrong – I love this stuff, but much of it might be attractive and seductive only because of its novelty. It may be being adopted for the all the wrong reasons – it’s new, it’s got the bling factor and it’s cool. It’s easy to overlook the fact that it might be presenting ‘solutions’ to as yet unidentified problems.
How many designer/developers recognize this little (actual) scenario?
Course coordinator: OK, we’ve got all the notes and guides and quizzes ready to put online – can we have a blog as well? Developer: Sure. What would you like to achieve with this blog?
Course coordinator: ??!! Umm, well … we don’t know yet. We want to something that the students think is cool …maybe we could have a wiki instead … ?
In the case above I did eventually set up something – but only after gaining a lot more clarity about the actual problem that the Web 2.0 technology was supposed to solve. Just because this stuff is cool doesn’t mean we shouldn’t apply the same rigour in its learning design and deployment as we do with our other learning experiences.
I’m seeing support staff at institutions are becoming more operationally fluent in a wider range of learning technologies and their practical application. But a parallel challenge is to develop a greater awareness of the whole process – the interrelated flow of design, development, production, evaluation and review stages. By doing this, we are more likely to identify the desired outcomes and the nature of any barriers to learning first, and then to deploy the most appropriate solutions from the arsenal of learning technologies at our disposal.
Hopefully, this will result in better learning experiences, greater student engagement and better outcomes – which is what it’s all about, isn’t it?
A curmudgeon's view of eLearning 