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  • My Agenda

    By Joshua Kim August 24, 2009 1:58 pm EDT

    This Technology and Learning blog will ideally be a space for conversation and debate for those of us active in creating the discipline of learning technology. This blog is written by and for people in the "middle" - those of us with aspirations to provide strategic leadership to our institutions and companies but who spend most of our time on the tactical aspects of learning technology.

    This blog comes with an agenda. My hope is that some folks will make their way to this space, disagree vehemently with the overall agenda and/or individual posts, and let us know exactly how my thinking has gone off the rails.

    Agenda #1: Explore the ways in which our profession of learning technology is emerging as an academic discipline.

    Agenda #2: Participate and contribute in reform efforts to move higher-education towards student/learner centric models of course/program design and teaching, changes informed by learning theory and catalyzed by technology.

    Agenda #3: Highlight, comment, discuss and contributed to innovations in teaching and learning at the space where learning and technology intersect. (Check out Malcolm Brown's Educause talk on Learning from the Future for a great overview of how the process of innovation plays out in our discipline.

    These interrelated agendas are explored further in a column I wrote with my colleague Dr. Barbara Knauff for the Educause Review "Business Cards of the Future", an article in which we attempted to explain the role of learning technologists as educational change agents.

    This blog is a spinoff of a Dartmouth group blog on educational technology. I hope that if you found your way to Technology and Learning that you will check out the ccblog - as it contains many voices from my local community sharing thoughts and links on innovations in learning and technology. I'd also highly recommend that your department, unit or group start and nourish a group blog if you are not already doing so - as we have found a group blog to be a wonderful tool to collaborate, communicate and expose ideas.

    In this Technology and Learning blog I plan to take a more provocative stance towards the issues, communities, vendors, technologies and trends that impact folks working in learning technology. This will partly be done to provoke - as I look forward to taking on the EduPunks, the Blackboard Defenders, the Learning Gurus, the Cloud Nuts, the Biz Dev Schmoozers, and everyone in between. I will critique as a member of the tribe, hopefully with modesty and affection, as people who work in learning technology (both on college/university side and on the vendor side) are my friends and colleagues. I think we are a force that will lead change at our institutions of higher learning, but a force that has all too often been marginalized by our structural position as "support" units for faculty and our relative invisibility as untenured and occupationally indeterminate mid-level learning technology professionals.

    Finally, this blog is motivated and animated not only by the agendas that have been articulated but by some deeply personal concerns as well. In 2017 and 2019 my children will leave to attend college, and I go to work each day hoping to make some small contribution to insuring that their experience with higher education be something better then what I experienced 3 decades prior. I am convinced that the pairing of sound learning theory (and an advanced understanding of how our brains learn) with the innovative utilization of appropriate technologies will catalyze the necessary reforms in the construction and delivery of higher education.

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Comments on My Agenda

  • Posted by Greg on August 24, 2009 at 6:15pm EDT

  • should I dare hope that you will also talk about accessible technology, students with disabilities, and universal curriculum?

  • Posted by PhD in Instructional Technology on August 24, 2009 at 9:45pm EDT

  • In regards to Agenda #1: How does the discipline of "learning technology" differ from instructional technology or educational technology?

  • Posted by Joshua Kim , Senior Learning Technologist, Adjuct Faculty at Dartmouth College on August 25, 2009 at 2:00pm EDT

  • Greg...thanks for the comment and question. I have to admit that accessible technology, students with disabilities, and universal curriculum are a real blind spot for me. I think this is a function of my training being in a discipline (sociology and demography) rather then learning design. This may be a structural problem within our discipline, that people like myself simply do not know enough about these issues. On the other side, accessibility issues are always part of our requirements in looking at learning technologies. Perhaps you could point us to some resources that will help us go up the learning curve and stay well-informed on these issues? Thanks again.....Josh

  • Posted by Joshua Kim , Senior Learning Technologist, Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth College on August 25, 2009 at 2:00pm EDT

  • Hi "PhD in Instructional Technology". Great question. Here maybe you can help us understand this better. From my understanding all of these titles fall within the same discipline. The distinction, as I understand it, is between corporate "training" and learning design/technology for post-secondary (or I guess secondary) education. I am very comfortable in a college classroom, and with faculty, as my background is teaching. I'd be less comfortable in a corporate setting designing training and corporate classes. How would you answer this question?

  • Point Taken
  • Posted by PhD in Instructional Technology on August 30, 2009 at 1:30pm EDT

  • Hi Joshua,
    I understand your point a little better now. You feel that "Technology Integration in Higher Education" is a specialized area of academic inquiry. And I would agree that academic study of Instructional or Educational technology alone would not prepare one for this endeavor. I see this work as an interdisciplinary intersection of adult education, instructional technology, instructional design, information technology, media literacy (think libraries) and assessment/evaluation. In fact, depending on the institution, the role might be in an academic computing department, an instructional design team, or in a library setting.

    Yes, this is very different from technology integration in K-12 and from corporate training.
    At the same time, something we in the instructional technology setting often miss is that each discipline (it seems) has journals devoted to teaching and learning within that field, where specifics of instruction in that domain and technology integration into instruction are explored. Journals such as ETR&D provide research focus on educational technology (including in higher ed) and journals such as Medical Education or Journal of Business Education provide discipline-specific inquiries that often include technological innovations.

    Even with all this explanation, I still feel that cit is inaccurate to call the systematic integration of learning technology into higher education an "emerging" field, but certainly it is a very narrow specialization. Certainly, the willingness of higher education institutions to create positions dedicated to his endeavor that require a specialization in instructional design or instructional technology is fairly recent.

    Did that help explain my perspective?
    Thanks, PhDIT :)

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