So I’ve been doing this for a number of years now (doing = working with technology in higher education and earning a Masters in Teaching with Technology) - and have come to the conclusion that I’ve been championing the wrong approach. I’ve been patient with the slow pace of technology adoption but frustrated that the masses haven’t even reached the peak of Everett Rogers bell curve. Part of the reason is that I, like many others in my profession, use terms that demonstrate our lack of a clear vision of what learning looks like. We use words like “integration” when in fact that’s exactly the wrong concept to be using and promoting! Integration implies that the curriculum is developed first and the technology is added later as an extra appendage. That’s not what we really are striving for is it?! Do we really want to nail it to the side of learning as an afterthought? Take for instance this comment left on Jeff Utecht’s blog “The Thinking Stick“:

“It’s a chicken and egg problem - if technology only supports existing practice or takes a background role, what you end up with is existing practice. If practice is transformed without understanding technology, you are still left playing catch-up. It has to be both/and - and that’s the tough part.”

So maybe David Warlick is on to something. Maybe it’s not integration or embedding that we need since this would still focus on the technology (thanks Jeff for pushing me to think hard about assumptions and the casual manner I bat about words). Maybe it should be on technology literacy and technology fluency which would put the emphasis where it should be - on student learning. With this approach technology would be a tool in the teacher’s chest which would also consist of a syllabus, goals and outcomes, rubrics, exams, etc.

So to paraphrase Warlick we have to stop focusing on technology integration and begin to understand technology literacy. This will result in the integration of literacy with the focus on literacy not technology. Technology will follow because students need to use, understand and manipulate it to navigate information landscape.

So from a pragmatist point of view what does this mean? I guess it means that we start small and start thinking hard about what we want our end result to be. Do we care about the # of faculty using PowerPoint to deliver lectures or should we instead focus on students and how they might use technology to better demonstrate their understanding of the course? Thinking about this is the fun part - the hard part comes when trying to implement change.

JENNY