We all know this. Change comes slow to higher education. Technology, on the flip side, is racing forward at bullet train speed. When combining higher education with computers, do we really want a train wreck? With the silos comprising a typical U.S. college campus, that may be what we are getting. Faculty members are in meetings with their professor colleagues. Librarians mingle and talk with other librarians. Then there is everyone else. It's time to shake things up.
I am an academic technologist. Academic technologists are those campus professionals that assist with the use of emerging technologies to sustain effective learning experiences. Sometimes called instructional technologists or educational technologists, we have varied backgrounds but our role is to collaborate with faculty members to create and design digital course content, or use high-end visualization software, or set-up relational databases, or video and audio editing tools, or script, or program digital games on mobile devices, or code, or build rich web sites, or set-up rigorous evaluative methods. That’s the abbreviated list. Most academic technologists can work closely and collaboratively with busy professors and their students. In the U.S., academic technologists are typically placed within the central computing group on college campuses. Why is that? Admissions offices have their own technology specialists who know how to use spreadsheets and run MySQL queries to help in the recruiting effort. Development has its researchers who run data analyses all day with an eye towards fund raising for the college. There are probably exceptions, but of those educational technology specialists that I personally know of or Tweet with or meet at Educause meetings, most are positioned in the campus computing group. I think the reason is historical. I think the academic structure should be hacked.
The computing group is a vitally important part of higher education as it keeps the technology across the campus humming. Though far from an exhaustive list, the functions of central computing include: keeping the network operational, making sure the wireless is switched on, patching the Learning Management System so it’s always ready to go, pricing, purchasing and setting up office and lab computers, telephonics, removing viruses, and if the campus still hasn’t out-sourced email, verifying that it too is working all the time. It, I mean IT, functions as a utility. The computing group is that often invisible entity that is charging along at top speed. Fortunately, the educational technologist knows how to speak two languages, the language of network, systems, and administrative computing professionals and that of the faculty.
Historically, academic technologists were expected to work with a particular software, teach with it, and show faculty and students how to use it. Maybe they also needed to run a full high-end computer lab. Professors don’t normally do that nor do librarians. Because Deans hire professors and Heads of libraries hire librarians, there was no other logical place in the hierarchy to put an academic technologist than the computing group.
If you think about it, Google Earth has changed the way we teach with geospatial information, blogs have changed the personal essay, YouTube and podcasts changed course content and allowed for alternative modes of lecture delivery, wikis and Google Docs changed collaborative writing. We couldn’t do these things in this way with this much ease and this DIY ten years ago. Another example: how many campuses have underutilized dedicated video conference rooms? Skype and a web cam broke down the walls of the classroom and changed our communication options with the outside world.
The rapid increase in technological advances influencing pedagogy have not just rested in the cloud with Web 2.0 technologies. Laptops, tablet PCs, mobile phones, clickers, and virtualized computing have changed the face of computer labs, knowledge sharing and knowledge creation on campus. Any classroom is a potential lab. What’s next? What should we expect in the coming five years that might be the latest indispensable tool for teaching?
Who is going to keep an ear to the ground on these coming technologies? And figure out how to use them? Who will attend the unconferences or EduTech meetings or read the blogs? We want the answer to be “the professors!” because we want them to keep up with technology. But professors are expected to go to their disciplinary meetings, read journals and blogs related to their field, subscribe to lists that focus on their academic interests. And I agree they should. All of that faculty professional development feeds right back into the courses. Besides, given a professor’s teaching load, service to the university, and a research agenda, where is the time to put into staying current technologically? Does any of that time count towards tenure and review? That is where the educational technologist comes in, working closely with the professor to co-develop course content, produce digital scholarly objects, or teach about the utility of teaching with these emerging technologies.
If I had it my way, I would move the lone instructional technologist on campus or the educational technology group, whole cloth, into the academic dean’s office. Or the Library. Or the Learning and Teaching Center. Or into individual academic departments. You see where I am going? Educational technologists are academics, they should be considered as such and they should think of themselves as such. I would write the job description of the educational technologist to require an advanced degree. This is not to be elitist or exclusive. There’s already too much of that on our U.S. campuses. On the contrary, having been through the rigors of developing and finishing a thesis or dissertation makes the statement that the person filling the role of academic technologist can conduct original research, develop courses, write papers and give presentations, and quite possibly write and win grants. This person is a scholar. She or he could win a teaching position but has chosen to follow a different path, one that utilizes rare-in-the-academy technical skills used for the betterment of media-inflected co-curricular development and digital research. There is no need to provide "Project Management" training to this academic technologist because one’s advanced degree has clearly been a practical lesson in project implementation and follow-through. The model for this in the UK is one of calling these non-faculty technologist positions "research associates" or "analysts" as is the case at the King's College London.
North American faculty members may or may not see the educational technology specialist as a colleague, a comrade, or as Jim Groom put it, an "engaged participant in the transparent intellectual life of the university," but they never will when the academic technologist is sitting in with the central computing group. That gets me to another point. Since the system should be hacked and the educational technologists embedded with the academics, they should contribute to the mission of the college as an academic is expected to. They should go to faculty meetings and sit on committees. They should advise students. They should teach classes! I would go so far as to say they should have sabbaticals, but that might be stretching it.
Why should it matter whether or not an educational technologist is positioned with the computing group or sits with the faculty? The reasons are two-fold. First, in the interest of educating our students with needed 21st century skills, the educational technologist can fill the technology gaps found in the faculty ranks. From the 2009 Horizon Report, "There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy" or what Gardner Campbell calls "Media Fluency," which is to say an understanding of computers as tools for thought. As they earn their Ph.D.s, future and current professors aren’t necessarily trained in emerging technologies and how to teach effectively with them. It is in the best interest of developing media fluency for our students to integrate the educational technology professional alongside faculty members with the goal of co-curricular development and pedagogy. Second, review time. I think the people on campus that understand more closely what it is that the educational technologist does or should be doing - that is curriculum development, understanding teaching and learning goals, providing expertise instruction, consulting on the integration of media in pedagogy, conducting scholarship in education and research in one’s field - should be those providing the annual reviews. That would be coming from the academic side of an institution. Typically hired as staff or administrators, educational technologists do not enjoy tenure and are usually not part of a union. Some are hired on soft money. Their reviews should come from those they work most closely with and are allied with and ideally the review won’t be skewed by a misunderstanding of what the role is of an educational technologist
I write while sitting in an office at the University of the West Indies in Barbados where I am fulfilling an 11-month Fulbright Scholarship. I am taking my own hard-won and honorable sabbatical. The department that I am affiliated with, the Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies, sees me as an academic. The feeling of respect that I get here as I do the same things I was doing at my previous job, developing digital course materials, conducting research, writing grant proposals, showing people how to use new and emerging technologies in their teaching and research, writing papers with students and professors, is palpably different than the feeling I got in the computing group I was in back home. I was an anomaly there; I am a scholar here.
As I said, change comes slow to the academy. What I've presented here is a suggestion, a hack to the system, that may infuriate some of my educational technologist colleagues across the country. I may anger the faculty members who read this, those who are not technology averse. I may hear "How dare you!" The point I hope to make is: the system for educational technology on most U.S. campuses is disconnected from the real work that could be going on in bridging teaching and learning with the possibilities that exist in alternative pedagogical technologies. Maybe we need a committee to investigate...
Creative Commons photos above:"Old School " by Caro's Lines and "Teaching about Wikis" by the author.
