Getting the Chunk Size Right

Being new to blogging and preparing to read the writings of two distinguished education technology experts, I decided to visit their blogs to learn something about them (Bates flies small planes and Dron plays swing guitar.) I read some of their posts written in a more informal voice and believe it was helpful as I read through my assigned chapters and articles.

“Good teaching may overcome a poor choice of technology 
but technology will never save bad teaching.” tonybates.ca
 

In his book, Teaching in a Digital Age (7.2), Bates provides a valuable and concise history of education technology. In it he outlines the seminal shifts that moved humanity from oral tradition, to written communication, through electronic media and to the learning technologies we recognize today. Bates describes the accelerated pace of technology in the last several decades, leading up to the ubiquitous nature of our current interface with digital media, most notably the Internet, as a “paradigm shift” in education. 

I found it interesting that Bates posits that new technologies are often not truly new and that old technologies do not necessarily disappear but, rather, are integrated into modern ones...like the QWERTY keyboard.

"Usually the old technology remains, operating within a more

 specialized 'niche', such as radio or integrated as part of a

 richer technology environment, such as video in the Internet."-Bates

Drawing upon older technologies can offer educators options to address the varied learning styles of their students.  No one learning technology need be the answer for all.

This article offered me an opportunity to contemplate the differences in terminology when referring to servers, browsers, the Internet, the World Wide Web and to explore the rich technological lexicon.  This thinking prepared me to approach the more academic writing of Jon Dron.

Dron's article in Form@are, Open Journal per la formazione in rete (translation: for online training) is a scholarly piece which examines learning technology as it affects pedagogical choices.  This reading was made possible through DOAJ which is a great source for online articles: https://doaj.org.

 

Soft is hard and hard is easy: learning technologies and social media explores the various models for learning technology and the reasons educators might choose one over another.

Dron takes a bit of time working through various definitions of "technology" and it was more confusing than clarifying.  I found the following definition on Dron's home page easier to grasp.

"Technology' means organizing stuff to do stuff (any stuff), and we are

not just users but participants in that organization, either playing our roles correctly (hard technologies) or organizing stuff ourselves (sort technologies.)" JonDron.ca

 

Even more concise is Dron’s quoting of W.B. Arthur’s elegant definition of technology as “an orchestration of phenomena”.  

Dron defines pedagogies as technologies and, in a behavioral context, it's easy to understand how various theories of human development can be applied to the decisions around creating and working with learning technologies, both hard and soft.

It was interesting to consider the distinctions between soft and hard technology and I appreciate that there are many available options when deciding upon appropriate learning technology.  The combining of soft technologies to create hard ones allows for flexibility to accommodate myriad teaching styles and goals. The challenge, writes Dron, is "getting the chunk size right" - a phrase that will stay with me.  The balance between soft and hard technologies is not a rigid equation but rather a question of ratio that is determined by pedagogical needs and by human and social interactions. 

               

                                                             

 I had not previously considered learning technologies as a

 subset of technology as a whole and, as an exercise in interfacing

 with technology, this blog post has been a great learning opportunity.

                                                                        ~ J