Educational technology is brilliant at many things - but one thing it is absolutely brilliant at is sharing and connecting. You can share content across different platforms, you can share resources to students wherever they are, and you can connect to people in an almost infinite number of ways.
This all sounds great! But one of the things that has surprised me since starting work as a Learning Technology Adviser, is a brand of protectionism demonstrated by some academics. Their driving concern when it comes to any educational technology is that no ‘outsiders’ should ever have access to their academic resources.
The argument used to justify this concern is that they have spent a lifetime developing these resources, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to let any Professor Tea-Leaf nick them all just because they happen to be an External Examiner for the course, or another lecturer on the programme, or the Programme Manager or a student.
After all, these dubious characters may forge for themselves a stellar career entirely off the back of these ill-gotten but priceless sets of lecture notes and handouts!
It is difficult to know precisely how to deal with such attitudes.
I find it so hard to believe that people can be so hell-bent on jeopardizing their own professional integrity by stealing a bunch of PowerPoint slides. Are these disciplinary sectors really rife with such pyrrhic skullduggery?
This protectionist approach seems perfectly designed to stifle any personal or professional development.
Of course the idea of working in a bubble, where nobody can criticise or question, is tempting. It feels safe. You just produce the grades for your students and never have to answer questions about how you got them - or whether you could have done anything better. And perhaps we can even convince ourselves that it’s not possible to be any better - that we’ve got it nailed, and it would be sheer vandalism to challenge such perfection. But even were this true, while we as educators get older each year our students don’t. Even as our experience or expertise increases the distance between our lives and theirs also increases, and as this distance increases our methods and approaches slide quietly out of tune like a rubber guitar string.
Surely, we are better educators when we are able to get feedback from others? And we are better educators when we are able to give feedback to others? This means drawing back the magic curtain of our pedagogy. Demystifying the alchemical processes of our courses. And letting people see our damn PowerPoints.
And if they did steal our slides, so what? The whole reason I work in Education and spent so much time accumulating these poor scraps of knowledge, was so that I could give them away. Indeed, my entirely professional value has been based on how good I am at giving it away. And for as long as I have been in the profession, I have been (at least partly) funded by the public, so I have always felt that the public has a certain right to what I produce.
Perhaps the real concern here about jeopardizing my own self-perception? The fear of being told that I may, possibly, not be quite as good at my job as I think? But whether the issue is delusional paranoia, a secret academic Cold War where anyone may be an enemy agent, or a desperate desire to protect a fragile self-image - it works directly against some of the very things that make educational technology so valuable: It stops us sharing and it stops us connecting.
So - here’s the question: What can we do to support academics so constrained by these kinds of fears? Or are they right, and am I wrong: This is simply a skullduggerous world, and I am naive to think otherwise?
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