At our Nordwit meeting in Tampere Åsa Cajander (from Computer Science) and I talked about her reading group where they’ve been looking at Calestous Juma’s (2016) Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies. Resistance has been a big topic in our project, as has education, and in particular the paucity of professional educational development for staff around technologies. Institutions tend to imagine that having a technology (hard-/and or software) means that people will use it – which is, of course not the case. One is reminded of Sara Ahmed’s (2011) non-performative performative. Very little is done in many countries to induct staff into new technologies or to even see this as part of continuing professional development. Frequently reference is made to ‘online manuals’ or ‘guidelines’ that can, in fact, be hard to find and, more to the point, which staff have no time to work their way through in order to discover quite what they are supposed to do. I told Åsa about Richard Sennett’s (2008) The Craftsman in which Sennett talks of the ways in which learning happens (over time, honing of skills, repeating processes, etc.) and how this is effectively denied in the ways in which (education) institutions deal with technology and technology user-knowledge acquisition. Åsa said that in her discipline books cannot be cited – only articles. I was very surprised but also reminded of the issue of cross-disciplinary differences.
Oxford University Press – eat your heart out!
Gabriele Griffin
NORDWIT 