Both/And
or
When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It
Zittrain’s 5 Aspects of Generativity
- leverage (making it easy to do more)
- adaptability (making it easy to change)
- ease of mastery (making it easy to adopt)
- accessibility (making it easy to gain entry)
- transferability (making it easy to share)
Mr. Roger's Neighborhood
Everett Rogers and
Diffusion of Innovations
Attributes of Adoption for Teaching Innovation
- more work
- moving from the comfort zone
- more complex
- closeted/siloed
- idiosyncratic, not shareable, scalable
Rate of Adoption affected by
- relative advantage
- compatibility
- complexity
- trialability
- observability
Both/And not Either/Or
So technology does not carve out a space; we do the carving
- not displacement but symbiosis (TV/cinema)
- not a selection but a multiplication of options (communication)
- not a dispersion but a convergence -- on the user
Still, choices will be made in the long term, especially for things that resist that principle of convergence. Witness the fate of print journalism, video (book & record) stores, the encyclopedia business. How do you take the long view and make the right bets?
One problem: new modes don't "fix" things
Not just the Printing Press
but also the rise of
- the reading public
- the bourgeoisie
- the managerial class
- etc.
What will draw old faculty to new modes?
Part of the point then: It's not just technological change but systems change across multiple systems (economic, educational, cultural)
and
Sidesteps to Progress
Not So Fast
Socrates
(in Phaedrus )
inveighing against
the technology of
writing
Change is not to be confused with (linear, wholly positive) progress. Instead, we engage in a calculus of gain and loss, of missed understandings and slowly revised behaviors.
It started as a message service, allowing operators to inform all their own customers about such things as problems with the network. When we created SMS it was not really meant to communicate from consumer to consumer and certainly not meant to become the main channel which the younger generation would use to communicate with each other.
--Cor Stutterheim, inventor of SMS