I’ve come along to the Curverider conference, being held in room 401 of DHT of Edinburgh Uni – the place where for four years I was terrorised by the impossible French and German translations placed in front of me. Since then, they’ve added an overhead projector and computer, so things are obviously looking up.
Terry Anderson, Canada Research Chair for Distance Education, was the first to take to the podium tackling a few adoption strategies for social software. In the past I have only had Suw Charman’s business adoption strategy under my arm, but the educational ones suggested by Terry dovetail this nicely.
When institutions want to implement social software the first thing they often do is set up some kind of system, some kind of portal even. But often this tends to limit, to some extent, individuals’ control over their space, time, content…
A Learning Management System makes sure that everything is in its place, in the right box. Trying to embrace social software, though, can blur this so that it’s difficult to pigeon-hole chat, formal writing, assignments, social areas and so on.
Elgg has tried to bring these social tools into a common space to make sense of the chaotic nature of social software, offering some form of control for the organiser. Yet, the LMS at the moment will always be easier for educators to ‘get’, and so social software, even with an element of control, is difficult for institutions to adopt.
At Athabascau University Terry and his team have developed a Masters in Distance Education, using Elluminate for realtime collaboration, Furl for dissemination and knowledge polling, Moodle for the calendar and resource drop-off, Me2U.Athabasca.ca for blogging and making connections.
For educators, it seems a lot of work getting rid of a previous LMS to make only incremental improvements while also losing control.
8 conditions that facilitate the implentation of educational technology (Ely 1999):
• Dissatisfaction wit the status quo
• Expertise
• Resources
• Time
• Rewards or incentives
• Participation
• Commitment
• Leadership
Rogers (2003). Five characteristics that will lead to swifter innovation:
• Relative advantage
• Complexity (this is down to individuals’ perceptions)
• Trialibility (is it easy to trial and test, without commitment)
• Visibility (how easy is it to demonstrate – online and ubiquitous)
• Compatibility
Dan Surry: Strategy of a change agent
• Developer philosophy: they build tools, evangelise them, if only the tool is perfect then they will come
• Adopter philosophy: focus on the context: the needs and opinions of potential adopters.
Moore (1995): Inside the Tornado: Bowling Alley Adoption
• A period of niche-based adoption in advance of the general marketplace, driven by compelling customer needs and the willingness (and capacity) of vendors to craft niche-specific whole products
Adapting these ideas to education we could, approach end-user decision-makers and show them how our innovation resolves problem or saves them time or money.
Design-based research
• Investigate
• Create intervention
• Evaluate in a local context
• Intervene and evaluate in multiple contexts
While similar to action research it involves both the practitioner and a researcher, with a focus on end-users, not IT infrastructure. The use of small-scale projects allows us to bypass conventional IT managers.
One issue Terry had while implementing Elgg was that he threw too many tools at the students at once. As such they didn’t concentrate as much as they perhaps could have done on the blogging aspect of the tool.
Thank you for capturing and sharing Terry's presentation.
Enjoyed meeting up and hope to cross paths
again virtually or when you come to the states.
Chris
Posted by: Christopher D. Sessums | September 05, 2006 at 03:48 PM