Learning & Leading Through Technology

Learner or Lurker?
AS I SEE “IT”

Since chat rooms were new, there have always been people who enter and read all the chats but do not contribute in any observable or meaningful way. They are called lurkers.

When you think about the term professional learning, you might picture inquisitive minds seeking to explore new boundaries of thinking and being part of a social community where these ideas are vetted and tested. But, unfortunately, that is not typical for school staff meetings, professional development sessions, or data study teams. I have come to the conclusion that we are now a generation of professional learners and lurkers.

By Don Hall

As I See “IT” is an editorial opinion column that appears in every other issue of L&L. If you are interested in writing a guest As I See “IT” column, please email kconley@iste.org.

Lurking

As professional lurkers, we sit at the fringe trying to look like we are participating without adding any real value and hoping we are not required to exert any real mental energy for problem solving or creating new knowledge. This may sound harsh, and it is in a sense. Because we represent the one institution that should know how to promote innovative thinking, critical analysis, and continuous professional improvement, we should lead the way in modeling professional learning.

Instead, too many are like me when I ask my daughter to show me how to do something on my iPhone, which she does with such casual ease. I pay only marginal attention to what she is doing. I either consider it too complicated, irrelevant, or not worth my time. When she is done, I can honestly say that I did not learn anything, and she will have to do it for me again the next time. That is a clear example of a professional lurker.

We see these behaviors all the time when teachers attend workshops on how to use technology. When we ask them later why they do not use it in their classroom, they respond, “We need better training.” I propose that the initial training was probably sufficient, but the mindset they went into it with was not.

It is not all their fault, though. We grew up in a time when professional learning meant something very specific and required a narrow set of skills, usually memorization. Most of us mastered those skills. Now, however, the sheer volume of information and rate at which it is created make those skills of limited value, and the time we have to develop new learning strategies is even more limited.

Most of today’s working adults are a generation of people who want shortcuts for doing things. Most do not want to expend the mental effort to learn something new, let alone create something new. As technology leaders, we have gotten better at providing training aids for our schools in the form of tip sheets, training videos, and webinars. However, our help desks are still flooded with questions about how to solve basic problems, such as what to do when someone’s computer “locks up” or how to get a computer screen to show up on a classroom projector. There is no organizational or personal expectation that these employees will use some critical thinking skills to try to resolve these issues on their own.