Technology - Don't you just love it!

My Blog’s running a bit late this week and my self-imposed deadline of 4pm on Fridays is fast approaching. I’m putting this down to lack of personal robustness and poor resilience on my part. I’ve suffered a few frustrations this week with technologies as I struggled to get to grips with an open source ePortfolio system that we hope to use in some new workshops that we are developing. I thought I’d long got over the notion of blaming my own technical incompetence but I slipped into that trap again and spent a disproportionate amount of time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.

One email to the helpdesk reported that this was a “known bug” and a workaround was put in place. Ah... don’t you just love it......

The experience reminded me though just how difficult it is to get to grips with new systems – even when you do have time to play about with it as I do. Even more so, I was reminded how annoying, de-motivating and exasperating it is when the technology doesn’t work as it should. I strikes me that in order to move the use of new learning technologies from being relatively small scale and the preserve of the determined enthusiast into the mainstream, it’s the new systems that must be robust and resilient not the people. Perhaps this accounts for some of the reticence that requests for enabling some software (and sometimes quite flaky software) comes from e.g. how secure is the information held in an online ePortfolio ? how do you know that young learners will use the correct security settings on Bebo ? who is responsible anyway ? It’s a bit of a minefield.

The wider uptake of technology for learning is dependent on good working relationships between curriculum staff and technical staff. Mechanisms that provide opportunities to nurture this and encourage two way communications can be put in place quite easily. What about a focus group, a round table or an online forum to get people talking. Here at the RSC we hear both sides.

“Why is YouTube blocked ?” (Lecturing Staff)
“Why would you want to use YouTube?” (Technical staff)

A better understanding of what the teaching staff want to use, or perhaps more importantly what the learners want to use, and equally what the technical staff can reasonably provide will mean that accommodations on both sides can be made.

image from JISC InfoNet's photostream in Flickr