Reflection 1: Educational Technology

My thoughts about Educational Technology might be different than some students in my class.  I am not a K-12 or higher education teacher.  All of my teaching is done a corporate level in healthcare.  So my perspective is a bit different, but I would say that we have some of the same ideas and goals.   Goals and motivation seem to be my most outstanding thought that I have about educational technology.   Improving performance, I think, is the goal of any educational technology but in most cases I sometime wonder if anyone every asked the question what the goal of the performance should be.  I struggle with this concept in my own field when a technology is introduced to my end users.  I am always wondering if the goal of the outcome was to just have them use a new application or was it to improve patient care.  I know the answer is patient care but the goal getting there is not always as clear as one would think.  One thing that is important to understanding technology and education is to make sure we understand what motivates the learner to learn and only then, will we improve performance.

 I read a great article last semester from Gray Hamel that make great since to me about corporate training.  Hamel’s article made a very good point about business, they often sends an e-mail to a group and believes the word “training” in the subject line means that training is complete.  This made me think, as stated by Hamel possible the cause of for number of organizational initiative failures every year, is because of the “lack of attention to individual’s learning needs” so it does not only happen in K-12 but in large organizations as well (Hamel, 2009).  This made me think about theories done about technology and education, do they only look at young adults learning when they are doing these studies.  How often do universities use older adults for learning studies?  In most of the studies I read as undergrad in psychology tend to only have freshmen in the studies.  I have to admit that I learn a lot different now than I ever did in high school and even my freshmen year.   

One thing that I found to be interesting by one of my classmates is he let his students use cell phones in the classroom. I really like the fact that more teachers are not look at technology as a cheating tool for students.  The business world uses cell phones every day to conduct business, why would we not teach students how to balance both worlds as well?  It just something I found to be very interesting. 

The knowledge I have gained from learning a better definition about education technology is that we have to make sure that we keep the process of learning and technology a group effort as is learning from each other as well as making sure we still manage the complex issues.  I feel that my experience in learning more about the definition of technology helps influence those around me.  I want to make sure we understand the goals and the motivation of what makes a learner meet performance.  I know, this will always be a struggle for me because often times those in leadership only see one way people learn.  I think that is something that I now understand from many of my classmates, people making the decisions about education sometimes only see black and white learning but the teachers who teach are colorful.    I just hope with this process of understanding more about the education technology and the decisions that are be made I can enlighten those who we need to be open to the learning needs of our students, parents, educators, and business people learning.  We all learn different and for good reason because we all have something to contributes to our culture to make it a better place.  Training should not be centered on technology, but on the way the human mind works using the technology (Atkinson & Mayer, 2004). 

I think that Januszewki’s definition is pretty close to how I feel that Education Technology should be defined.  This might how I would state it:

        Educational technology is a complex, integrated process, involving people, instructional design, ideas, devices, and organization, for analyzing problems and devising, implementing, evaluating and managing solutions to those problems, involved in all aspects of human environment of learning and motivation.

 Lindy

References:

Atkinson, C. & Mayer, R. (2004). 1 2 3 4 5 Five ways to reduce PowerPoint overload. Retrieved from http://www.sociablemedia.com/PDF/atkinson_mayer_powerpoint_4_23_04.pdf

Hamel, Gary. (2009) Moon Shots for Management – Harvard Business Review. (n.d.). Retrieved September 21, 2011, from http://hbr.org/2009/02/moon-shots-for-management/ar/1

Januszewski, A. (2001). Educational Technology: The Development of a Concept. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, Inc.

Januszewski, A., & Molenda, M. (2008). Chapter 1: Definition. In Educational technology: A definition with commentary (pp. 1 – 14). NY: Lawrence Erlbaum, Inc.

Note:  I put all of this together using OneNote.  It worked out very nicely because I could have all my thoughts in one place.  Still did have to do some printing for note taking on the articles I used.  Still on the learning curve for that.