My friend Paul posted to Facebook today that he was having trouble with a WordPress install. WordPress refused to serve any post with a comment on it, preferring to issue an Error 500 instead. I’ve been mucking about with WordPress for, like, 7 whole months now, so of course I volunteered to take a look. (My best guess is that he’s got an out-of-date proprietary theme which is misbehaving, and he’ll end up either paying to upgrade it, choosing a new theme, or figuring out how to hack it with someone who actually knows what he’s doing.)

This speaks a little bit to the Reclaim/Connectivist ethos and the way personal learning networks work, but I’ve had two specific thoughts I wanted to reflect on.

Technology and The Illusion of Choice

A world of “reclaimed” pedagogy is necessarily going to involve more interactions like this. Faculty members will get a project started, and come looking for help in media res when something stops working. Support staff will be asked to jump into systems they didn’t configure, maybe didn’t even know existed. This will be a real challenge for people and organizations with a binary approach to “support” – that things are either inside the zone or not, and clear algorithms exist to explain whether or not a project gets assistance.

That binary, of course, is an illusion. No matter how big your organization, there’s always some point at which you throw up your hands and say “well, that’s just how it comes from (vendor name).” Or you say “support means reload it and start over,” or “here’s the workaround and we’ll fix it in the summer,” or some other phrase which explains that “support” isn’t really an on/off switch but a complex equation which includes available resources and institutional and personal priorities.

I wonder how we set expectations for this kind of service. I suspect one answer is that we change from talking about tools we support, to talking about tasks we support within tools. Much of “our” software is just too complex to claim that we can help you do anything it advertises it’s able to do.

We’ll also need to talk more about the level of support you can expect – whether we’ll implement a fix, or provide faculty with tested directions, or just sit next to you and say “huh, that’s a new one.” That’s going to require faculty to adopt a different definition of ownership over their tools – and it will require (many) technologists to adopt a different definition of responsibility to assist.It’ll still be a job, and there will still be service level expectations, but I think there will also be a new kind of community growing up. My neighbor once told me that he couldn’t fix my riding mower’s starter, but he could show me how to hotwire it with a screwdriver. I think some part of our job will get more “neighborly” like that.

hello, neighbor

Love and Service Professions

My friend was having trouble with his site, and was brave enough to ask for help. I don’t know the subject deeply, but I care enough to take a look. I took the time to explain my thoughts – I wanted to teach Paul anything I could, and I didn’t want any unstated assumptions to gum up a website with 15 years worth of work in it.

This can’t just be about pre-existing friendships or high-priority websites, though, because I’ve provided similar (if much less extensive) advice to strangers in communities like YouShow and DS106. I have received more than equal advice and encouragement in return – maybe it’s about models of behavior? Shared group identities?

The small nagging voice asks me if I do as well at my workplace as I do in these extracurriculars. I’m reasonably confident that I do – certainly I can list big and small projects where I made sure people were more empowered to reach their goals. For that matter, I’ve got a list of “fake it till you make it” jobs where I think I communicated caring, even though my real goal was to get some technical problem out of my hair. But – what about the other ones, the interactions where I’m basically asked for a transaction, and that’s about all I provide?

How can I make there be fewer of those? Even given that sometimes the transaction is all that’s required or desired – how can it be delivered with lagniappe?

I’ve written about this before – what can we do as instructional technologists to expand the love in the world? If my job is ultimately about nurturing the development of increasingly empowered people, what are the steps I need to take to make sure people know that my office is a safe place where they can grow? (Even if, today, all they want to grow into is someone whose Moodle gradebook works right.)

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Image credits

Image 1 – John Cleese in Silvarado; animated gif by Alan Lopuszynski at http://burbanked.tumblr.com/post/4087989913/silverado-john-cleese

Image 2 – Zen [Explored] by Riccardo Cuppini. CC licensed BY-NC-ND 2.0 at https://flic.kr/p/5ehoTC

Image 3 – Mister Rogers by Grant Lindsay. CC licensed BY-ND 2.0 at https://flic.kr/p/DuNo8