I was reading Jeff's Advanced Technologies posting on WebsoftMJLJ for this week's lecture. In this posting he poses an interesting question... What are the best choices for educational technologists?
Although this question is related to Jeff's IMU project, I am sure that all of us have found ourselves in Jeff's situation. What technology is the most appropriate for a given situation? Although not easy to do, we can somehow answer this question with a general answer. For instance, what technology would be appropriate to deliver training materials to a set of users? As an answer, we can suggest to use a web page, or maybe producing a CD-ROM. We can even suggest to develop a printed "How-to"guide and still be able to provide a proper answer.
However, once we decide what solution we implement, there is a more granular level where we, as instructional technologists, still have to make a choice on what technology is the most appropriate. If we decide to deliver training materials through the web, should we make it interactive? If we are looking for interaction, what's the best technology we can use? Action scripts in Flash, or perhaps we should use any type of DHTML? Yes there are systems available that we can use to help us manage these types of questions, however, as instructional technologists, we know that we are responsible for knowing of the different technology solutions available, but are we also responsible for knowing all the specific details for each one of the possible technologies as well? At what level does this stop?
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And this doesn't even take into consideration the grand battle I have had in the past where you must take your educated definitions of what a technology is and attempt to educate decision makers that don't have such an understanding. For instance, I've been fighting for more than 2 years for people to understand what a blog really is and not what they think it is.
While I’m relieved to know that I’m not the only one struggling to educate the higher-ups about instructional design/tech and, ahem, continually trying to justify our jobs and existence, it’s at the same time sad that we’re (IDs) forced into being one-man/one-woman shows and expected to know it all. The more I promote modern technology, a la Web 2.0, in the curriculum, the more I’m convinced that this is indeed, a team effort and one person cannot run the show by him or herself. There’s no way I can acquire all the knowledge to run backend as well as take care of designing workshops, modules, etc and be the front-woman. I’m wondering at what point higher administration will “see” this and what can we do, as IDs, to move their education forward?
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