Requiring Change

As a part of my desire to get more engaged in our various scholarly discussion, I posted a discussion response to a colleague’s posting about wikis in the Kairos Praxis wiki.  In this posting I wrote about a topic that was really triggered in my mind in various discussions at the 2007 Computers and Writing conference.  The problem:  what is the difference between how learn a new technology when it is required, versus being optional? In other words, I’m starting to cringe whenever I hear “my students learned this pretty easily.” My internal response, “well, they had to, you required it.” I’m not saying I don’t do this…heck, I do it all the time! My poor students are always fiddling around with some newer technology I’ve required that they use in the course.

But my point is that I think a majority of the students are more in the “majority,” the major portion of Roger’s curve, whereas those of us requiring the use of the technology are either in the Innovator or Early Adopter portion of the curve. I think those of use who are earlier in the curve are much more flexible, willing to play, not afraid to glitch or show flaws. Whereas our students, and remember they also have something at stake here—their grade, as folks in the majority section of the curve are not nearly as comfortable adopting to change and learning new things. Those of you who do require newer technologies in your classes, admit it, you know when you occasionally have an innovator or early adopter, they are ecstatic that you are playing with these technologies in the class. They are usually the ones coming to talk to you about the technology, and other ones they know about. They are not the norm!

As I’ve been reading books like Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation, Gladwell’s Tipping Point, Friedman’s The World is Flat, as well as Tapscott’s and William’s Wikinomics, I’ve been starting to think about how the different types of people and “rules” or “theories” in these books overlap to help theorize about how and why faculty and students engaged with and adopt newer technologies in different ways. I guess this is a call for “help” as I start to blog about connections between innovators, early adopters, early and late majorities, laggards, mavens, salesmen, and connectors. And then dump in some of the ideas in the Transtheoretical Model of Change that gives six stages of change. Maybe this is just me realizing it will be the cross pollination of these theories that will help me to analyze my dissertation data to get that thing out the door?!?!

June 27 2007 | Posted in Reading