The Battle Between Time and Technology

As I read through the commentary of my peers this week, I felt that a concern that seemed to be prevalent was the idea of time and technology.  How long would it take a student to learn Second Life?  How long would it take a teacher to learn and build in Second Life?  And most important of all, in a world where classes are crammed into very tiny segments of time, where does all this learning and implementing of complicated technology fit in?

I think Jerry said it very well in his posting about our tutorials (Tutorial Review):

Most of us recognize the need to provide more than static text in our course materials.  The challenge is that developing robust multimedia requires additional skills and special software.  The presentation ["Engaging Students with Multimedia for Improved Learning"] was provided by a team of experienced multimedia developers.  I would characterize the skills necessary to develop materials at the level illustrated in the tutorial to be “advanced”.

And that really says it all.  When we are all learning the technology on the side as we try to teach the curriculum, how do we groom ourselves to an "advanced" level so that we can teach our students technology skills also - and how do we do that in time to prepare them for the tech-rich environment they will be facing? 

I think the best any of us can do with this challenge is to put our current time into the pieces of technology we believe are going to be most facilitative to learning and save us the most time in future. 

For me so far, I believe that will be a platform similar to Second Life.  I find it to be the most time consuming on the front end but also the one likely to overcome the most challenges in online learning, particularly those described by Vesely, Bloom, and Shelock (2007): diminished social presence; lack of a sense of community; longer time between communications; and uneven participation.  The pros mentioned in Warburton's writing (2009) - persistence of the in-world environment; shared space allowing users to participate simultaneously; virtual embodiment in the form of an avatar; interactions between user and environment; immediacy of action; similarities to the real world - almost exactly align with the other study's cons in online education.

Technology is everywhere and overwhelming, to the point that with the amount of time we have in a day, it's almost impossible to become expert at any of it.  Many people are just able to say that they know a little bit about a lot of things.  As educators, it may be in our best interest to hone in on the tool that can accomplish the most and put in the time to make it as successful as it needs to be to truly deliver our content.