This is something that has come to me today as a conversation ebbed and flowed on one of the university support group lists. On the list, the topic that was being discussed was a recent outage on one of the networks. With a good dose of “geek” being tossed about, it wasn’t really that interesting to me, but I knew enough that what was going on was really ignoreable. Later on it turned out that this outage actually caused a ripple effect in it’s patching and it brought down the access to one of the commonly used elearning systems on campus. This is something that may have been caught if the original patching was careful, but it seems to me that (without really knowing what is the true story) elearning systems are not on the top of the information technology admin/support priority list (unless it’s directly mandated by their position). This is the second time in as many weeks that the IT support people on campus have had not one clue with regards to the elearning systems that students rely on.
The second part of this observation was when I was working with a fellow IDer over email and while the ID conversation was going fine, the IT terms that came up were just blowing over the top of my colleague’s head. Some of these issues were likely due more to a lack of knowledge with regards to the platforms that were being discussed.
So what do these two points have in common – other than some degree of overspecialization at best (arrogance/ignorance at worst in similar cases) – ? I think it’s a lack of a shared vocabulary (something that I was talking with some instructors about yesterday when they were wondering why students were having trouble with a given concept) that is creating the gap.
Some of this is important because it shows how instructional technology and information technology are indeed starting differentiating (just like there are LAN Admins who are different from Database Admins in the info tech world), but it is disturbing because if there is nobody who can stand with a finger in both pies, many of the technology integration projects out there are going to fall to info tech people with little instructional technology or info tech implementations that are going to fall into the perview of instructional people.
A bit of a rant, so I’ll clean it up as I get the time and clear my head.
By the by, has anyone else noticed that WP’s new editor doesn’t allow spell checking on the visual tab? You have to go to the code view to see it. I also noticed that I suddenly got tools on the visual editor that weren’t there last night.
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