At the risk of sounding repetitive, the pandemic has made us force our offline lives online faster than we expected. I wrote about this when discussing Fully Online Learning Communities (FOLC) in May 2021 (Houldsworth, 2021). Weller (2020, p. 100) discussed “overenthusiastic initial adoption” of online worlds in Chapter 14 for 2007. He suggests that “virtual worlds for learning may be one of those technologies due for a comeback”. I agree with him, but perhaps not for the reasons he expected when he wrote that. Fortnite and the attempts by Silicon Valley to develop online worlds (Park, 2020) have provided a space for those who can and want to migrate their lives online, partly to avoid contagion and partly because they prefer it. I would argue that it is a smaller step now for schools to follow. As the pandemic continues to drag on, online life continues to pull us forward, while our old life tries to hold us back.
The concept of sludge (Thaler & Sunstein, 2021) or sedimentation (Weller, 2020) refers to the idea that administrative structures “accrue around the system” (Lanier, 2002, p. 222), making change difficult. In my professional life, I am living it due to the way that our systems have developed. When we were first required to work from home, simply accessing anything online was virtually impossible, which made regulating (a legally required activity!), let alone learning, very difficult. The very real risk of lack of nuclear regulatory oversight could have existed, which contradicts how we see ourselves. An organization can try very hard to be agile, but due to years of sedimentation, it cannot pivot very quickly, even when it thinks of itself as modern and responsive. Weller (2020) said, “it is necessary to be aware of every institutional action that adds to the sediment and to be aware that the greater the accrual of such sediment, the more difficult it becomes to implement, or even contemplate, other solutions” (p. 66). Throughout 2020, we watched the LMS, the regulatory activity databases, and even the processes used for hearings struggle along in the sludge, along with the people who use them. Thankfully, senior management is recognizing this now and making meaningful, forward-looking changes so that we won’t get caught again.
References:
Houldsworth, C. (2021, May 8). One Week (or maybe a Fortnite?) https://malat-webspace.royalroads.ca/rru0208/one-week-or-maybe-a-fortnite/
Park, G. (2020, April 17). Silicon Valley is racing to build the next version of the Internet. Fortnite might get there first. Washington Post. Retrieved May 7, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/04/17/fortnite-metaverse-new-internet/
Thaler, R., Sunstein, C. (2021). Nudge: the final edition. Penguin Books.
Weller, Martin (2020). 25 Years of Ed Tech. Canada: Athabasca University Press.
Thank you, Corie. Great point on the need – and difficulty – of regulating remotely. In your last sentence, you write that management is “making meaningful, forward-looking changes so that we won’t get caught again.” Can you speak to those in a few words? What are some changes that are enabling your organisation to move along, and, avoid being bogged down by sedimentation so to speak?
Thanks George!
The things that are being done now are pretty basic for industry, but big for government. We still don’t have the ability to livestream inspections or inspector training assessments due to bandwidth, security, and file size limitations. Senior management spoke to this at an all-staff meeting this week. They’re working on the adoption of Office 365, projects with scalability, and not building bespoke software anymore, as well as more secure network connections to be able to meet privacy and security requirements. These will be able to help us improve our in-house inspector training programs, as well as our regulatory activities. We’re working on the foundational access stuff currently, rather than the higher order Ed Tech that Weller discusses. The pandemic has really driven home the point that access is very unequal, as your post about TV learning in Mexico pointed out.
The current sedimentation that we’re bogged down in are things like reliance on fax machines (!) and paper mail, lack of staff expertise (MS Teams was rolled out to much confusion a couple of months ago), and using really old LMS (we have 2.5 of them). We have a long way to go before we can start talking about anything beyond Weller’s Chapter 3. Yes, we still use Bulletin Board Systems. Seriously.
Hi Corie,
Thanks for your post, and you raise a number of great points. I appreciate your comment about sounding repetitive in saying that the pandemic forced all of us online faster than we could have imagined. As sick as I am of hearing about, thinking about, stressing about, and talking about Covid, the reality is that we will continue to grapple with its impact for a very long time. Your comment “as the pandemic continues to drag on, online life continues to pull us forward, while our old life tries to hold us back” is brilliant and so true, and I see that conflict playing out. The sedimentation and sludge that come with the tools we relied on during the pandemic’s early days are leaning towards reinforcing traditional structures and methods, but in a digital format. I sung the praises of the LMS in this week’s blog post, and for good reason (https://malat-webspace.royalroads.ca/rru0202/the-comforting-embrace-of-the-lms-wellers-history-of-ed-tech-2002-2011/). However, I do wonder and worry somewhat, that educators are becoming complacent with the “good enough” aspects of the LMS and will avoid experimenting with ed tech like blogs, which are likely a more effective tool for life-long learning. For me, one of the big take-aways from Weller’s book is that change in education moves very, very slowly. Although we are in a unique situation and see the necessity of large-scale shifts in thinking, culture, and policy, the snail-like pace of educational change will make this process much more difficult.
Amber
What great synergy we accidentally had this week! Thanks for your comments, Amber.
As I noted in my reply to George, we have 2.5 LMS’s at work. It’s things like that as well as the basics, such as fax machines and lack of bandwidth, that continue to pull us backwards. The pandemic definitely lit a fire under us, but that change was sort of artificial and I wonder how much “backsliding” might happen when we get back into the office full-er time. Like you said in your post that the old LMS is a “familiar tool in a time when their world was consumed with uncertainty”, but also here that change moves “very slowly” (an understatement if I ever heard one!).
I see a lot of fear of change at work, as well as a lot of simple lack of knowledge about what’s currently possible. Both us and our licensees are using LMS’s of some sort, which I don’t think will change anytime soon, but things have changed over the past year more than I thought they would, and I wonder what other changes COVID has in store for us.
No kidding!
I completely agree with you. As this pandemic drags on and organizations, or people within organizations, see the potential for change, I wonder if the pull of the old and familiar way of doing things will result in a lot of cyclical discussion but no forward momentum. Time will tell, I suppose!