Challenges of change

Challenges of change

My fascination for the last 25 years has been with how change happens, its impact on myself and other human beings and the organisations within which we work, and the social mechanisms which either block or support it. This second section of the book contains two articles, published nine years apart in 1989 and 1998, between them containing many of the ideas about change that have shaped my subsequent work. The fi rst was written to a tight word limit for publication in an edited book of papers presented at a conference and is a distillation of the fi ndings from my fi rst funded research project. What it contains is largely empirically derived and my line of argument is not set in the context of the contemporary research literature on change. The second was written as an invited presentation to an audience of peers in higher education as part of the consultation into the potential of ICT for Higher Education led by Niki Davis on behalf of the Dearing Review for the Higher Education Council (NCIHE 1997). Its purpose is to explore how the research literature on change could inform policy and practice for ICT use in Higher Education.

A story from the summer of 1985 may serve to illustrate both the excitement and the frustrations for me of being involved in the early years of ‘micro-computers’ in education. As a local English teacher I was a member of the organising committee of the Cambridge Children’s Poetry Festival (an off-shoot of the main Festival) and at a gathering one evening found myself talking to one of our invited guests. He ‘never had been able to understand poetry’, he told me, and ‘couldn’t see why people needed to write things in such an obscure way’. I responded as one would expect of an English teacher, arguing for the power of poetic language and its positive impact on children’s imagination and creativity. The conversation continued for several minutes and I became aware of being bored by reiterating old arguments rehearsed many times before … and then suddenly realised that I had not actually had this conversation for several months. A year previously I had come out of the classroom and joined the Cambridgeshire support team for computers in education, which involved me in providing professional development courses for teachers introducing computers into their classrooms. The conversation I had been having frequently in the months leading up to the Poetry Festival was actually about computers not poetry – trying to respond to people who told me they ‘couldn’t understand computers’, and ‘could never see the point in using them’ – for writing or anything else – when pens, paper and a slide rule were easier, quicker and more intuitive to use. I realised

66 Challenges of change that poetry and computers, despite their obvious differences, were perceived as alien

culturally to many people’s perceptions of their own identity and sense of meaning in being in the world. It is this cultural impact on an individual’s identity, together with the challenges of ICT for organisational structures, which is what most fascinates me about the process of technology innovation. Computers arouse strong passions because they challenge the ritual practices of our daily lives.