The Ed Techie

Is ed tech an obsolete term?

Old School Bus by Kahunapulej http://flickr.com/photos/kahunapulej/324000439/

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Institute of Educational Technology where I work has recently been reviewed. I'm reasonably phlegmatic about the review, but one sentence in the review document rather raised my shackles, and it was:

"educational technology is now an almost obsolete term"

I didn't know where the authors had got this view from. Admittedly, being a Professor of Educational Technology, and having a blog called The Ed Techie, I am not unbiased in this, and the thought of being 'Professor of Obsolete Stuff' was rather unsettling. My view was the  opposite, rather that it was a term that had gained more currency recently as an umbrella term to describe the general interest in taking web/internet technologies and applying them to education. I know ed tech is more than this, but if I meet someone who says they are into educational technology nowadays, I don't usually think they mean print. John Naughton tells the joke the joke that the only piece of educational technology known to work for sure is the school bus.

I digress, my view was that if it's good enough for Scott Leslie, D'Arcy Norman and Jennifer Jones to use it to describe themselves, then it's current enough for me. But I thought I'd check I wasn't totally off-beam so I set up a Twitter poll, using PollDaddy, with the question 'Is educational technology an obsolete term?'. I'm glad to say that at the last viewing, the Nos have it.

Making Connections 2.0

Pete Lambert - http://flickr.com/photos/peterjlambert/97671748/

It was the annual Open University internal conference this week, which had the title this year of 'Making Connections'. There were some good presentations, but one of the key issues that arose was not what the presenters were saying, but what the audience were doing. My colleague Doug Clow was live-blogging the sessions he was in (e.g. see his account of my Learning Design session). He was told by three different people in separate sessions to stop as his typing was offputting. Doug gives his account here, and Niall backs him up here.

The audience of this blog may find this surprising, since the idea of not live-blogging would seem odd, but it shows we take certain behaviours for granted in our ed tech world. I found it rather ironic though in a conference called Making Connections that Doug should get these comments. He was making connections with people who weren't at the conference (see the comments on his post), and additionally a few of us were twittering through the conference so we were making connections across the sessions (I set up a Crowdstatus page for those twittering). Making connections is about more than chatting over a glass of wine (although that's nice too).

I think some people feel it shows disrespect to the speaker that you aren't giving them your full attention. In fact, thinking through the act of people having laptops or other devices operating during a talk I give, I'm of the completely opposite view. If what I'm saying isn't interesting enough for you to want to liveblog, twitter, look up sources or take notes on it, then I'm doing something wrong. And, if by some freak chance what I'm saying isn't interesting, then I'd rather people were doing their email or reading blogs than sitting in my session feeling resentful because they are trapped. Hey, I've had people sleeping during a talk before - I'd rather they were tapping away on their keyboards.