One of the things that I had a chance to do while I was recovering over the first couple weeks after surgery was to hunt down books on Amazon. One of them was Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody“. I don’t remember how I came across this, but I remembered that it hit me as interesting as the idea of “headless organization” is something that the ID game needs to understand as you organize grass roots because the leaders are often not willing to “jump in”. Anyway, when I was looking to see what the release date for the paper back way, I came across the Ars Technica review (odd… Ars seems to what to be all things these days) and on page 4 there is an interesting Q&A:
I think you’ve said that “communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”
Exactly. In a way, the kind of real transformation of the American landscape by the automobile—the rise of the suburbs, the change in work and living patterns, and so forth—could only happen after cars themselves—and in particular, the fact of the internal combustion engine—had become boring. …
In a lot of the stories in the book, the tools they’re using are 10 years old. The effects are new because of the social density. Because once you can take it for granted that everyone has access to certain tools, you can use those tools to do a different kind of thing than if you’d just been thinking about the technology itself.
This takes the idea that I have been stressing for a long time – instructors should integrate a new (or “new”) technology into their own lives before trying it in the class. That way they are comfortable with their own abilities and have some frame of reference as to what the tool can do – and puts it one step further… maybe Instructional Design and Instructional Technology types should be looking at ways to integrate “old and established” technologies if they are looking to make real change. There will of course be those that want to be on the bleeding edge and will be more than capable of integrating those technologies, but for the vast majority, the tools that are “invisible” might be the best way of going about things. Even though the web is “old skool” now, LMS are not. Even though email is old, Read/Write web? Not so much. Without reading the book, but running off the interview, this may explain why using LMSes and Web2.0 tools are still “too new fangled” for the majority of instructors, to say nothing of microblogging and cell phones (txting may be the new “blinking 12:00”).
This leads me to a thought. Maybe the success of SNS is due in part because it “looks like email and works like a website, but one that doesn’t have sad or crappy news all the time” (to paraphrase a relative). Blogs, Twitter and Photogallery apps are out there for geeks to tool around with and to “oooh and aaah” at their technical prowess (think gear heads of old, and “auto-carriage clubs”), but SNS allow these individual tools to blend into one (granted often in a walled garden with less functionality). Users don’t have to worry about if their WP install is up to the latest rev, or how to deal with the RSS feed – much like motorists today don’t worry about more than gas and washer fluid, and the auto-clubs are more concerned with insurance and services.
How does this translate to the ivory tower or the brickyard playground? We should look for systems that leverage what instructors are comfortable with. So instead of a blog with a web interface, maybe tell them that they can simply email their updates in. Instead of an LMS that they are not comfortable with, cook up a “blank” that only requires them to drop files into a folder via SMB. This certainly feels like a cop out, but if we look at it by trying to identify processes that are “invisible”, I think it certainly makes sense.
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