Reading Conole

Week 21 Activity 1b

 About an hour (optional activity)

Read the first half of the chapter by Conole (2011), ‘Stepping over the edge: the implications of new technologies for education’; just up to the section entitled ‘Making sense of the complexity’. 

Consider to what extent you agree with the arguments Conole makes.

I liked the article, and there is a lot in it that I agree with. I thought that Pea’s description of how progressive waves of technology have changed the ‘ether’ of mediation was really interesting.

There were some aspects I did not fully agree with.

“…fostering these new skills suggests a need for a radical transformation of the educational curriculum.”

I’m not sure I agree. I think it is right that institutions’ systems and processes will tend to block change, but I’m not sure that they can’t gradually evolve rather than needing to radically transform. The essence of Web 2.0 is that it is user-led, and that the tools are intuitive to pick up and will be appropriated and adapted by the users to suit their needs. IE I think that change will be driven by learner practices, and institutions will need to evolve accordingly. But an effort to try and re-write curriculums to ‘fit’ them better to the new Web 2.0 world is likely to fail.

To use an analogy, re-writing the curriculum is akin to trying to centrally plan an economy rather than letting the market operate freely in determining the best allocation of resources.

Conole describes a world where institutions and systems are in place, with strong cultural norms around ‘what education is’ (still largely in most people’s minds a matter of transfer of knowledge) and its value. We can theorise about new potential education models, but I can’t see that the existing structure of schools and universities could be replaced overnight. What is more likely is that there will be new types of institution offering learning in new ways, and over time the existing institutions will evolve or die.

Conole seems to share Wesch’s view that the Lecture Hall is fundamentally ill-suited to the Web 2.0 approach to education – but why can’t the Lecture Hall be complementary, one part in a suite of tools that learners can use? I understand that we need to leverage the new things that we can do with Web 2.0, but does that necessitate rejection of all the old approaches to education?

And is the teacher/student nexus really under such threat? Why isn’t the teacher’s role as an expert guide and facilitator still a valid one, with plenty of authority?

Reflect on your own experience and how technologies have changed the way you do things and how you work.

·      I can access up-to-date research and information far more easily now.

·      I can work from anywhere, and at times to suit me.

·      Word processing allows me to draft documents and shape them in a much more flexible way that suits how I assemble information from different sources and then do a lot of iterations and re-writings and re-orderings

·      I have a variety of communication options – mobile phone, skype, email, Facebook, Twitter.

·      Broadly, technology has enabled me to allocate work and non-work activities when I want to (and I can opt to compartmentalize work and non-work, or to blur the boundaries when I feel like it), and to choose the time and duration I devote to a task. I can have a more flexible and personalized lifestyle.

What changes have occurred in your own institution over the last decade in terms of the use of technologies?

·      Globalised internal phone system – has hugely increased rapport levels.

·      More telephone conference calls.

·      Increasingly sophisticated use of video-conferencing – has reduced the time needed for face-to-face meetings.

·      Blackberries – continuous access to email (and the need to learn skills of ‘switching off’ from work when necessary).

·      Coordination of group work between different countries by way of e-mail control summaries and conference calls – allows us to move faster.