{"id":270,"date":"2019-12-17T18:53:10","date_gmt":"2019-12-18T02:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/?p=270"},"modified":"2019-12-17T18:53:10","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T02:53:10","slug":"musings-on-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/musings-on-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Musings on Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve spent the last three days reading and re-reading Dron’s (2014) chapter in Online Distance Education<\/em>, thinking about innovation, technology and education. It’s so tremendously rich with ideas I’d not known about previously, or had only thought about in different contexts than education technology.<\/p>\n

Some of what keeps me going back to this chapter is the myriad of ways that we, within Western culture, use the word innovation<\/em>, and the multiplicity of ways that it is used in this chapter. Merriam Webster (n.d.) defines innovation as:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. the introduction of something new<\/li>\n
  2. \u00a0a new idea, method or device<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    While I’ve certainly used innovation in this way, it would seem that in our cultural context it means more – there’s an implication to the word that suggests technology, and useful<\/em> technology.<\/p>\n

    Innovation is something we talk about regularly in my household, as my partner is a prototyper and inventor.\u00a0 Our conversations about innovation and innovating often center around the use of ideas or objects, their ability to simplify and make life better in one way or another.<\/p>\n

    The Dron (2014) chapter\u00a0discusses the adoption of new technologies (innovations) through several models. I investigated each of them, from Roger’s innovation diffusion theory (Rogers, 1995 as cited in Dron, 2014, p. 243) to UTAUT (Venkatesh, Morrris, Davis, & Davis, 2003, as cited in Dron, 2014, p.244) and had several conversations with my partner as we looked at what fit with our own experiences and observations. Ultimately, looking to understand educators in particular, I found\u00a0 this metaphor (the image is hyperlinked to the original page):<\/p>\n

    \"Image<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    The pencil metaphor echoes most closely my experience of working with school populations (from K to post-secondary) as to how educators respond to new introductions of technology in the pedagogical or andragogical space.<\/p>\n

    The\u00a0ferrules <\/em>being the corrolary to Roger’s laggards, the\u00a0leaders<\/em> parallel to Roger’s innovators. The piece that this (rather un-academic) model has that is missing from the other ones is the erasers<\/i>\u00a0and hangers-on,\u00a0<\/em>who, in my experience, are as big a barrier to adoption of new technology as the ferrules<\/em>. They are the architects of or the believers in the hard system, the non-responsive context. It is no wonder that, as Dron points out, adoption of new technologies and change happens most expeditiously in contexts that are tolerant of and promote diversity (Seely Brown & Duguid, 2000, as cited in Dron, 2014), as change happens in places that can entertain a variety of viewpoints.<\/p>\n

    I’d love to wrap this post up into a tidy bow, but that’s not possible yet. I want to pause with this rich chapter – to not feel rushed to have a final understanding of the richness that is in it. I’ll continue exploring other pieces, as well as digging deeper into some of the technologies that Dron (2014) discusses – some that are already defunct<\/a>, and others that look promising for possible classroom work.<\/a><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \n

    References:<\/h3>\n
    <\/div>\n
    Dictionary by Merriam-Webster: America\u2019s most-trusted online dictionary. (n.d.). Retrieved December 17, 2019, from https:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
    <\/div>\n
    Dron, J. (2014).\u00a0Chapter 9: Innovation and Change: Changing how we Change.<\/a>\u00a0In Zawacki-Richter, O. & T. Anderson (Eds.),\u00a0Online distance education: Towards a research agenda<\/a><\/i>. Athabasca, AB: AU Press.<\/div>\n
    <\/div>\n
    \n
    \n
    The Pencil Metaphor: How Teachers Respond To Education Technology. (2014, August 28). Retrieved December 17, 2019, from TeachThought website: https:\/\/www.teachthought.com\/technology\/pencil-metaphor-how-teachers-respond-to-education-technology\/<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’ve spent the last three days reading and re-reading Dron’s (2014) chapter in Online Distance Education, thinking about innovation, technology and education. It’s so tremendously rich with ideas I’d not known about previously, or had only thought about in different contexts than education technology. Some of what keeps me going back to this chapter is … Continue reading Musings on Innovation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[25,24,38,19],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lrnt524","category-uncategorized","tag-education","tag-education-technology","tag-innovation","tag-reflection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/143"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions\/274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0113\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}