I’m beginning to feel frustrated by my lack of technical knowhow. I’ve spent the last two years in a job where everyone thought I was some sort of programmer. One university bigwig glazed over whenever I opened my mouth and responded to whatever I said (even if I was merely commenting on the weather) with ‘oh, I don’t understand computers’. Some of the people I worked with thought I’d written Moodle. Most of them assumed I had some kind of power over it that they didn’t.
I am a educationalist. Useful technologies excite and inspire me. I can find my way around VLEs. I can set up RSS feeds. I know the HTML code for creating a basic hyperlink. But that, frankly, is about it. And now I’m having ideas about the kind of things that might actually be really helpful for learners, but my tech-literacy is so poor that I can’t actually be certain that they don’t already exist.
Something I’m very interested in at the moment is the idea of a user-friendly aggregator that allows learners to pull in feeds from both extra-institutional (blogs, twitter) AND institutional online ’stuff’ (VLEs, wikis); effectively the homepage for a Personal Learning Environment (PLE). I think I understand the papers that have been written about it (mostly coming out of the JISC CETIS project). They use words that are familiar to me, like ’system’ and ’service’, but I suspect these words hold a context-specific (e.g. cybernetics) meaning that I’m not familiar with, so there are blank spots in the conclusions I make from the papers.
I guess the root of this problem is the graphical user interface and its near total detachment from the inner workings of a programme. Many of us working in e-learning support and development actually have little idea how the system is working – I couldn’t fix a bug in Moodle even if I had access to its soft underbelly. My general concern is that there is a widening knowledge gap between the educationalists and the technologists (programmers). My specific and personal concern is that I can see what I think is needed but I don’t have the skills to realise it.
Is it too late for me to learn?
16 responses so far ↓
1
Shirley Williams
// Sep 30, 2009 at 7:18 am
Interesting post, I am at heart technologist who works in an environment of education. Indeed I have used “Learning Technologies” to describe my interests. I think the two communities technologists and the educationalists need to work to come closer together and understand the language of each other. I’ve written a post about this reversing your title The technologist and the educationalist (http://redgloo.sse.reading.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/3437.html)
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lindsayjordan Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 8:21 am
Hi Shirley – what a great idea in your post about job swaps
I have just realised how much I would like to spend a week on placement as a programmer (does that sound weird?)…! Maybe when I get settled in my new job… 
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2
Iain
// Sep 30, 2009 at 7:39 am
No! It’s never too late to learn..plenty of neuronal plasticity still there! go on, hack some code..just for fun…it’s not too bad and there’s a great sense of achievement and empowerment in doing such. It’s the continual challenge of our age, with a growing distance between consumers and producers..but you can do it….even just the first little ‘hello world’ is fun!
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lindsayjordan Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 8:22 am
Iain, you’ve inspired me. Where should I start?
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Dominik Lukes Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 8:55 am
A good place to start with a bit of PHP/MySQL or JavaScript is http://www.w3schools.com.
But the best way to learn is to hang out on developer forums. Moodle is fine but I like Drupal’s transparency of the development process.
A good way to play around with some basic PHP is to try to modify the themes on a Wordpress install.
I’m constantly amazed how little educational technologists know about the underlying technologies of the things they work with. They don’t have to be expert programmers (which I am not) but they should understand the underlying architectures the cloud.
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AJ Cann
// Sep 30, 2009 at 8:20 am
Yes, it’s too late for you to learn. But more importantly, you shouldn’t learn. Don’t divorce yourself from the needs of the users by over-immersing yourself in technical detail. Concentrate on what’s needed and what works rather than how.
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lindsayjordan Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 8:39 am
Gee, thanks for the positivity Alan
But what if I think something WILL work… but I don’t know if it already exists, or – if not – how feasible it would be to create it? That’s the problem I have. Up until now it’s felt like I’ve been bumbling along trying to get the best use out of what’s available, and I’d love to be able to try something new or at least to manipulate what’s there.
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Matt
// Sep 30, 2009 at 8:22 am
Hi Lindsay,
Interesting post; sounds like my technical proficiency is similar to yours but I very much want to keep it that way!
I think it’s important that there is a good mix of learning technologists: those who can programme/develop stuff but understand educational requirements & the art of teaching; then others who, like many of the staff we support and collaborate with, don’t go beyond the user interface but are aware of what’s out there and how it might be utilised. Sometimes I think ‘blanks spots’ are a good thing.
I don’t see myself as an educationalist or technologist… jack of all trades may be
Matt
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lindsayjordan Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 8:30 am
It’s very interesting to hear the perspective of someone who’s happy with having blank spots
I find them ever so distressing – I always have done – I remember having a tantrum in A-level Physics and refusing to use an equation until I understood completely the relationship between each of the variables (how childish).
However, I must admit having these blank spots is a lovely opportunity for some social learning – figuring out who I need to ask about these things and making new contacts! I do wish words didn’t mean different things to different types of people though. I know someone who builds playground equipment and you can imagine what he thinks of when he reads the word ‘mainframe’…
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5
Ricardo Torres
// Sep 30, 2009 at 9:06 am
That’s a very interesting dichotomy that many of us seem to be torn about at some point… a lot of people assume I’m some sort of tech-specialist just because I’m an engineer, while I see myself (mostly) as a teacher. I know what you mean
I don’t think we need to learn every little detail about the inner workings of whatever tech we are using, the same way some of us happily drive a car without knowing the very basics about its engine. We are currently running a project focused on helping (not teaching) high school teachers to adopt and implement “new technologies” (whatever this means) and Web 2.0 stuff in their classrooms. We are being very clear about not running a course on how to use the technology, but rather how to make the technology another tool in out toolkit – the same way textbooks, blackboards, pen and paper are. Feel free to dislike some or all of them, but no one has said you HAVE to use them all. Just that we need to be aware they exist and they can be useful. Our point is, students “talk” Facebook, MySpace, Flickr – they don’t (usually) “talk” Moodle. So why don’t we try to adopt “their” tools instead of forcing them to use ours?
This is what we have been doing over the past year, working with a group of students that built their PLEs (which in my mind means the Personal Learning Environment Digital Support Tools) using (mostly) Web 2.0 tools. So far, so good. We are entering the second phase tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they have added (or removed) from their toolkits.
It’s great to be able to share these thoughts with such a big community… sometimes I feel I’m alone in the (real) world. It’s good to have Twitter!
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lindsayjordan Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Hi Ricardo – I agree, you don’t need to know how an engine works to drive a car – but what if the car isn’t working properly? It would be nice to know where the problem lies, and the extent of it, even if I had to get someone else with the tools, spare parts and additional knowledge to actually fix it. Then the mechanic couldn’t take me for a ride (that’s a metaphor within a metaphor).
I’d like to hear more about your PLE project. Do your students have anything to bring all the different tools they’re using together – something that provides a kind of mashup of everything coming in from their networks that’s relevant to the topic or task at hand? Is this something that would be useful? Do you use a VLE as well? Do the institutional & extra-institutional elements ’speak’ to each other in any way?
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6
David Andrew
// Sep 30, 2009 at 9:45 am
Its fun to learn – although as a holist learner I find most approaches to learning programming far too serialist – got my confidence building games using a tool some years ago with a 9 year old.
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7
Andy Hampton
// Oct 4, 2009 at 5:10 pm
HI Lindsay
Interested to read what you have been saying about creating a PLE ‘homepage’ which aggregates the various tools and platforms you use to access your PLN and learning. A colleague pointed me towards Personal Brain. A free download (though you get the full pro version for a month and I am not sure yet what I will lose when that runs out – I might even pay for it!) and you get a spidergram creator. I found it very intuitive to create – took about an hou to set a homepage with the following nodes (links) coming from the central ‘thought’:
- Content manager for my school’s website, with links to the pics folder on my computer and to the website itself.
- An Elgg site called C4LPT which contains an ‘on the web’ tool set up to scan the web for mentions of PLEs and ePortfolios (that’s how I found you)
- iGoogle page which has RSS feeds from some of the bloggs I follow plus other stuff
- Blogs that I read regularly.
- Other stuff relating to hobbies and interests.
From this homepage I can see at a glance all the stuff I usually browse, including a twitter ap, and from this homepage I go off in search of new things!
I tried to paste a screen shot but this text writer won’t let me. I recommend you give it a whirl. It was certainly an interesting answer to the PLE aggregate problem for me. I’ll try to create a twitpic and tweet it.
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Andy Hampton
// Oct 4, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Just tweeted a screen shot
on twitter @andyhampton
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paul lowe
// Oct 14, 2009 at 6:39 am
etienne wenger (of communities of practice theory) has a concept called a technology steward, someone who understands the needs of learning and can find the relevant technologies to support and enhance it, so not a techie as such but someone who knows enough about the pros and cons of technology to make reasoned choices betwen various platforms and assess their use in pedagogy.
I like this concept a lot, he talks too about brokers as people who operate between two (or more) communities and ‘pollenate’ both, bringing ideas from one into the other and vice versa. this is where I think the true role of the academic learning technologist comes into play, to bring the tech into academic and the academic into tech
on a more prosaic note, have you tried netvibes as a portal for rss feeds etc, mike wesch at kansas has set up a great course home page that agregates all sorts of rich feeds, data etc, as he says, ‘the information now finds you’
see http://www.netvibes.com/wesch for his course site
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lindsayjordan Reply:
October 14th, 2009 at 8:20 am
Hi Paul,
I like the idea of being a cross-pollinator! I suppose the frustration comes from an inate independence – a desire to do as much as possible for myself, which conflicts with my love of and respect for social learning. I’m realising the positives of having limited knowledge and understanding; it forces one to go out and expand one’s learning network
I have indeed looked at Netvibes (and Pageflakes, which is similar), and have settled on iGoogle and Google Reader for now. The big challenge as I see it is for those learners who use institutional VLEs as a key part of their learning experience; which are difficult to wangle feeds of any sort out of! I’ll check out Mike Wesch’s course page; thanks for the tip-off
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