web.pdx.edu/~rueterj/rtw/new_metaphor
John Rueter
Jan 23, 1999
Much of the discussion about the spread of new methods in educational technology have been based on Roger's model of the diffusion of innovation. We used this model extensively to design faculty development programs for faculty at PSU (OIT talk). The model is very useful because it divides the faculty into different categories with respect to their ease of adoption of new technologies; innovators, early adopters, early mainstream, late mainstream and laggards. The ease of adoption can be related to the steepness of the learning curve for these faculty, with early adopters learning material very quickly to late adopters having a much longer learning curve.
The reported "chasm" (see Figure 1)in the diffusion of innovation is of critical interest to faculty development efforts. There seems to be a barrier to diffusion in many systems that have been studied and certainly seems to hold in academic settings.
Figure 1. Categories of faculty with respect to using new technologies and the "chasm" between early adopters and early mainstream.
This model for facutly development implies that the transfer of information flows from innovators to early adopters easily and that there is difficulty translating that into action and acceptance by the early mainstream faculty. Our efforts in faculty development focused on trying to help bridge this "chasm" through workshops and other activities.
We expanded on this two-dimensional model with one-dimensional diffusion, we also developed a conceptual dynamic model for the faculty development process. This model included the factors for recruitment, support and retention for faculty in different categories (Table 1).
| Table 1. Faculty categories and relative effort required to maintain them in their use of educational technologies. |
| Category | Recruitment & learning curve |
Support requirements | Retention |
| innovator |
no recruiting effort rapid learners |
maybe low from faculty development | long term |
| early adopters |
minor effort rapid learning |
moderate and in spurts | will probably stick with it |
| early mainstream |
substantial effort reasonable learning curve |
higher and continuous |
fickle: may drop out if technology is unreliable |
| late mainstream |
major effort trainable but slow |
highest level of continuous support needed | brittle: may drop out after minor failure of technology |
| laggards | uninterested | not feasible |
Given these characteristics for the different categories of faculty we hypothesized that increased facutly recruitment could actually decrease the number of faculty using technology if the per capita support level dropped below the required support threshhold for the early and late mainstream faculty. We argued for a systematic approach for facutly development that looked at the entire cost of recruitment and support. Functionally, this resulted in stronger communication between the faculty development group (Center for Academic Excellence) and the support group (Office of Information Technology/Instructional Design and Support Center).
We extended the conceptual dynamic model to demonstrate how information must flow from faculty recruitment to support to outcomes assessment, and that the assessment results must flow back to faculty, faculty development and technology groups. The outgrowth of this analysis was to set up discipline specific "institutes" that would include programmatic assessment efforts.
I am now proposing a new metaphor for the spread of innovative uses of technology and pedagogy in teaching and learning that is based on the connectedness of the faculty. This new model is useful because it recognizes several weaknesses of the diffusion model. The underlying model is that of networks and connectedness rather than one-dimensional diffusion. An appropriate metaphor for this model is a forest fire in rugged terrain, rather than mass transfer from high to low concentrations.
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Figure 2. A cellular automata view of a forest fire.
The fire spreads from one site but doesn't necessarily spread to all burnable
neighbors. After the fire passes, there is regeneration of the forest.
The brown areas are barriers to the fire. A partially connected system
will show more variation in the spread than a completely connected forest.
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The "network" metaphor recognizes several shortcomings with the "diffusion" model. The diffusion model is based on an agrarian system and the passing of methods in rural society. This model has been applied to technology such as the use of word-processing skills but it is still a uni-directional process between people the interact with each other and exchange information as a part of their normal activities. The network model incorporates our understanding of how technology has fundamentally changed both the level of connectedness between people and the types of processes and products that can be conveyed over those links. For example, in educational technology a faculty can develop a web-site that can be accessed by several of his colleagues at their convenience and that web-site can include products and tools (such as graphics, Javascript, cgi scripts and others) that can be transferred over the same link to the information. In rural societies you didn't just pull a tractor our of your pocket when you met someone at the store.
Many facutly only have rich connections within their own department or discipline. A "rich" connection is one that can provide for the reciprocal exchange of teaching content and methods. This situation will limit the broad dissemination of new teaching/learning strategies and in particular may even limit the exchange of teaching/learning techniques that are not discipline specific. Some departments have their own computer labs for using educational technologies. Although faculty may develop new methods in these labs, they will not be visible and potentially not very portable to other disciplines.
One major avenue for faculty development and enrichment is the hiring of new faculty into the department. Often this is the hiring of a younger person who will bring new techniques and theoretical basis to the entire department. This avenue is extremely valuable for the growth of the research activities and assests of the department but may not have the same benefit to teaching and learning. Often these faculty are supposed to focus on their research and are "protected" from teaching activities. This situation is particularly important for the transfer of new technologies into the department and yet is has a minimum impact on introducing new technologies into the teaching enterprise.
Figure 2. A schematic look at the connectivity in a college based on discipline contact. In this example, facutly from Geography have few rich connections to facutly outside their own department
Instructional technology has two aspects that helps form rich connections. First, the information about teaching is freely available, such as posting of syllabi on the internet. This availability of information makes the process of teaching more visible to peers in the same department and in other departments that may require those courses as prerequisites. The second, and a very important, way that that information technology can help is that the tools can be transferred along with the content. For example, if you use a Javascript page to explain a particular concept, the other faculty can link to that web page from their own course website. Another example might be the use of a spreadsheet to demonstrate population growth, not only do the other faculty see what you have made available for your students they can use essentially the same instructions to do a different or follow-up exercise. The re-usable aspects of our digital technology is a crucial characteristic that makes the spread of innovations with digital technologies different from spread of innovations in previous process or analog technologies.
Figure 3. A schematic look at the connectivity for instructional technologoy in the same college. This diagram shows the additional rich connections that might be formed through the use of instructional technologies that allow sharing of both content and techniques.
The underlying theories for this model are based on complex networks. From this literature there are several aspects that should be important; the number of nodes and connections (Kauffman 1993). Based on the number of nodes (faculty) and the number of links (rich connections that each of these faculty make) we would expect several characteristics to emerge. As the number of total connections approaches the number of faculty, the structure should begin to crystallize. The mean number of faculty that are linked to another faculty will start to rise above 1 as the number of connections exceed the number of faculty. The "radius" (which as index of how many connections it takes for a change in one faculty to propagate to its decendants) will reach a maximum at some point where the connections are greater than faculty, but continuing increase in the number of connections will decrease the radius. This is because shorter pathways to all of the descendants will emerge. For example if F=200 the maximum radius (about 12) will be at C=320 and the radius will decrease to less than 8 when C > 400. This means that an average of two rich connections per faculty will provide a highly connected system. A final characteristic of this connectivity is the development of feedback loops where a faculty would be connected in such a way that information on changes they made would come back to them. Again the number of linkages is crucial and with 200 faculty and 400 links, about 80% of the faculty would be on feedback loops that were somewhere between 4 and 8 faculty long. The importance of increased rich connections leads to shorter radius, more feedback and shorter feedback loops.
The other characteristic of a network would be the degree of connectedness. This is probably easiest to visualize as the number of gaps in the landscape and the local areas of high connectivity (such as a department). In Figure 2 the metaphor of a fire crossing a landscape was proposed. This metaphor is fitting in that innovation is not going to necessarily affect all of a particular persons neighbors but it may catch on. Even though the spread of innovation is thought to be beneficial, the homogeneity that comes from over-connectedness should be avoided. Just as a fire sweeping across a forest may leave small parcels of landscape that serve as innoculum for subsequent growth, the continued process of innovation may require small areas that are not always being buffetted by sweeping change.
Based on my arguments and the network metaphor presented above, I fell that efforts to help faculty develope in their uses of information technologies (in particular digital technologies) is fundamentally different than previous models for the diffusion of innovation would support. Whereas the emphasis in the previous mode was to help some faculty to "bridge the chasm", to develop a critical number of people using new teaching methods and to ensure support; the only similarity to this model is the crucial value of available support. This metaphor for connectivity and innovation also emphasizes the value of continued innovation as a force in progress.
Based on these ideas, I will present "three things you can do" for faculty, faculty development staff, information technology administrators and academic administrators.
Three things you can do if you are a faculty member:
1. Make your teaching public (Hutchins 1993). Invite your colleagues to your lectures. Give them the URL to your website. Sharing your teaching and getting peer reveiw will help improve your teaching. Put links on your teaching materials that describe how you did something, i.e. provide explanation pages for both your peers and students. Remember, many of our students are going to go on to teach in the same way that you do.
2. Make time to make rich connections. Find two or three people who you can work with to either learn techniques they have mastered or to teach them what you have learned.
3. Take the time to understand the technology that is working. Go out of your way to thank people and lend your support to the staff that are running the systems that work all the time.
Three things you can do if you are a faculty development facilitator:
1. Plan events that help make teaching visible. We (at PSU) have a very successful Teaching with Technology Fair in which faculty set up booths and talk to other facutly about what they are doing. De-emphasize events that are designed just to instruct facutly on new skills.
2. Invite new people to all of the events. Including one "new" face each meeting may be as important for the long range propagation of information as having any particular meeting be twice as large with the regular crowd.
3. The most difficult part of this enterprise will not be the adoption of new technologies but rather the verification or assessment that these new methods are meeting the needs of the faculty and students. You should devote a large amount of effort to assessment and evaluation activities.
Three things you can do if you are an information technology administrator:
1. Make sure that the digital resources that you provide for faculty are solidly supported, i.e. make sure the webserver is robust. Faculty and students are depending on these resources as a new form of life blood. The corollary to this is to be careful about what you choose to promote as your services.
2. Encourage or budget time for your staff to teach in the disciplines. Just teaching a single course per year will put this staff member in the "teacher/practitioner" category. This will increase both the credibility of your staff and provide direct feedback on how everything is working. Be sure to put these faculty right in the trenches of offering real courses to real students and using only the same technology that is availalbe to all other faculty.
3. Make all facilities available to everyone. It might be wise of course to pilot certain technologies on a limited scale, but as soon as the test is over, make that technology universally available. You will need to budget for this but it will promote university wide connections. Don't make the mistake of providing customized services for sub-groups.
Three things you can do if you are an administrator:
1. Adjust the budget processes so that implemenation of new technologies (hardware and software is directly linked to ongoing support and upgrades.
2. Look for faculty incentive models that promote both rewarding that particular faculty for their work but also the formation of rich connections. One school gives release time to groups of faculty to work together (instead of giving that just to an individual faculty).
3. Realize that "managing complexity" is an oxymoron, get pas tthe "boxology". The way to do this is make the goals of the entire enterprise clear and then both communicate those goals to everyone and simultaneously make everyone responsible. Interpret the university's or college's goals in terms of access and quality that are meaningful to faculty, facutly development staff, information technology staff and other administrators.
Information technology is pervasive in our lives and educational endeavors, it fundamentally changes the way we do some things. These technologies have transformed the nature of connections between faculty around teaching improvement. The goal of our universities should be to help spread innovations in teaching with technology across the campus while at the same time nurturing continued innovations.
Rueter, John G. - Faculty Development for Teaching and Learning with Technology: New Directions for PSU, 1997.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 1993. The Origins of Order. Oxford Press. (page 423).
Hutchins, Pat. 1993. Making Teaching Community Property. AAHE Teaching Initiative.
