Wow, I’m really glad you re-directed me to this post, this idea is at the forefront of my mind after a conversation I had with Gardner at EDUCAUSE 2008, and I want to thank you for bringing me back here. I forgot I even wrote this, and I’m frankly shocked it came out half as gogent as this seems to me on a re-read. I think I mght just re-purpose it thanks to your comments here, damn I love you. And damn how powerful is the blog for just this reason? Thank you, Matty!

I broke away from productive dissertating last Friday to attend a panel on innovating with open source at the 2007 CUNY IT Conference featuring our fearless leader, Mikhail Gershovich, City Tech English Professor Matt Gold, and University of Mary Washi…

I have to say that your analogy is a beautiful one, god I love it! And there is much wisdom to sitting in front of the whorehouse handing out WordPress fliers. In fact, I think your call for a happy medium is something my propensity for zealotry robs me of at times. I think taking people who really want to do something with teaching and learning through various other tools is essential. Yet, I often find it is hard to approach this without falling into the trap that WordPress or whatever else is a replacement for Bb, in fact it really isn’t, It is a different frame of mind all together that requires a certain amount of re-conceptualizing a virtual spce for teaching and learning. I think making the application as simple as Bb is one way to make the pitch, but another is some focused examination of what we think about online tools more generally and what thy offer higher ed in this day and age. I can’t help but thinking the conversation needs to be broader and more focused at the same time. Does this make any sense?

This I can understand. And I think librarians do this to a certain extent too. I don’t recommend databases or resources to students that I don’t think are useful to their research, of course. But I also don’t recommend resources or techniques that I think detract from the whys – I don’t often recommend what may be an easier resource or technique if it isn’t going to get students to quality resources or if it will set a bad example for them in terms of information literacy and evaluation. For example, I wouldn’t tell students to Google their research topics over using library databases just because Google’s interface is easier to use.

So it sounds like you are trying to incite a rebellion of sorts. You aren’t happy with Blackboard, you don’t think it is a quality teaching and learning tool, so you don’t want to include it in your teaching and learning repertoire. I can respect that.

I wonder if there is a happy medium to be reached though – because I do worry that rebelling against Blackboard (or whatever resource seems inadepquate) leaves a lot of folks who are using the system without help. And this may put a bad taste in their mouth and they won’t want to ask for help in using other systems.

There are a lot of librarians who rebel against Google and Wikipedia. But a lot of students who still use them. My stance is “I’ll be happy to show you how to use Google or Wikipedia for what they do best, but give me a few minutes of your time to show you some other things too”.

To use a bad analogy (and one that is probably in poor taste – forgive me): you’ll reach more sinners by passing out church flyers in front of the whorehouse than you will in front of the church. Go where your target market already is and lead them away.

I am thinking that much of the difficulty in your job probably comes from having to recommend or find systems that work for the university as a whole – you don’t have the funding or staffing to offer all of the CMS’s that are out there.

Anyone in a position of selecting resources of any kind (books, databases, CMSs, accounting systems) in the public academic arena has a tough job. Budgets and staffing so severely limit what you can offer people. So we often end up with inadequate systems and resources. And reference librarians and instructional technologists are often stuck helping their community use these systems. Maybe this is what you mean when you talk about the administrative burden on instructional technologists?

Excellent points. let me see if I can respond accordingly.

I guess the issue I see specifically with administration (in how I am using it here is the actual conceptualization of technology as somehow intrinsically administrative. Which I believe has a nice corollary with a librarians mission. For example, part of what both you and I do is think through systems and show people how to use them, and I have no problem with that, in fact I enjoy it very much. But what begins to concern me with the technology is that the growth of this nascent field, i.e. instructional technology, has in many ways been stifled by the systematic conflation of Course Management Systems like BlackBoard with Teaching and Learning Technology. Especially when in our moment of technology this seems like an outmoded means of thinking about the intersection of technology and teaching and learning. I think this is also the case for librarians, not so much that you don’t want to show people how to use databases for you do it and do it well, but you are also faced with thr question of how do so many of these others tools available for searching resources online need to be considered as well.

And while academic journals are a part of your purview, how many other resources are out there that might be of use and how do you go about encouraging people to approach the intersection of finding solid resources without disregarding the trends in searching, accessing, and sharing educational resource that are made possible by social networking tools for example? I am sure I am simplifying things here, but I entirely agree with you that librarians and instructional technologist share many of these same concerns in this moment.

And I think that similar to my argument for instructional technologists, librarians might also feel the intense need to be thinking about the why in order to reframe the how, or at least part of it. The rate at which things are changing is moving far faster than courses and curriculum, we need to imagine this stuff together, hence the very establishment of a job like mine.

That said, I am a public servant and I would never suggest that someone else do the how, rather that we think together creatively about how the how has changed and what it means for teaching and learning–or the why. This isn’t something I made very clear in this post, but it is an issue that I am grappling with and believe is still evolving. My statement that I wouldn’t “deign” to train folks on BlackBoard was not a holier than thou approach (or at least not entirely ), it was more akin to engaging in a process that I believe will produce more harm than good for teaching and learning. Which in turn makes me think it is in fact contrary to what I am being asked to do. So while blackboard is a useful system for some basic tasks that I think every professor might need, I think it is our job to re-imagine those basic tasks in light of the wealth or resources, information, and general teaching and learning that is taking place on the wider web. BlackBoard (or systems like it) are anathema to the very approaches, practices, and theoretical conceptualizations we need to be preparing burgeoning thinkers. Part of that is certainly administrative, but we that administrative process has taken over much of the landscape of teaching and learning technologies making the primary issues about efficiency and scalability which all too often chokes out the magical process of thinking hard about the unique challenges and possibilities we are currently faced with.

In short, we are getting your class blog on Jami and lib guides for all my library friends

(Like my post this is all over the place on a re-reading, forgive me but these thoughts are very much in transition and you are helping me tremendously to think through them)

I may be misunderstanding your post, but I read that you see the role of instructional technologist as focusing on the “whys”, leaving the “hows” up to administrators. I wonder about this stance and would love to discuss it more. I am not ready to fully disagree with you yet, but I will throw out some food for thought.

Despite frustrations with the time spent on the hows, I think many librarians (myself included) recognize that the hows and whys are both legitimate needs that have to be served and that doing both should be our job. Put simply, I can talk all day about how to evaluate articles and how this all informs the contruction of a good research paper, but if I don’t take the time to show the researcher how to find the articles and get access to them, all my “whys” have been for not. While we could have some library staff that do the hows and others that do the whys, I don’t know that this serves our patrons – and I don’t know that they see that much difference in these 2 needs. They want both and need both pretty much at the same time. And from the librarian’s perspective, (when time permits, but that is another issue really) there is a reward in being able to give them both.

Akin to library patrons, do faculty separate the teaching and learning piece – the “possibilities” – from the administration of tools? And if they don’t, I wonder if faculty are best served by intructional technologists that do?

(Maybe I am ready to disagree with you after all – lol)

Actually, my post was alluding to how disappointed I was that I couldn’t see the Instructional technology Fellows’s presentation. Seems like you all are really into some wonderful stuff, (I really like your Drupal set up on the Maccauly site, btw) and I personally would love to attend a small conference on Instructional technology hosted by the Honors College. In many ways the Honors College was (and I’m sure still is) far ahead of the rest of CUNY in imagining the space of instructional technology for teaching and learning. And the distributed nature of your program makes these open source social applications that much more appealing.

I’m really bummed to have missed you at the conference. The panel I presented in was concurrent with yours and it was killing me to miss it. We’ve been talking about hosting a small instructional technology conference at the new Macaulay building. Might be a good venue for discussing the better integration of “information” and “instructional” as technology disciplines.

Anyway, hope to talk to you soon, and steer clear of hippies!

Jeff