The title of this post was also the title of a talk by Barbara Taranto, the Director of the Digital Library Program at the New York Public Library at yesterday’s FIT conference. I just love it. An “education inflected architecture” is exactly what I crave. But beyond that, Barbara poses exactly the right challenge:
For faculty and the organizational structures that support their work, it has been a bit of a rough ride –mastering new tools for collecting, analyzing and organizing information and at the same time accepting the responsibility of managing the outcome of all the collecting, analyzing and organizing activities that so persistently carry on. But for software developers, including some very prominent academic ones, it has been a free-for-all, an ideal market for real life R&D. Every week, or perhaps even every day, there is a new tool or a “better way” to do one’s job, a new piece of software to have and to learn and to use, a new widget, gadget, and for some, a new toy that needs no marketing other than to say it is a solution to a problem we didn’t know we had. And so for a very long time the focus of administrative activity has been on this shifting, volatile environment and how best to adapt to the “new student” and how best to create the “new university” in order to meet the needs of the “users”, generic-faced as they may be, even when the idea of the new university is not even well articulated by its greatest proponents.
But amidst all the busyness, the balance and direction of the academe seems to have moved beneath our feet. The lauded best practices of instruction and research are often driven by software development and the overbearing individualist psychology of the consumer rather than by any higher purpose. We are encouraged qua instructors to describe our work –even our passion– as a “service” to others, and to proscribe future work as a functional unit –an economic widget; and qua researchers, to insist on further resources to meet our individual needs. In my mind, the model is dysmorphic and very possibly unsustainable–certainly undesireable. I suggest that for education practice to right itself, to flourish and evolve, and for students and academics to get back to the work of learning we need to shed the technology carapace and develop a new education inflected archtecture.”
To sum up, we have to stop deciding what we’re trying to accomplish based on what our tools make easy (or hard) to do and start deciding what our tools need to look like in order to help us with what we’re trying to accomplish. That’s…well…a lot harder than it sounds. Because computers are essentially stupid, they force us to explicitly map out even the very basics of what we’re trying to do. It’s easy to make these maps incompletely or even inaccurately, in part because some of what we’re trying to articulate explicitly is inherently tacit knowledge.
So what to do? I think we need to fundamentally change our software development practices. Agile development, a family of development techniques that seeks to tighten the feedback loop for developers so they don’t drift too far into theory land, certainly gets us part of the way there. My experience with software development teams creating applications for which they themselves are not the primary users is that they are best not left unsupervised for long periods of time. But I think we need more, too. Barbara is right: we need an education inflected architecture. Or, to put it another way, we need an architecture that can be inflected (or influenced, or evolved) by educators.
In a recent four–part interview, JotSpot CEO Joe Kraus gives us some hints as to what that might mean. (more…)
