The educational technologist as a variety-handler
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The educational technologist as a variety-handler Videoconferencing for remote music lessons as a case in point Emanuele Bardone1 · Tony Tonni2 · Irene-Angelica Chounta1 Received: 22 July 2019 / Accepted: 20 December 2019 / © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In this work, we theorise the role of the educational technologist in an educational institution as a “variety-handler”. That is, we theorise the educational technologist as responsible for the orchestration of educational and technical resources, namely tools, either to attenuate systemic variety or amplify regulative variety at a certain level of recursion. To do so, we carried out a single case study that focused on the work of the educational technologist in a Music College. The educational technologist provided support to an accordion teacher and his student in remote music lessons. We collected qualitative data from the practice of the educational technologist and the experience of both the teacher and the student over six months (mainly observations and interviews) and we analyzed them building on research from managerial cybernetics, in particular, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM). Our case study indicates that, depending on the context, the educational technologist may overtake many roles, such as be a designer, technician, researcher, planner and so on. But the central role is that of handling variety in order to avoid disruption that could potentially affect the lesson negatively. Keywords Educational technologist · Viable system model · Managerial cybernetics · Stafford beer · Videoconferencing
Emanuele Bardone
[email protected] Tony Tonni [email protected] Irene-Angelica Chounta [email protected] 1
Center for Educational Technology, Institute of Education, University of Tartu, 1a Salme St, 50103 Tartu, Estonia
2
Tartu Heino Eller Music College, Tartu, Estonia
Educational and Information Technologies
1 Introduction: Who is the educational technologist? We live in a time where visions of the future of education are invariably tied to technological innovation. Whether it is Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) or the Internet of Things (IoT), it seems impossible to design for educational change in the current educational landscape without referring to technologies. This, at least on paper, bears the potential of revolutionizing how we conceive the provision of education – no matter the level or the subject area we aim to address. The educational technologist is one of the main characters in the narratives about how technology can change the provision of education. The main goal of this work is to provide a theoretical treatment, which will contribute to answering one crucial question: Who is the educational technologist? A brief historical survey shows that discussions around “who is the educational technologist?” were already present throughout the sixties and seventies – well before the advent of the internet. That is not surprising, as visions of t
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