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Engagement
I definitely agree with the idea that you will hear from more people online that you will in a face-to-face instructional environment. I've been thinking about that lately as it applies to the brief training meetings that we sometimes host. I work in HR in the central office of a state agency. We work most closely with the HR analysts in the field and I'm taking this course to discover ways to do what we do differently and more effectively, particularly train and onboard HR analysts. If our IT department would move into the 21st century we could have meetings via webinar instead of polycom. Not that polycom is bad. It's definitely nice to see faces. However, I know that there are people with questions who will never ask them in that setting. I'm sure the backchannel could be amazing and instructional for everyone.Students Don't Have to Be Tech Saavy
Another challenge is that my audience is not particularly tech savvy...this is probably not completely true, but I think that the majority have quite a bit of tenure and aren't into networking, sharing and learning. I was able to sell the idea of a discussion forum (using ProBoards) to our management and we did "launch" it but we haven't been able to get people to use it without prodding. On a few occassions, I sent an email with a teaser or a bit of introductory information and instructed the analysts to go to the forum to see the details and provide feedback. That worked really well. I'd love for them to use the forum to query their colleagues and discover best practices. Obviously this won't happen without effective facilitation and I'm clearly not an effective facilitator...yet :)I hope the forum might be the discussion hub for the human resources analyst orientation course that I hope to develop while taking this course. We do a lot of talking instead of helping our analysts to problem solve. It's the "lecture" approach. I bought a book called Telling Ain't Training. It's very true, just like Talking Ain't Teaching. I have a lot of work ahead of me because what I'm really trying to do is spark a culture shift. I think that those of you who are educators are at an advantage because it seems like the education community innately embraces improvement and learning. State government...not so much.
You wrote: "Another challenge is that my audience is not particularly tech savvy...this is probably not completely true, but I think that the majority have quite a bit of tenure and aren't into networking, sharing and learning".
ReplyDeleteI think this is true, though I don't think tenure's to blame but rather a lack of what you claim later on, that "the education community innately embraces improvement and learning". I have certainly seen some of that, obviously, among individual teachers, but not always as a culture of a college. And too often "improvement" means tracking, analytics and test scores, not innovation.
And I'm seeing a disconnect between being tech-savvy and being into sharing and learning in the open.
The folks you're trying to get into the discussion board may see it as "just another thing to do". That's hard to get past. I can't help but wonder whether any of them use Facebook already?
It IS hard to get past "just another thing to do". In fact, I'm finding way there myself. Aghast! At some point or points on a curve, I (maybe others) am simply over the complicatedness of technology. It's a kind of busy work peripheral to the task at hand, that quickly becomes the task at hand.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't a rant; it's an accumulation of personal experiences and observations.
I've pulled back on explorations of emerging technologies. I've turned off the bells and whistles. I eat with a fork. It works. All the time.
Lisa, these are great points and I know you're right:
ReplyDelete"...I'm seeing a disconnect between being tech-savvy and being into sharing and learning in the open."
I notice this at work.
"The folks you're trying to get into the discussion board may see it as 'just another thing to do.' That's hard to get past. I can't help but wonder whether any of them use Facebook already?"
I'm sure they view it this way, especially since there hasn't been any discussion that has provided lots of value. They are not familiar with the technology and so they don't know how amazing an online discussion forum community can be.
I probably need to take a poll about the Facebook thing. My only aversion to it is that you can't search or categorize posts in Facebook. We want the forum to also serve as a knowledge base.