Several weeks ago a series of conversations on Twitter and touched on by edubloggers Kate Olson (“Edmodo – I scored an alpha invite“, Reflection 2.0, 6 March 2008) and Kelly Christopherson (“Go to the source“, Educational Discourse, 7 March 2008) inspired me to sit down and write out a support structure to aid educators interested in exploring the educational uses of emerging technology.

As most of my good ideas seem to do – with or without my consent – the brief framework has since become something vastly larger. It’s become a full-fledged paper in excess of 11 pages.

I feel fairly confident that I’ve captured the essence of the issues Kate and Kelly have talked about, and have hopefully presented something that will prove useful to educators and administrators; but I’d like to open up the paper to comment and feedback to gain an outside perspective on whether it makes sense to the target audience.

I’ve attached the paper as a PDF download at the bottom of this post and would be very grateful for any feedback and suggestions. You can either leave these as comments on this post or email me directly through the contact form on this blog.

Abstract

There is a growing swell of interest across education, with educators seeking to harness the power of emerging technology in ways that enhance learning and teaching. Despite this, educators frequently do not have access to adequate support and consultation to aid them in bringing to fruition their visions for innovative teaching practices.

The primary focal point of this discussion paper is to elaborate on the nature of the growing divide between so-called “users” and “non-users”, propose solutions for bridging the gap, and inspire discussions that seek to identify and resolve this issue.

Importantly, this paper will also discuss the presence of another divide – one between providers of support opportunities, and the developing user community that requires these services. This divide is seen to represent a barrier to uptake and exploration of emerging technology that amplifies the disparity of the primary divide between users and non-users.

Update: I’ve added this document to Scribd, so you know have the option to download it, or read it online.

References:

• Download the whitepaper as a PDF (256 KB)
• Read the whitepaper on Scribd
• “Edmodo – I scored an alpha invite“, Reflection 2.0, 6 March 2008
• “Go to the source“, Educational Discourse, 7 March 2008