I had something of an epiphany earlier in the week and I'm going to write up the thoughts that led to it here.
Though retired now for more than a decade, I remain on some listservs that target learning technologists. While I have certainly not done a careful research about the postings, my distinct impression is that most of them are about administrative issues with particular software or with a specific vendor. There are hardly any postings about evaluation of learning issues, something you might expect during the pandemic, or about novel adaptations of software to enable a new pedagogic approach to address specific learning issues. If that's happening, it's being done either behind the scenes or by others, notably instructors who are not affiliated with the learning technology organization, or it's not happening at all. I'm on record from quite a long time ago, this post from near the end of January 2007 after the ELI conference that year articulates the view, that the technology itself should linger in the background and hardly be noticed at all if it functions as it is designed to do. Putting the technology front and center is having the tail wag the dog. The post itself elaborates on what else should be the focus. While in some ways things are quite different now, in this regard I believe that learning technology as a profession is still making the same error. So, one might ask what could shock the profession in the right way to bring the learning issues into focus.
A few years after I became involved in learning technology administration (spring/summer 1996), first with SCALE and then with the Center for Educational Technologies (CET), I became a member of the CIC Learning Technology Group. (The CIC has now become the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Back then there were fewer universities in the Big Ten and the University of Chicago was part of the CIC, though it is not in the Big Ten.) Let me note a few distinct features of the LT Group at the time I joined it. It was funded by the Provosts. Later that changed and it became supported (though with less funding) by the Campus CIOs. There was a mixed membership with both Learning Technologists and Associate Provosts for Undergraduate Education. The latter drifted off the group over time. When the CIOs took over sponsorship, there were only Learning Technologists remaining. Among the Learning Technologists, some were tenured faculty members like me, while others were full time staff (though some may have had fractional appointments in an academic department) and were without tenure. It is also worth mentioning that the faculty with tenure among the group were all men, while those who were full time staff without tenure were mainly women. I got along well with everyone in the group, but I had a tighter bond with the those who were faculty members, one of whom, like me, was an economist. Apart from the evident collegiality, the others were all extremely professional in their approach. That might seem a good thing, but I will challenge that assumption below.
Now let me introduce one more idea before getting to my epiphany. This one is from Daniel Pink's Book, A Whole New Mind. While much of the book is about taking a creative approach to the work we do, there is one particular framing of this that I liked very much - celebrate your amateurness. My rewording is to be experimental with the approach, which then makes the recommendation very much in the spirit of Donald Schon's The Reflective Practitioner. Experimentation is part and parcel of reflective practice. Of course, experiments can fail. The experimenter has some control over this by selecting the degree of riskiness in the experiment. It is safer to have less risk. But the big gain may come only when taking larger risks. This latter argument holds especially, when many are taking like risks and the gain is the result of the pooled activity of the various experiments.
For quite a while, I thought that the head learning technologist on campus should be a faculty member, precisely because the person would direct the learning technology organization to be experimental. In the mid to late 1990s, that made a lot of sense to me. Five to ten years later, however, I believe the profession as a whole saw a trend away from that, toward having the head learning technologist be an academic professional, without tenure. Indeed, in a post from around then I referred to myself as a dodo-head, meaning my type of learning technologist was going extinct. Was the profession as whole doomed as a consequence? I thought so, until I had this epiphany.
Maybe it's not the faculty mindset but rather the contractual arrangement (tenure) that makes the learning technologist willing to be experimental. Indeed, isn't the core logic behind tenure based on the notion that it promotes intelligent risk taking? If so, and if a sober analysis of the profession as a whole came to the conclusion that insufficient risk taking was happening, might the profession then conclude that at least part of the answer would be in giving learning technologists tenure?
That's as far as I got with the epiphany. I want to make a few caveats and then close. How one would go about giving tenure to learning technologists without making them faculty, so the requirement on scholarship wouldn't be too onerous, or by making them faculty a la academic librarians, is beyond the scope of this post. Don't put the cart before the horse. Implementation is its own problem. Here let's stick to reasoning through why such implementation might be desirable.
Then, I want to argue about lessons I've learned in retirement, where though experimental in some ways I'm now definitely an old dog and highly averse to learning new tricks. So there is a question about whether flipping a contractual switch will have a significant impact on mindset or not. I don't know. This question might then lead to consideration of other factors than the contractual mode that might encourage risk taking, budgeting for example.
One further point is that experimentation is greatly facilitated by the availability of soft money, so grants from external foundations might be part of the answer to the question in the previous paragraph. But, if my experience in the 1990s is any guide here, the external foundations have their own agenda and often the agendas across foundations are uncoordinated. There is an implicit argument here toward more coordination with soft money funding and in a way that satisfies the needs of higher education overall. I don't know if this is possible or not, but it is certainly something to discuss.
As I wrote in my previous post, there are experiments I wanted to see happen that never occurred, but I'm sufficiently out of the current conversation to not know whether what I'm suggesting here makes sense, if only as a topic of conversation for the time being. I would be delighted if this post does promote subsequent discussion. That's the most I hope for now.
