JOHN MILLNER

Let's hear it for the Laggards

I've been thinking (never a very clever thing to do especially late at night with a whisky bottle in front of you) about Rogers' adopter personality groupings; and at the risk of being thrown into the dustbin of history along with the other lazy idle laggards, I want to call into serious question the idea of 'progress' which seems to underlie the schema.

Rogers was aware that much of the research his work is based on is open to the charge of pro-innovation bias. Indeed some of the research cited in his book was funded by the marketing departments of big agri-chemical, pharmaceutical and other companies who obviously saw it primarily as research into how to sell new products more effectively regardless of whether the innovation was going to do people any good or not.

To his credit, Rogers both attempted to address the pro-innovation bias problem, and gave some examples of technology innovations, like the adoption of Snowmobiles by Laps in northern Finland, which have proved disastrous for the adopter societies. Nevertheless it's fair to say that his adopter personality schema and whole tone when discussing innovation is premised on an essentially Victorian concept of Progress with a capital 'P' - a Grand March into the Future, based on ever-increasing growth fuelled by constant innovation: in other words, doing pretty much as we in the developed world have done for the last few hundred years only Bigger and Better.

There are two major problems with this, however.

The first is that, as Rogers shows (somewhat to his own dismay) in his final chapter on Consequences of Innovations, the result of a successfully diffused innovation is usually to make a society more unequal, because new adopters are more likely to be wealthy to start with and get wealthier as a result of the innovation; and because the already wealthy segments of society, even if they are not early adopters, are nevertheless better-placed to exploit the new technology and get even wealthier. Thus,
"the consequence of the diffusion of innovations usually widen the socioeconomic gap between the earlier and later adopting categories in a system.. Further, the consequences of the diffusion of innovations usually widen the socioeconomic gap between the audience segments previously high and low in socioeconomic status." (Rogers, 2003, p471)

So those heroic innovators and early adopters are champions not just of The New, but of Inequality too.

The second problem is that, knowing what we now know, it's clear that the Victorian idea of Progress driven by technological innovation no longer delivers human good. Looking back over the last 200 years many of the most significant innovations - the internal combustion engine, jet aircraft, nuclear power and agro-industry to name just four - have turned out to be disastrous for the world's environment and human society alike.

Maybe the time has come to rethink the desirability of rushing to adopt every innovation which promises to speed things up and make more stuff, and worry more about the disruption that innovations cause, not just to a few stuck-in-their-ways laggardly individuals, but to the quality of life in general.

Rogers, EM, 2003. "Diffusion of Innovations", 5th edition, Free Press, New York

"Supporting personalised learning"

The Interactive Logbook is a research project by the University’s Centre for Educational Technology and Distance Learning, which has been trialled by a group of Masters engineering students. It’s aim is to create an “electronic workspace” enabling students to collaborate more effectively in small groups.

The logbook consists of a bundle of applications and a bespoke interface running on Windows tablet PCs (like laptops but supporting handwriting input) connected to a campus-wide wireless LAN. It enables students to:
• access VLE content, lecture notes and other course materials from multiple locations or on the move
• communicate both asynchronously and synchronously with peers
• share resources with peers and collaborate during groupwork
• take notes in lectures and seminars, and
• allow online management of personal organisation and development resources, including ePortfolios

An interesting aspect of this project is its unusually thorough grounding in learning theory and social observation. One of the case study documents notes that the first stage of the project was the development a theory of use:
“The theory of use was constructed through research into cognitive processes and social interactions surrounding the collaboration of students to reach a common goal. The findings showed that advantages of collaborative learning over independent study lie in the processes of articulation, conflict and co-construction of ideas between collaborating peers.” (Kiddie P, 2004)

Kiddie P et al, 2004, ‘Interactive Logbook: The Development of an Application to Enhance and Facilitate Collaborative Working within Groups in Higher Education’ (paper presented at MLEARN 2004) − http://portal.cetadl.bham.ac.uk/ilogbook/Public/InteractiveLogbookResearchPaper25thJune.pdf

main case study at:
http://www.elearning.ac.uk/innoprac/learner/birminghamvid.html

"Designing flexible learning spaces"

This case study describes how the City Campus Library of Northumbria University relaunched itself as a ‘hybrid learning space’ in order to:

1. meet new expectations for access to online materials including web-based and VLE resources, alongside print-based ones, and
2. provide a more appropriate environment for group work and social learning than the traditional library.

The library now has 130 flexible online workspaces suitable for either individual or quiet group work, and a number of high-table ‘express access points’ where students can log-on for short periods to eg, check for messages. In addition there is a Learning Café where students can use borrowed laptops to work or chat while drinking coffee (the whole building is covered by a wireless LAN). Students can use their mobiles or snack in the Learning Café area.

Crucially, the redesign was done only after looking carefully at how students used library resources, surveying their views, and actively involving them in designing the new facilities.

There doesn't seem to have been any formal assessment of the impact of the change, although feedback from both students and staff is very positive. Certainly the case study demonstrates that it’s not just the technologies deployed by a learning institution that matter; the spacial and social environment in which they are deployed are important too.

The case study report concludes that
"Offering students a varied range of IT opportunities, including loan of laptops on a short term basis, use of their own equipment within the wireless network, and provision of both formal and informal learning areas, will increase their learning potential."

http://www.elearning.ac.uk/innoprac/institution/northumbriavid.html

"Active collaborative learning"

This video case study documents the use of the Interwrite Personal Response System in lectures at Strathclyde University’s departments of Mechanical Engineering and Modern Languages.

Each student uses a PRS handset to interact with a large digital screen, so they can respond to multi-choice questions posed by the lecturer at intervals during the session, and record their views as they change in response to what they hear. Student responses are represented on screen and used as a springboard for debate and group discussion on questions raised by the lecturer, and in the Languages department for practising language skills.

This is a great example of innovation in learning. It takes a traditional, one-way transmission learning technique – the lecture - and uses a digital technology to transform it into an interactive, collaborative event which is not only more engaging but has greater power to deliver real learning. It's also a good example of a social constructivist pedagogic approach.

According to the case study document,
"Discussing conceptual questions in class with their peers has proved to be a powerful motivating force. Evaluations show that this increased interactivity has improved understanding and retention. Results from diagnostic tests provide further evidence of raised standards in the department. Allowing time for debate and reflection has prompted more active learning."

Both student attendance and satisfaction with lectures improved substantially after PRS was introduced.

http://www.elearning.ac.uk/innoprac/practitioner/strathclyde.html

"Learning without boundaries"

This overview of an envisioned fully-wired, mobile-equipped university for the 21st century addresses the need for HE institutions to adopt innovative learning technologies in order to widen participation, boost retention levels, achieve a better fit with the lives of students, and increase efficiency in an increasingly competitive HE market.

Its ‘day in the life’ puts the mobile device at the centre of the student’s relationship with the institution – reminding them of deadlines and seminars, delivering podcasts and other short-form content, logging them into the university network, recording fieldwork data, and providing access to an ePortfolio and connectivity to other students. Institutional laptops are used for notes, VLE access, and upload/download of assignments and other learning content – often while the student is in non-formal contexts such as the campus café.

Potential risks are acknowledged, including the disadvantaging of students with less developed technical skills, the increased cost of infrastructure and support, and the marginalisation of curriculum areas which lend themselves less well to wireless/mobile delivery. A problem that’s not acknowledged here is the privacy-invasion issues potentially raised by automatic logging-in (and tracking?) of students by the institutional network.

Advantages are listed as
• Greater capacity to deliver relevant and stimulating content
• Greater personalisation as a result of ‘portability, privacy, spontaneity and connectivity of mobile and wireless technologies’
• Support for a wider range of learning and teaching styles
• Better access and diversity

The vision of a 21st century university is not actually that visionary - as is pointed out, the case study “already reflects the use of mobile and wireless technologies in some institutions today” - but it is an essentially technocratic one. In the preoccupation with new communication technologies too little attention is paid to new types of relationship they make possible. Most of the learning traffic is still one-way, and the student still does most of their learning on their own.

This 21st century learning environment lacks a community of learners.

http://www.elearning.ac.uk/innoprac/institution/boundaries.html

Disruption, compatibility & relative advantage

Are innovations always disruptive? Probably yes, but some innovations are much less disruptive to the traditional way of doing things than are others. The ball point pen for example was really just a more convenient version of the fountain pen and caused minimal disruption to handwriting practice; the typewriter on the other hand brought a massive advance in efficiency but was much more disruptive, requiring people to painstakingly learn a completely new skill.

Rogers identifies ''compatibility'' as a key factor in the rate at which an innovation diffuses through a community - by which he means the extent to which it is disruptive of existing cultural norms, habitual behaviours etc (Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 2003). Innovations which fit in with how things have always been done will be adopted much more readily, while the adoption of more disruptive innovations will require more effort or incentive, or may be rejected. To overcome this resistance to a highly disruptive innovation, the new technology must be seen to have a high ''relative advantage'' - that is, the benefits of adopting it are so great that they outweigh the disruption caused.

The diamond-frame bicycle, as invented in the early 19th century and perfected at the end of it, was a revolutionary personal transport innovation which diffused through most human societies in little more than a century. Learning to ride it required some time and effort, but the huge advantage over previous methods of getting around easily compensated for this. But recumbent bikes (like the one in my photo) have not diffused widely, even though they're an improvement on the original design in terms of ergonomics, speed and comfort. Why? Because for most potential adopters the marginal advantage gained does not justify even the small amount of effort needed to learn to ride it.

They don't know what they're missing, tho ;o)

The S-shaped curve

Further notes from Diffusion of Innovations ..

When social researchers first started looking at how innovations diffuse through social systems in the 1940s, they noticed that the pattern of spread of a new technique or idea was very similar to that described by epidemiologists in studies of how infections spread through populations. That is to say, the rate of spread starts off slowly, accelerates through the mid range of the graph, and then slows down and levels off, forming an S-shaped curve.

The S-shape is caused by the fact that the innovation - whether it's a technology or a pathogen - has first to come in from outside the social system, and that means relatively few people are susceptible to begin with. Once the innovation is established within the system, more and more people come into contact with it, and the rate of spread increases. Eventually, so many members of the community have been affected (adopted the innovation or caught the infection) that the system runs out of unaffected members, and the rate of spread slows and eventually stops.

S-shaped curves have a critical ‘take off point’, at between 10% and 20% of the system, where a sufficiently large number of people in the community have adopted (or been infected) to make the rate of growth turn upward and continue climbing until the system begins to run out of unaffected members.

The S-shaped adoption curve applies to virtually all innovations, but something interesting happens when the innovation in question is a communication technology like mobile phones or the internet. When a non-interactive innovation spreads through a system, early adopters don’t get any extra advantage from subsequent adoptions (apart from additional people to chat to about the new toy!). But with a communication technology each new adopter adds value to the innovation for everyone in the system. So a cycle of positive feedback sets in which makes the adoption curve accelerate still faster. This is partly why the internet has grown from zero to a billion users in little over 15 years.

Another interesting point that Rogers makes about this process is about the different influences affecting early adopters, as compared with later ones. The first members of a community to take up an innovation must necessarily learn about it from outside the social system, and so are more dependent on indirect knowledge transmission via newspapers, books or other media. However as the innovation spreads through the community, more and more people are able to learn of it directly from neighbours, workmates, friends or family members – and this direct, personal contact is much more effective at persuading people to try out the innovation. This is another reason why the S-curve typically starts to speed up at between 10% and 20% adoption; and also helps to explain why the internet - which makes direct, personal contact possible even when individuals are 1000s of miles apart - has diffused worldwide so quickly.

Rogers, EM, 2003. "Diffusion of Innovations", 5th edition, Free Press, New York

Waggle dancing, or Hardware/software

I’ve just finished reading Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. It’s the book which first proposed the 5-fold classification of innovation adopters into “innovators”, “early adopters”, “early majority”, “late majority” and “laggards”, and is a bit of a key social science text. I thought I’d blog my notes on the book as I’ve a feeling they might come in useful during this course…

Rogers defines an innovation as

an idea, practice or object that is percieved as new by an individual or other unit of adoption. (Rogers, EM, 2003)

Rogers’ book is a depth study of how innovations spread from individual to individual through a community, and between communities. Many innovations of course are new technologies – to such an extent that the two words can be considered virtual synonyms. Rogers describes a technology as

a design for instrumental action that reduces the uncertainty in the cause-effect relationships in achieving a desired outcome. A technology usually has two components: (1) a hardware aspect, consisting of a tool that embodies the technology as a material or physical object, and (2) a software aspect, consisting of the information base for the tool. (Rogers, EM, 2003)

We have a tendency to focus on the hardware components of new technologies because they’re easier to see. But the original Greek word techne means simply an art or skill, and it’s often the software component of a new technology that has the biggest impact on our lives. In fact many innovations have no physical dimension at all and consist entirely of information or ideas – for example the Reformation, or Darwinism.

My favourite example of the diffusion of a software innovation through a community is the way news of a good source of nectar is spread through a colony of honey bees. A single foraging worker bee who discovers a really good nectar source – an orchard of fruit trees in bloom, say, or a field of oil seed rape – will return to the colony and perform a kind of square dance or jig called a waggle dance at the hive entrance. The moves in the dance tell the surrounding bees everything they need to know about the new nectar source: distance, direction (probably measured as a bearing from the sun) and possibly even how rich it is. The lone forager will continue with the dance until every other worker in the colony has seen it, and if it’s a better nectar source than any others within range, in a few minutes every forager in the hive – perhaps 30,000 of them - will be making a bee line for the nectar bonanza.

Innovation in human communities used to be a really slow process. The new agricultural technologies of the Neolithic Revolution took several thousand years to diffuse through human societies. But the rate of diffusion keeps getting faster, and in the internet age a software innovation can spread through human communities almost as fast as it can through a colony of bees.

Rogers, EM, 2003. "Diffusion of Innovations", 5th edition, Free Press, New York

ps - the bees in the photo were personal friends of mine. I looked after them for a season while on a beekeeping course a couple of years back. All the workers and drones will alas have passed away by now. The Queen may for all I know be living still...