1
Mapping the Field and Terminology

Nick Rushby and Daniel W. Surry

Constant change is here to stay (Anon)

1.1 Living with Change

We give into temptation and say that over the past 100 years, the means by which we learn has changed out of all recognition. According to the utopian view, in the developed world education has changed from being classroom-based and teacher-led, to life-long learning that is learner-focused and capable of being delivered where and when the learner wants. Training has evolved from being a one-on-one activity where an expert demonstrated his or her skills to a novice, to a flexible, packaged delivery of targeted training at the point and time of need. It is learning technology that has made this revolution possible.

There are several problems with this utopian view. First, the majority of learning technologists live in the developed world and even in the developed world most of the education system still relies on classroom-based, teacher-led learning. In developing countries, with a few notable exceptions, there has been little change in traditional educational practices. In the world of training, classroom- and workshop-based, instructor-led sessions are still the norm rather than the exception. Second (and more optimistically), this view is but a snapshot of a world in which change is accelerating. It would be naïve to assume that the point we have reached now represents the pinnacle of achievement for learning technology. Nils Bohr is quoted as saying, "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." and the only thing that we might say with any confidence is that after the next hundred years education and training will (probably) look very different.

St Jude, who lived in the first century AD and who was martyred in Persia or Syria around 65 AD, is the patron saint of impossible causes. Many have adopted him as the patron saint of learning technology. They feel that although learning technology has so much to offer to the process of learning and performance improvement, its promise has never been properly realized. The introduction of learning technology always involves change in an environment-education-that is traditionally conservative and highly resistant to change. One of the purposes of the education system is to guard society's culture and pass it on to the next generation.

As each new technological innovation arrives, there are claims that "this will revolutionize learning" and those who have been working in the field for many years have a feeling (to quote Yogi Berra) of "déjà vu all over again!" (Berra and Kaplan 2003). Such claims have been made for successive waves of technology going back as least as far as the kinematograph, which was predicted to replace classroom teachers through the use of educational films. Indeed, if the affordances attributed to contemporary mobile devices are compared with those for a book there is cause to wonder whether much progress has been made over the past 150 years. We must conclude that most learning technologists are not very competent in the tactics and strategy of innovation. We could argue that if the roles of learning technologists are fragmented so that there are different people designing, developing, and managing learning resources, then there should be specialists whose task it is to manage innovation and change. The reality is that most learning technologists need (or will need in the future) to understand and engage in the politics of innovation.

A key problem that particularly besets information and communications technologies (ICT) in learning is that the champions tend to be well informed about the technology itself but often less competent in the broader aspects of learning. Their uncritical euphoria takes them through the technological development and the initial creation of pilot learning resources, but then meets a more skeptical group of people who are committed to the status quo and who are very hard to convince of the merits of the innovation.

Moore (1999) uses the analogy of a chasm as a break point in the innovation curve Figure 1.1. The initial take-up of an innovation happens with early adopters, who are naturally curious and willing to experiment with something new. But then the adoption curve meets a break point. Before the innovation can spread there is a large group that Moore calls the "cautious majority" who need to be convinced. They look for other people like them to go first, to try it out, and report back on their success. But, given that they are all on the same side of the chasm, it is difficult to get a critical mass of these decision makers who will endorse the innovation.

Xie, Sreenivasan, Korniss et al. (2011) use computer modeling to show that a committed minority of around 10% is required to reverse the prevailing majority opinion. In terms of the context in which learning technologists work, that is a far larger minority than most innovations currently have. It would mean that in a given institution one in ten of the staff, randomly distributed through the institution, would be constantly advocating the use of learning technology to their uncommitted colleagues and would be immune to any adverse influence that might cause them to lose their belief in the advantages of educational technology. Once that tipping point of 10% is reached, the model indicates that there is a dramatic decrease in the time taken for the entire population to become believers and to adopt the innovation. So, effective learning technologists need the skills of persuading and influencing to increase the size of the committed-evangelical-minority.

There are strategies that have been used effectively to "cross the chasm." In the 1970s the UK National Development Programme in Computer Assisted Learning (Hooper 1977) adopted the twin policies of matched funding and institutionalization. It was a requirement that the host institution matched the external project funding and thus demonstrated its commitment to the project. It was argued that if an institution had invested significant resources in the project, then it would have good reason to ensure that the innovation continued after the external funding ended. The strategy of institutionalization required the project to develop plans for its continuation at a very early stage in the overall project. Thus, by the time the external funding came to an end the cautious majority would have been convinced and would provide their support. Other funding agencies in Europe and North America have used similar strategies to maximize the chances of success for their innovations.

Particularly in the training content, but increasingly in academia, the cautious (even skeptical) majority ask questions about the return on the investment in learning technology. While the early adopters (to the left of the chasm) are content to use their curiosity as sufficient reason to make changes, others look at the costs of investing in the technology and in the development of new learning resources, and need to be persuaded that the longer term savings are justified. Classroom-based learning requires relatively little investment: the costs are dominated by the recurrent costs of staff, accommodation, and consumables. Disruptive change often requires significant investment, which must be balanced by the promise of future savings.

George Santayana (1905) wrote "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

A compelling example of this was given by Rushby and Seabrook (2008), who investigated research projects on the use of ICT in learning during the 20-year period from 1980 to 2000. They mapped the findings of this research onto the research agenda of a major UK funding agency in 2007 and found that almost all of the questions that were under investigation had already been addressed (and largely answered) years earlier-albeit with earlier versions of the technology. Paradoxically, one of the key reasons for this blindness to historical research was the technology itself. Today's researchers have become accustomed to carrying out their literature search using the internet as a primary-often the only-source. They are guided by two dangerous assumptions: first, that the technology they are investigating is so new that nothing can have been done with it before and, second, that if it is not on the internet then it does not exist. Crucially, most of the reports of this earlier research were not available on the internet: it was only in the final years of the 20th century that research reports and journal papers were routinely published online. And so the researchers had overlooked the earlier work that might have saved them time and resources, and might have enabled them to go further in their own work.

In this context of change this Handbook of Learning Technology brings together 29 contributions by acknowledged experts across the world, setting out an authoritative and contemporary view of the field. The phrase 'learning technology' deliberately reflects the book's scope to include both education and training. The terms 'educational technology', 'instructional technology,' and 'learning technology'...