Something was bothering me about our unit 1 readings and I couldn’t put my finger on it until just now, the readings from Watters (2014) didn’t sit well with me. It’s not because I don’t agree with her, in actual fact I think she is probably 100% correct in her assertions. What bothered me is the retrospective critique of past online edtech failures. As I mentioned, I agree with her and the author knows way more that I ever will on the subject, but I just think it’s too easy to pick off this low hanging fruit without being someone who was directly involved with these projects. Watters writes about failures of OpenCourseWare, Fathom, and AllLearn as monumental disasters and seems to insinuate that this could have been avoided with proper planning, design, and organization. The problem I have with this is that she has no way of knowing all of the circumstances in which each of these projects were built (maybe they were government funded and were pushed through for political reasons?).
This reminds me of situations I used to run into all the time as a contractor, people would have a project completed by another contractor (not myself) and be unhappy with the results. They would then ask me to come over and comment on all of the perceived problems with their work. I always resisted the urge to comment on things because I had no way of knowing the conditions that the project was built in..they could have rushed by the owner, advised that it was ‘good enough’, or perhaps they just got what they paid for and shouldn’t have ‘cheaped out’ in the first place. Unless you have actually been part of the project, your retrospective observations are biased.
Sorry for the rant…
Hi Steve,
I actually quite liked Watters articles I found them easy to read, and did agree with much of what she said. However, i would like to have seen more support for her specific claims. I recognise they were key notes and reciting an APA paper probably would not translate well to a live audience, but I feel more specific support was warranted.
Hey Marshall,
Thanks for the response. Just to be clear, I was in no way questioning her knowledge on the subject, just the notion that it is very easy to be critical after the fact.
Steve
Hi Steve,
I agree that is it easy to provide harsh critique on past projects without full knowledge of the conditions that contributed to the faults and failings.
I chose to watch a keynote by Watters at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw_hBhDW9sA&t=2988s. Among my takeaways from her speech are: 1) the importance of creating a caring learning environment for instructors and students; and, 2) the difficultly in justifying educators wages in a world where people are volunteering their knowledge and learning process es by publicly posting their learning in the formative stages (such as what we are doing now) and in the finished stages.
My question for our future careers/contracts is: Are we shifting from educators to designers and facilitators? If yes, what skills will be valued the most in the marketplace?