As an Instructional Designer, it’s rarely my role to take a definitive position. In my view, modern technology is neither killing nor a panacea for education. I’ve come to honestly embrace ambiguity, and in doing so, I’ve discovered professional freedom like never before.
I work to be an empathizer, a self-awareness advocate, a support mechanism, and at times, a hostage negotiator — Put Twitter down! It’s not serving you or your students and someone is eventually going to get killed…intellectually.
For the right educator with the right tools, ed-tech is magical, but the wrong tools in the wrong hands leads inevitably to disaster. We’ve all either seen it, experienced it, or heard the horror stories.
We’re too often held hostage by the promise of ed-tech, and while it does offer a unique bridge to relating more authentically to our students, if not done honestly and thoughtfully, they see right through the superficial bullshit. And the tech we once praised as our savior, quickly erodes trust and respect; two things that are truly sacred which will always trump tech when it comes to influencing student potentiality.
My position is to play strategically in the clouds and the dirt. I don’t underestimate the awe and grandeur of envisioning an inevitable (and truly exciting) tech-saturated future, but simultaneously take the role of a critical practitioner. I look to inspire others by dreaming in the clouds, but I’m also happy to be unapologetically critical, only after having played in the dirt. Being a true practitioner (that’s playing in the dirt) allows you the freedom to honestly criticize technology having experienced its shortcomings first-hand. From this perspective, liminality becomes freedom and opportunity.
In our intellectual pursuits as “disruptive educators,” we’ve developed far too many opinions without having put in the work to justify such rigid beliefs. The algorithms, adaptive systems, distributed networks, privacy schemas, big-data…whatever that means, ethics, etc. are too easily criticized without having spent the time necessary to develop callouses digging in the trenches— which can be very dirty work in every sense of the word.
I prefer not to play this popular game of tug-of-war where we position ourselves on either end of an ideological spectrum, and instead, find value in playing in both the clouds and dirt, taking a liminal position at the center of the rope, orthogonal to the current hegemonic views of ed-tech and education. This is often where I’ve found the greatest flexibility and capacity to discover the adjacent possible needed, now more than ever, in education. Until I’m proven otherwise, I plan to remain satisfied with very few opinions and the freedom afforded by the uncommon pursuit of liminality.
