Principles Before Products

Image: closequarter.co.uk

I love technology. There is no way around it. Technology is a living love song to the staggering power of human innovation, past, present and future. Let the record show, though, that in its strictest definition the word essentially refers to "... the entities, both material and immaterial, created by the application of mental and physical effort in order to achieve some value", according to the Wikipedia definition. Technology, in short, means all the stuff people have made to make life just that little bit brighter. 

(What better example of technology, incidentally, than Wikipedia... "both material and immaterial" indeed. Just beautiful. And is it becoming obvious that I have been indulging in a bit too much Sophie Kinsella lately? Never mind. Where were we?) 

So the thing about technology - especially in the current sense of the word where it refers to sleek, microchipped gadgets - is that there is money in it. Lots and lots and LOTS of money. As an educational technology enthusiast grounded by reason, I try to balance techy zeal with the voice of reason - as found in scholarly research. Yes, gentle reader, scho-lar-ly, as opposed to Shopaholic. Though as it turns out, when it comes to educational technology, the scholarly literature often turns out to be, frankly, unsettlingly shopaholic. 

I made this little discovery while researching best practices in online learning. In most fields of education, best practice steals the limelight because it spells out the principles that prove to be tried and true. But then most fields of education do not, let's be brutally honest here, have a massive profit margin. Not so for educational technology, which promises not only profits but also a smorgasbord of dazzling and, for many decision makers, confounding options.

And so it came to pass that my pursuit for scholarly work on best practices in online training turned up a surprisingly limited number of sources. Rather than best practice, educational technology articles tend towards glowing reports of the glittering results to be had from using specific products - many of them proprietary and pricey. Even where technologies were free of charge, the literature remains depressingly fixated on products rather than principles. 

Of course there is nothing wrong with using certain products for fun, profit and learning, and I myself am a devotee of several digital products. (As seen in the first paragraph, I would be lost without Wikipedia. Lost. In fact, I started humming the first lines of Let it Be while hyperlinking that very definition of technology, substituting as needed: "When I find myself in times of trouble/ Wikipedia comes to me/speaking words of wisdom/linking me/dum dum dum...."). My point, and I do have one, is that the value is not in the products but in the principles we apply when using them. In fact, any self-respecting course on educational technology includes the mantra that It's Not The Technology But How You Use It, squeezed right in there between the emoticons :-) and virtual group hugs { }. It's just that by the time graduates receive their printable certificates by email they have already started researching how an entire school community quadrupled its GPA, mastered several foreign languages, eliminated bullying and developed perfectly defined abs by kitting every student out with an iPad. Latest-version, of course. Not to exaggerate or anything, but you get the gist. 

My small gesture towards placing principles before products has been to gather the scattered threads of literature on best practices in online course development. The article is a start, but it does not pretend to be a final answer. Best practices do document what has worked in the past, but they can also evolve over time and be tailored to each unique context. One of my current projects involves formulating a Manifesto of Best Practices in Online Courses within specific contexts in collaboration with local educators, as a guide to their evolving online training strategies. And yes, there is a collaborative paper on that in the works. 

The beauty of such a set of principles is that they are not bound to any product. Sound principles can have value in the use of any technology. Returning to the broad definition of technology above, that can even mean going offline. Or, for the truly extreme.... unplugging completely. Principles before Products. The fundamental things apply. 

Acknowledgement: For the style of this post I must credit not the scholarly realm but the inimitable Sophie Kinsella, whose fabulously frothy novels are a welcome counterbalance to academic gravity and whose winningly convincing characters behave in ways that bear no resemblance whatsoever, whether real or ficitious, to my own modus operandi. Ha.