I can’t seem to locate a specific date when the shutdown is going to take place, other than a reference to “in a few weeks.”

Google indicates, though, that Buzz content will not cease to exist, but rather be visible on user’s Google Profile or downloaded using Google Takeout.

Now having said that, I’m deeply troubled by this news – and indeed this trend.  Allow me to elaborate.

I can respect Google’s willingness to recognise when things haven’t lived up to expectations – even been utter failures – and make decisions to refocus their attention and resources elsewhere.  I can also respect the fact that being on the cutting edge frequently means you are making up the rules as you go, and frequently having to move the goal posts in pursuit of a new idea or experiment.

That’s a large part of the R&D process.  Formulate an idea; design and implement it; observe what happens; make changes to try and improve it; observe the results.  It’s inevitable that some ideas end up better on paper than in practice.

At the same time, though, Google is dangerously close to becoming stigmatized as an unreliable service provider for non-early adopters; and let’s face it, that’s the bulk of the market.

In my view this is a critical distinction that needs to be recognised.  At some point a company like Google needs to shore up its reputation as a service provider.  This doesn’t mean stop innovating – I love what they do.  However the more R&D projects like Buzz get cancelled, the worse Google’s track record becomes, and the less likely people are to consider your ideas.

At some point, only the bleeding edge will remain – and that’s not a sustainable long term business model.

Non-early adopters have distinctly different needs and expectations of an online service than the far smaller bleeding edge segment does.  Early adopters are far more willing to give things a go, and just see how they pan out.  They’re also a very fickle bunch, so there are in some ways fewer long term risks with early adopters than those later in the long tail.

The only real issue for early adopters is for a company to stop innovating.

The risks are far greater with those later in the adoption curve.  If you alienate them, or become seen as a company with lots of big ideas but few that you can rely upon to be there in the long term, you’re in big trouble.  It’s hard to regain the trust of a disenfranchised average user.

With my bleeding edge hat on, I find Google really exciting to watch.  They’ve got fascinating mobility and flexibility for such a large company.

Yet with my other hats on, I’m beginning to see a company that’s good for search, but one that I’m far less willing to rely upon to house any of my data; and when it comes to making recommendations to staff in my Faculty, I have to be pragmatic and somewhat conservative in my recommendations.

Google is becoming a company I’m not so sure I can recommend to the average user.

A Moral Dilemma

“Moral Dilemma” is the phrase I used to describe the stalemate.  I work more or less at the coal face, interacting with academics and courses who use – or perhaps more accurately don’t use – educational technology.  This has allowed for some really interesting insight into the realities of what it’s like to be a course convener, and has presented some stark realities for one whose job it is to encourage technological innovation in learning and teaching practice.

The more I see, the more gobsmacked I am about the demands they face.  Ever increasing teaching loads, initiatives for “smarter assessment,” and yet constant pressure for quality research output.  And despite all the statements from Senior Executives to suggest that teaching is seen as a core activity of the university – on par with research – when it comes to career advancement and recognition, it’s clear that one activity trumps the other.

One early career teacher I know was advised “If you have to choose between getting a publication in on time, or being prepared for your lecture, you get the publication in on time,” while another deemed research into learning and teaching to be “career suicide.”

Such is the view of learning and teaching versus research that I am seeing time and time again.

I know at least a few innovative teachers who have been deemed “research inactive” – an academic scarlet letter if ever there was one – by virtue of the amounts of time they have invested exploring meaningful use of educational technology.

Conflicts of Interest

So where does that leave the educational technologist, tasked with the responsibility of encouraging and empowering academics to be innovative in their practice; to push the boundaries of what has been done traditionally, and explore new territories – perhaps even disrupt the system.

It presents them with a moral dilemma.  Propose new ideas, and risk jeopardizing the career prospects of your colleagues and friends; or instead facilitate traditional approaches to technology in education – eAdmin over eLearning – knowing full well that technology could be use more effectively to support learning and teaching.  Or perhaps suggest new ideas, knowing full well that you will see no interest in them whatsoever; understanding all too well why there is no interest.

It is important to note here, I think, to recognise I’ve made no mention of the needs or wants of students – this is another critical component in this discussion, and a topic that I’ve never completely resolved.  Namely: what is the relationship between educational technologist and student.  The best answer I’ve come up with so far is they help the students by helping the teachers, though I must admit I don’t find it entirely satisfactory.

Bureaucracy

Complicating the issues further are the traditional layers of bureaucracy you see in large institutions.  To even start to explore a new “supported” system you frequently need to apply for the chance – formally submit an Expression of Interest – and agree to additional responsibilities that really don’t benefit you.

In effect, the people who are willing to take the chance – the ones we really need to support as early adopters – are being forced to jump through hoops and make a case for why they should be given the opportunity.

Or, on the other hand, you can circumvent formally supported systems and adopt technologies on the open web, meaning you must also act as technical support for students as well as convener, and researcher.  Needless to say, few ever go down that road.

I’ve always approached my work with a service oriented view – and this is becoming ever more the case recently.  I’ll happily talk with people about the amazing opportunities that exist, but those opportunities are few and far between.

More commonly I battle with questions about why Blackboard doesn’t work, or why it’s so difficult to navigate the web of bureaucracy wrought by central units.

I see I’ve done little to internally resolve this conundrum, instead turning this post into the whinge session I’d so hoped to avoid.  You can see why I’m not blogging much anymore…

By way of an introduction, my name is Mike Bogle and I am one of the mentors for the Program for Online Teaching (POT).  I’d like to thank Lisa Lane for asking me to participate in the course.  I’m really looking forward to the 24 weeks ahead.

In terms of my background, I am Educational Technologist for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales (my staff profile here).  My primary role at UNSW is to assist staff with the exploration of learning technologies, as well as help staff effectively integrate their use into the curriculum.

By “learning technologies” I mean just about any tool or system that can enhance or benefit the learning and teaching process.  This can range from local systems such as large scale learning management systems like Blackboard and Moodle, to digital media, to collaborative tools like wiki’s, to personal learning environments such as blogs, Twitter, social media, virtual environments and the like.

There is enormous potential in this area, and yet many questions as well.  My job is to help make sense of the technical landscape, and then having done that, help people put it to good use.  So this is what I’m hoping to bring to the POT as well.

In terms of my various online hangouts, there are a few notable spaces to mention:

• Diigo: http://www.diigo.com/profile/mbogle
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/mike_bogle
• YouTube: http://youtube.com/mikebogle

So without further ado, let the fun begin.

Apologies for the black spots, despite using Screenflow dozens of times over the years to produce tutorials I managed to stuff up the timeline for the first time ever.  If there’s sufficient demand for a better version I’m happy to re-record it.  Just leave a comment if that’s of interest.

Like so many aspects of my work, I try very hard to see past my own ideologies and opinions and consider alternative viewpoints with the mindset that my role in education has got to be about far more than my opinions. I think that’s a very important part of how we learn – by continuing to challenge your own ideas by subjecting them to scrutiny.

Yet when I attend a session like this, it’s so hard not to be jaded and cynical; to make biting jokes under my breath, and take on the role of Statler and Waldorf, high in the seats of Muppet Theatre endlessly berating the performers.

I am increasingly distressed about the idea of being an “Apple University” campus. I see so much space for conflicts of interest in this, especially when sessions on the educational efficacy of technologies are being sponsored by corporations who stand to gain financially from your attention.

Cite all the academic papers you like. When vendor-sponsored organisations talk about their products in the landscape of education, you cannot have neutrality. So it was incredibly hard to distinguish the truth from the marketing.

I jokingly stated before the session started that I’d get up and leave the first time I heard the phrase “game changer” uttered. They made it 2 slides, but I persevered.

To be fair, the presentation is all you’d expect from an Apple-affiliated speaker. Polished, knowledgeable, charismatic. Truly, he seems like a lovely fellow. And the fact he has a respectable background in higher education did a lot for the legitimacy of his discussion on learning and teaching matters.

He was also very informative, and talked a great deal about different use cases across education. He referred to initiatives in higher education, and in secondary school; he cited a diverse selection of disciplinary use cases, from music to medicine, and business to creative writing. Each and every one was reasonable and innovative.

Yet throughout it all was the underlying theme that Apple is the be-all and end-all. That mobile learning is Apple, and Apple is mobile learning; that there are “those other companies” that have mobile offerings, but their presence is negligible. iOS is God.

Truly, this is what I was expecting. So in that I wasn’t taken by surprise. Yet what concerns me is the impact this spin will have on the local university community. This is where my complaint about vendor-sponsored affiliations lay. When you are trying to educate others about the viability and utility of technology in education – and its fundamental power to support learning – it needs to be presented by a neutral party, not by those who have a stake in you buying their products.

At best it paints unrealistic expectations about a technology’s impact on learning and teaching. At worst it completely hijacks the discussion and provides misleading evidence to make a dollar.

Increased use of iPads is not a learning objective.

In a follow up email I was asked to share my experiences, particularly in terms of lack of uptake, and talk about why I thought some people just wouldn’t touch technology in education.

Given there are many similar discussion taking place online about this same topic, I’m including the bulk of the email below in case it’s of use to others.

Please note, my discussion here is not intended to criticise the motives that influence lack of uptake, merely to try and explain why it happens.

Many of the issues mentioned in terms of lack of interest still remain to this day. Most of what I see and hear about anecdotally mirrors what we’ve all been aware of for 10 years or more. There are islands of innovation, where people are actively investigating how technology can be leveraged to empower L&T, but the vast majority of people don’t.

The big problem, or so it appears anyway, is the cause of this doesn’t seem to be technical in nature – it’s cultural.

Three Types of Non-Users

[NB: the terms I use for each of these groups is my own, included largely to make it easier to distinguish one from the other]

A) In one camp you have “the traditionalists” – they see technology as a gimmick that has no place in learning; frequently viewing the top down one-to-many lecture and face-to-face as THE way you facilitate learning outcomes.

They’re the type to argue that a “computer can’t replace a person.”

B) Another camp you might call “career pragmatists.” They see no reward for investing time in a) learning to use tools and systems and b) using them and/or maintaining their content over time. Their key emphasis is on research output, and anything that jeopardises that is disregarded completely.

I’ve heard research into learning and teaching called “career suicide.” Essentially, in order to have a future in academia they focus on research, and use the most efficient approaches to teaching as possible, most commonly large lectures with one or two exams or papers during session.

We might see use of the LMS in this group, but almost certainly it will be limited to content dissemination, and most likely uploaded by a research assistant, school administrator, or tutor.

C) Finally, an off shoot of the career pragmatists are sessional staff. They get paid by in-class time not online time (or time spent learning new systems). So any time they devote to online learning is out of pocket. Given there is frequently no guarantee of long term employment for them there is also little motivation to explore long term online learning strategies.

Strategies

As you might imagine, the strategies for engaging with these groups will vary significantly.

With Group A (traditionalists) I find there is very little hope of progress here. Many maintain die hard views that learning happens in the classroom, so the most you’ll see from them is a course outline uploaded by someone else.

In my case, given there is one of me for the whole faculty it’s proven more efficient to focus my attention elsewhere and hope that the experiences of their more willing colleagues will slowly influence their views over time.

With Group B (career pragmatists) the key in-road is to demonstrate how educational technology can make their lives easier, and particularly lighten their workloads. There isn’t much point discussing learning philosophy (at least not initially), because efficiency and pragmatics drive their view of technology. It’s very utilitarian, not pedagogical.

With Group C (sessional staff), the situation is a lot more complicated. There is often interest in educational technology, but the practical factor of no financial gain frequently discourages much in-depth experimentation.

With this group I find the best approach is to provide as much support as humanly possible. It appears that so long as progress is being made, and there is some sense that “it’s worth it,” their exploration will continue. But as soon as things start to go awry the experiment get’s abandoned very quickly, because there’s little motivation to keep going.

Closing Thoughts

Unfortunately the above 3 groups constitute a vast majority of the faculty, which seems to be reflected in the audit data that shows Blackboard as the overwhelming choice of tool in courses; used as a dissemination medium, not a discursive one.

It’s my hope that maintaining a constant presence in the faculty will have an impact over time, and that people will start to recognise I’m here to help, not out to get them. To a degree I’ve begun to see glimpses of this, and will occasionally hear from people who “want to try something new” but it’s going to be a long road yet I think.

Moodle has been growing in popularity over the last few years as a learning management system and has more than proven itself as a viable open source alternatively to closed proprietary systems like Blackboard and WebCT.

At a local level there is slow but steady interest emerging in this system as well, so I’m happily starting to spend some time tinkering and getting under the bonnet of the system to get to know it a bit more.

Of particular interest to new users of Moodle is the following full-length instructional book on how to use the system. In keeping with the open ethos of the system itself, the book is also openly licensed, with the description indicating:

The second edtion of the O’Reilly book “Using Moodle” by Jason Cole and Helen Foster. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License.

To browse through the book click on the player above and you can then use your keyboard’s left and right arrows to turn the pages. Click again to view the book fullscreen (which is far easier to see).

All I did was sit and listen to what she was contemplating, and giver her some positive affirmation that I really liked the idea and thought it was worth pursuing, and yet it had a clear and positive impact on her confidence.

It’s made me realise how important it is to see past the constant emphasis on “fixing things” and to connect with the people and ideas that inspire the whole process in the first place.

I was inspired to find this clip for someone who was having a down day today when I couldn’t help but notice a comment a viewer left on the YouTube site which said (quoted in full):

I just got back from Afghanistan. And one of my best memories from there was. My whole squad was pinned down by a gun pit and snipers. And a couple of my squad members started whisling this song. Then the squad next to us started singing…So on to about my whole platoon was whistling this song while beeing fired apoun… So literially the whole mountain was singing “DONT WORRY BE HAPPY”. So someone had their radio on.SO d HQ started singing.Other bases ovaheard. Then half the country was singin

Arguments about the war and its motives aside, this quote speaks volumes about the capacity music has to pick us up. From the emergence of the Blues in the impoverished South to a foxhole in Afghanistan, it has a unique way of helping people face the most trying of circumstances. Music rocks.

As redundant as it is, if there is no policy that says you can’t, there is no policy that says you can’t.

Unfortunately there is a pervasive fear in education that things must adhere to existing models; that every idea must be based upon a prior precedent before it has any legitimacy of its own. It’s a situation in which fear of failure is so acute that it precludes anything new or different from happening – as if the boogeyman will get us the instant we diverge onto the road not taken.

This is a deeply-rooted cultural malady that must be stamped out utterly. The view that experimentation is bad; that mistakes are a pox to be ashamed of, rather than opportunities for learning and re-evaluation; that unique approaches are a thing to be scoffed at – these are all shortsighted views that need to be cut out from the root.

As much can be learned from doing things incorrectly the first time and trying again as can be from never making a mistake in the first place. In fact, I’d argue it’s better to make mistakes.

An enormous amount of learning is not taking place because we insist on travelling well-worn paths at the expense of experiences we might have in new circumstances.

There is no shame in stumbling. The only mistake to regret is to not try in the first place.