Technology - stepping back for a moment

As I tidy up the backlog of my communicatios for SCEPTrE (and make this blog part of that process), I find I have space to think that i didn't have when I was employed full time Making Things Happen. Perhaps this is all part of the reason I needed to leave full-time working in higher education. In the busy, productivity-driven world, it's too difficult to carve out time for intelligent planning and impossible to question the drivers that keep us going forward. So, for now, this blog will continue and reflect on SCEPTrE and CETLs from a slowly increasing distance. I hope this will be useful for me, as a reflective process, and for readers (if there are any) as evaluation and research data.

Today, I have been adding to the Progress Report that we (I mean SCEPTrE team) produce for Executive Group. Headings have become fairly standardised over time and one is, as it always has been, 'Technology'. Now that I'm not in the process, but still able to add to it, a question arises: what do we say about ourselves by positioning 'technology' (in the singular??) as a subject worthy of comment? I think it somehow implies that we do not really consider technology to be a part of what we do, that it needs to be singled out as a separate focus for achievement. Perhaps it says that we are struggling to integrate ourselves (as a team and as a university) into the complex world that is dependent on computers, mobile phones, digital images, internet, social and formal tools and spaces, all underpinned by this technology stuff. We don't, for example, have a heading in our report for 'words and language' - as they are the stock-in-trade of committees, and of learning and teaching. There will be more on this, I am sure.

Only from a distance can I articulate my long-term discomfort with the way we intellectually and collectively make 'technology' separate from what we actually do. The consequences of this are worth thinking about. Fixing the tools becomes someone else's problem. The tools and the media distract us from thinking about how we make the ideas stick. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. As much of the literature on communication and change suggests, people and relationships are the key- these are harder to quantify or report on using two-dimensional technologies of type on paper.

Comments

[lacoste shoes]

Perhaps it says that we are struggling to integrate ourselves (as a team and as a university) into the complex world that is dependent on computers, mobile phones, digital images, internet, social and formal tools and spaces, all underpinned by this technology stuff.

[cheap jerseys]

I think it somehow implies that we do not really consider technology to be a part of what we do, that it needs to be singled out as a separate focus for achievement. Perhaps it says that we are struggling to integrate ourselves (as a team and as a university) into the complex world that is dependent on computers, mobile phones, digital images, internet, social and formal tools and spaces, all underpinned by this technology stuff.

[College Research Papers]

I never thought of it like that, but it really is true.