webnet.htm
John Rueter and Nancy Perrin
submitted to Webnet 2000
Much of the discussion about the spread of new methods in educational technology have been based on the model for the diffusion of innovation. 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 faculty 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 previous efforts in faculty development focused on trying to help bridge this "chasm" through workshops and other activities.
We are 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 early research in agrarian systems that studied how new methods were communicated in rural society. This model has been applied to technology such as the use of word-processing skills but it is still a unidirectional process between people that 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 that can be transferred over the same channel as the information. In rural societies you didn't just pull a tractor out of your pocket when you met someone at the store.
Many faculty 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 restrict 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.
Figure 2. A schematic look at the connectivity in a college based on discipline contact. In this example, faculty from Geography have few rich connections to faculty outside their own department
Instructional technology has two aspects that helps form rich connections across disciplines. 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, other departments, and other universities 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, other faculty can link to that web page from their own course website and can use essentially the same instructions to do a different or follow-up exercise. Some other examples are listed in Table 1. The reusable 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 technology 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.
Table 1. Examples of sharing digital media that can be shared. These examples were taken from our project on using technology in the large classroom.
Department Concept Approach Biology Hardy Weinberg - genetic equilibrium Javascript calculator Psychology Interpretation of numerical information from graphs on-line assessment with help Geography Current volcanic activity specify information to find on the USGS site Chemistry Visualization of chemical bonds Molecular modeling software assignment and assessment
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. 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. 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, continuous innovation may require small areas that are not always being buffeted by sweeping change.
Based on the network metaphor presented above efforts to help faculty develop in their uses of information technologies (in particular digital technologies) should be focused in a different direction than if the diffusion of innovation model is used. The emphasis in the previous mode was to help some faculty to "bridge the chasm". In the network model the focus should be to develop a critical number of people using new teaching methods and make sure they are interacting with each other. A crucial parameter in both models is reliable support. This metaphor for connectivity and innovation also emphasizes the value of continued innovation as a force in progress.
Based on these ideas we suggest "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 review 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 PUS) have a very successful Teaching with Technology Fair in which faculty set up booths and talk to other faculty about what they are doing. De-emphasize events that are designed just to instruct faculty 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 available 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 subgroups.
Three things you can do if you are an administrator:
1. Adjust the budget processes so that implementation 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 past the "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, faculty development staff, information technology staff and other administrators.
It is time to move past the diffusion model for the spread of new methods in educational technology. Adopting a complexity based model can lead to faculty connections that crystallize to form a sustainable transfer and improvement of ideas.
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.
