Just Use It – Justifying Why I Don’t Read the Manual

I came across an article in techLearning (Mary Burns) arguing that teacher technology inservice should be based on a “just use it” rather than a skills training approach. The article was an argument against lengthy experiences in which educators learn the features of PowerPoint, BlackBoard (or whatever) even when an attempt is made to link this training to practical classroom applications.

The author lists several arguments explaining the limitations of a skills training approach:

technology rather than the curriculum becomes the focus

in order to meet the needs of each individual too many features are presented overloading everyone

skills approaches unintentionally focus on the expertise of the trainer rather than the skills of the learners

The author advocates minimal training, projects involving groups of teachers, and training individual teachers in skills that they pass on to group members (kind of cooperative learning for teachers).

As I read this article, I was evaluating some of the premises by way of personalization (Note: I hope other people do this. If not, I must be very egocentric.) Anyway, my institution has made a massive change in the way techology works on our campus by integrating all kinds of things through PeopleSoft software. I have heard all kinds of very negative things about this new system and was probably prepared to become frustrated, angry, etc. I decided to ignore the request that all faculty members attend a training session and just log on (I hope the connection to the Burns article now makes some sense). I did have some difficulty initially – I had thrown away the email providing my password. I tried the old trick of having the system send you your password by email but this did not work and I did become frustrated for a little while (it turned out the department secretary included the wrong email for me when enrolling department members – the “old trick” assumes the system has your email address). However, I eventually was able to connect and seemed to find a way to do lots of interesting things. Poking around to see what worked was fun. I must admit I was doing this without any pressure to get a specific task accomplished and not everyone would be willing to spend time in this fashion.

Promoting “Don’t Read the Manual” – My version of “Just Do It” (Note – I am just making this up so evaluate my reasoning carefully).

Playing is an active form of learning. If you are willing to play with technology, you create your own understanding. Good technology does not break. If it does, blame the technology!

Experience generalizes. Developers are allowed to use good ideas they have observed elsewhere and do. What worked before or what should be the case often is!

When I run into a wall, I do use the manual. This is inefficient in the specific case, but being inefficient in a few cases may be better than being efficient more times than necessary!

I sometimes do try to learn everything. I sometimes read the manual after I already know how software works. I did say sometimes. Thoroughness may be applied after I am convinced an application is really cool and I want to explore what more I might do with it. The details make more sense when I already know how something works and have experience doing productive things (a way to avoid working memory overload and a way to provide a context for learning).