I am just now getting around to commenting on Nate’s post regarding SPTF and AECT. I give it a whole-hearted amen, especially his list of possible “causes” to rally around. They are not causes so much as opinions that AECT should be taking a stand on.

- Can any member of AECT ethically support digital rights management or the current implementation of copyright? Does the notion of copyright even have merit?

For what purpose do AECT publications maintain copyright of the published materials? This is not a frivolous question. AECT is a non-profit, an organization that was created to meet the needs of professionals in educational communications and technology. What benefit is it to these professionals (us) if we must relinquish rights to any materials that we publish in AECT journals (and we must publish if we want to progress in our field). I’m not talking about what every academic publication should be doing, I’m talking about what our academic publications should be doing. It would be a very progressive and strategic move if authors maintained their own rights.

- Does Education matter? If so, what’s our take on it? If not, then what?

Of course education matters and of course the use of educational media matters more than ever. We should be taking a stand and we should have enough respect as the oldest educational technology organization that when we put forth an organizational opinion, people stop and listen.

- Do we have any obligation to our fellow members? How about people who aren’t members? How about our students? How about student’s who aren’t ours?

What kind of obligation? I like the sentiment here, but not sure how to expand on it.

- How much longer will we remain silent about No Child Gets Ahead? Does it matter to us that the US Federal government is using invalid and non-existent research to make Federal legislative requirements on home-rule institutions?

Tricky, if you don’t want to end up on a CIA watch list. Actually suggest that “No Child Left Behind”–while laudable in its sentiment is a useless and underfunded piece of legislation. It is important to have standards, but when all classroom activities are geared to passing the tests at the end of the year, it undercuts the one thing that Americans have traditionally done better at—which is fostering creativity in education. Also, the whole idea of punishing schools with inadequate numbers of passing students by taking AWAY their funding, which has resulted in institutionalizing a disdain for special needs and ESL students (if not in practice–as I hope it’s still illegal to deny educational access to students who need it the most!– at least in sentiment).

- Does it matter to us that the US has more people in prison than any other country in the world?

YES! And that it’s one of our fastest growing industries. That matters too! And that after prison, there are very few opportunities for non-violent ex-cons to re-integrate into society. Well addressing the issue at all levels is important (from providing educational opportunity that translates into life opportunity for all students to advocating educational opportunities for adults being released from prison)…maybe the best way to directly to address something tangible is to advocate access to educational opportunity as being a right for all people, including the incarcerated (I have not confirmed, but I believe that access of distance ed programs for the incarcerated has been cut).

- Do we believe that we have any relevance outside of our own circle of navels? What would it be?

Yes, absolutely…but there has to be real action outside of our own circle of navels to begin to make a difference.

Is that enough of an amen?

aect

I’m finally ready to get back in gear with this blog. It’s been a long hiatus. I haven’t taken a lot of time to reflect from an educational standpoint on my summer in Barcelona. It seems funny in a way. I reflected on midquel on the cultural and language issues, but it’s hard to make an assertive statement about how the experience will play out in my professional work.

The experience of being technologically challenged, in terms of resources will always stay with me. It is probably the paramount aspect of technology use that anyone implementing technology into the learning experience must remember.

For example, it was NOT possible for me to skype to keep in touch with people as I had thought I could do. For every possible solution–there was a new problem. We didn’t have internet in our apartment. It wasn’t possible because we were temporary tenants. My laptop was too heavy to bring to school everyday and it also overheated, making it an impractical solution. The microphone didn’t work on the the Mac that I was using at school. I skyped from a computer café one time, but the other end was so choppy for people that I didn’t try it again. This may seem like a simple and insignificant issue—but if you are a student in a distance education course, having access to the tools and bandwidth to interact with others synchronously could be a problem.

But the issue was really larger than that. When computer technology isn’t seamless, when it’s slow, when you haven’t found a solution that makes it easy and smooth to get done what you need to do, the effects of that linger. Because using these technologies in an integrated way is such a part of what I do, I am not taking it for granted just yet that I have everything in place back here at my new job.