Moore’s explanation on the relationship between the flash part and the instructional design part could be viewed as a thumbnail of the general reflection on an instructional technologist role, to the extent that we seek to know both technology and educational theories. This triggered a question that I have been pondering for a while. This is a question that I have discussed with Dr. Wang, that yet still sometimes entangles me.
One of my former teachers in college was very good at technology. He graduated from a prestigious university in central China and holds a Master’s degree on CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning). He is good at Flash and programming, he could even solve programming problems for faculty from the CS department. I admired him a lot as to his technology competence. Yet as we discussed about this, he told me that he could not survive like that because he’d been devoting to technology so much that he was not able to publish paper. On the other hand, we know a lot of educational technology professors who publish intensively actually know little about operating softwares and hands-on experience in developing instructional programs.
We are learning Flash now. We all want to, as I assume, create awesome projects with this software. That absolutely takes time. And there are tons of softwares and programming languages and different hard ware technology that could be used in education, such as Flash/ActionScript, virtual reality technology (3D Max, Maya), web development (HTML/ASP.NET/PHP), database (SQL Server/Oracle), telecommunication, film/video editing and making (Premiere/After Effect), etc. These technologies could take years of our life to learn and master.
The definition for our field (Educational Technology, AECT) used several words concerning technology, like manage, utilize, evaluate and so on. What do we actually do with technologies then? Do we learn them well, or just dabble a little bit? Do we just evaluate them, or evaluate them after mastering them? So to what degree do we need master these technologies and how do we choose to allocate our time as a graduate student in this field?
What then, is our role as an educational technologist, compared with technology expert (like Flash programmer, courseware developer, etc.)? Will they be like us if they learn some instructional design theories and learning theories? So may I tend to believe that we are supposed to shape ourselves into generalists rather than specialists (because we need to dabble into so many fields)?
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