Higher education passivity
Existing Digitally, Audrey Watters
If technologies are shifting our industries – and certainly we’re told they are – then how should we, how must we respond – and respond not in the service of “industry needs” but in the service of our own needs.
What I often fear is that we don’t really know what our needs are – technologically at least. Indeed, I think we’ve shied away from figuring this out, in part because we’ve been convinced that technology is too hard, too complicated. We’ve surrendered too to the notion tech is necessarily intimidating – or conversely to the idea that tech “just works” – and that we needn’t interrogate, let alone master it. It’s “someone else’s job.”
“Someone else’s job” – perhaps, but that job is increasingly encroaching on our own work.
This passivity results on strange relationships between higher education and scholarly publishing, ownership of learning materials, ownership of courses, ownership of educational technology, data.
Limitations of any Learning Management System
Disclaimer: on record as a critic
Create silos: lock students out of their own courses on completion, actively prevents drawing of connections across topics, courses, programs
When compared with other popular online environments, perceived to by clunky and unintuitive to use
Complex and difficult to support
They do nothing to promote development of digital and online literacies (by students, and he institution itself), they are designed to prevent the sorts of interactions that develop them
Open education – alternate models for materials, technology, pedagogy.
Open Web Tech: Unserious, Unreliable, Unloved
