Yesterday, I held a WiZiQ session on the use of online tech in higher education:
Enthusing Higher Education: Getting Universities and Colleges to Play with Online Tools and Services
[slideshare id=528283&doc=enthusinghighered-1217010739916970-8&w=425]
(Full multimedia recording available here)
During the session, Nellie Deutsch shared the following link:
Diffusion of Innovations, by Everett Rogers (1995)
Haven’t read Rogers’s book but it sounds like a contextually easy to understand version of ideas which have been quite clear in Boasian disciplines (cultural anthropology, folkloristics, cultural ecology…) for a while. But, in this sometimes obsessive quest for innovation, it might in fact be useful to go back to basic ideas about the social mechanisms which can be observed in the adoption of new tools and techniques. It’s in fact the thinking behind this relatively recent blogpost of mine:
Technology Adoption and Active Reading
My emphasis during the WiZiQ session was on enthusiasm. I tend to think a lot about occasions in which, thinking about possibilities afforded technology relates to people getting “psyched up.” In a way, this is exactly how I can define myself as a tech enthusiast: I get easy psyched up in the context of discussions about technology.
What’s funny is that I’m no gadget freak. I don’t care about the tool. I just love to dream up possibilities. And I sincerely think that I’m not alone. We might even guess that a similar dream-induced excitement animates true gadget freaks, who must have the latest tool. Early adopters are a big part of geek culture and, though still small, geek culture is still a niche.
Because I know I’ll keep on talking about these things on other occasions, I can “leave it at that,” for now.
RERO‘s my battle cry.