Following along what I was thinking about last night with regards to IT vs IT, I began to see that for many, the line is very blurry. It’s much like the whole hybrid learning environment thing. Sharing acronyms certainly doesn’t help matters any, and when the individuals within the respective fields can often offer at least some level of support to the other, people on the outside get even more confused. Usually when I talk about instructional technology, I’ll be sure to include “educational” (EDIT). When I refer to the information technology, I’ll refer to it as hardware or software support. I would hazard a guess that many people “on the inside” will look at things in a similar manner – just like there are more than one kind of scientist, biologist, geneticist etc.
So to help those on the outside, what can we say that will help them to understand how we are different? I think the easiest way to do it is to look at the focus of the two groups. The instructional technology folk are interested in what technologies can be used to help instruction. If they are “fixing” something, they are fixing pedagogical methods related to the use of technology. At times, this will require being able to troubleshoot the technology that is used, but usually not to the depth that the information technology people do. EDIT will usually make use of what tools are available and look for ways to use existing technologies, and maybe design new systems.
Information technology people on the other hand, will be able to give some advice on how to use technology in general. Knowing what can be done (the EDIT people will often add the question, should it be done), they will support the user through the machinations of the machine, but not necessarily as deep as dealing with pedagogical design. IT folk are the ones that can slap together a database and have it do whatever one wants, hack a registry to give Windows a fighting chance to live or manage all the other infrastructure that supports the technology enterprise within a unit.
Granted, I’ve generalized on the roles and I know IT people who are very good at thinking about how a technology can be used in a classroom and I’ve seen EDIT people who can whip up a pretty mean bunch of coding to get very specific jobs done. So if you are reading this and were somewhat miffed, there is your justice. You are the ones that stand out so tall and bright that the “great unwashed” get confused as to where the line sits.
Just some thoughts.
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