I’ve been listening today to the podcasts from ELI, and I’m struck by a strong sense of privilege for living when we do and for doing the work that we do. Think back six or seven years about the talks we heard then in such venues, compared to what we hear (and participate in) now. I could go back another 10 years and another 10 years — thanks to my age — and see the same pattern. Every day, the amount of territory defined by the term “thinking bigger” grows in size and importance. What a cool time.

The challenge here, at least for me, is patience with the time it takes for critical mass to be accumulated sufficient to enable real conceptual change. But I reflect a little and consider the likelihood that I’m a victim of my own ever-rising expectations. What represented “thinking bigger” in my view a few years ago has come to pass in some important respects, but it falls far short of what I’d call thinking bigger now. The day we’re not frustrated with the pace of change and with the limits of prevailing vision in higher ed is the day we need to climb down out of the saddle and hand the reins to someone else.

Chip

Okay fine, I will fire up my wee synapses and see what I can come up with as well, although you have certainly echoed a lot of my sentiments and concerns here as well.

Thank you for getting the ball rolling.

Cheers

Clearly there is a conceptual shift that needs to happen amongst a broader community. “Instructional Technology” is a term that does not come close to invoking the ambition and imagination intrinsic to the broader process at hand. That process is one that brings into being a new culture of communication amidst the many paths it has fostered, as well as new means for collaboration and the very production of knowledge.

This seems a production which, when done right, transcends a false (but oft-invoked) divide between creating knowledge and delivering it, and yet which also avoids falling into the parallel trap of simply labeling the medium as the message. Or, its innovators simply as ‘support’.

I think we do need a new language here in order to reach that broader audience…

It’s easy (not to mention institutionally encouraged) to fall back into thinking small. That kind of thinking needs to be done because there are every day activities to be made better, but given diligent effort that will happen anyway. Thinking big doesn’t happen by accident…

There is something more fundamental, more urgent, and more important below those surfaces. We need to find it, and we need to define our roles at our institutions so that when we find it we can help to make change happen.

It’s not that there is a web and cell phones and laptops and smartboards, but that the existence of those things has changed the way we interact with each other, the way we think, the way we work, and more. And yet, in some places, it hasn’t. Or people are not thinking or refusing to think about the way that technology has the potential to change what we do–for the better. Instead, people mourn the loss of some imagined idyllic past that never. really. existed and try to maintain that imaginary past. I’m trying to stay positive, but I keep running into brick walls of various kinds. I really, really don’t want to be in a place that gets left behind.