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Emotional e-wiring

By Gilly Salmon (June 2005 Issue)
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I’ve been working on an e-learning strategy for the University of Leicester. Our plans will position the university as a terrestrial and virtual 21st-century learning organisation. Much of the rationale for the inevitable changes to Leicester’s well-rehearsed and successful approaches of the last century is clear and compelling. You know the kind of thing: flexible, student-centred learning, great technology and pedagogy for distance learners, working with industry partners through new media, overseas partnerships, offers everyone better quality learning for less, and so on.

My university colleagues, with their many different roles and responsibilities, quickly saw the powerful nature of the arguments for development of learning, teaching and support. No isolated ivory tower here! They have been fantastically engaging and supportive to me – the newcomer to the Leicester table! They have taken on extensive essential constructive critique with energy, enthusiasm and their students firmly in mind. There comes a time, though, in every formal and informal encounter where I witness each individual take a gulp and a little step backwards. They realise that their part inevitably involves some change in themselves, their way of working and sometimes even their way of thinking.

Feelings come to the surface, often uncomfortably. For some the change is experienced as exciting but most have concerns, fears even. If these emotional responses do not find a voice somehow, there’s a risk that what we hoped for as genuine progress becomes instead a pendulum swing, an oscillation, rather than real, worthwhile development. We illustrate a basic powerful truth about technological change: it’s shaped and driven entirely by what people make of it, do with it.

What’s this got to do with each of you and ‘E-talk’? Well, please pause just a moment and consider this nasty scenario.

What if a well-informed, trusted authority told you that you have to make demanding enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you do not, your time in the real and cyber world will end much sooner than necessary. Will you make immediate and lasting changes?

Your options are:
1. Yes, of course; are you mad!?
2. No.

Did we all answer no. 1 (even if we are inclined to ask for more information and check out the quality of the facts)? In practice, though, few people make changes in themselves – however compelling the reason. Eight out of nine people are unable to make sustainable changes even in life-threatening situations. Given the choice between change and earlier death, only 10 per cent of us opt for major modification. Some of us retreat into ourselves and carry on regardless, if somewhat more secretly.

We have a great deal to learn about transitions, especially associated with technology. At work, many of us intuitively feel threatened by personal change. Some will undertake the necessary task with considerable huffing and puffing and T-shirts saying ‘Proud to be a martyr’. Others put scarce energy into actively avoiding embracing variations. However, framing ‘resistance to the change’ in terms of a ‘dinosaur attitude’ (overheard at an e-learning conference recently) suggests to me more about the person doing the labelling than the one doing the resisting. First we should seek to understand!

How do we explain our opposition to change in our information-rich and turbulent worlds? I realised when studying how individuals work together in groups in online environments that without engaging the emotions few of us are able to respond positively. Most people pick up clues about feelings by being with people in face-to-face situations. Hence, when working online we need to learn how to ‘read between the lines’ rather than observe body language. Most ‘failed’ e-learning encounters are based on the lack of in-built design of experiences for ‘getting to know’ and working effectively with others. Still, that’s for another time …

The way you alter what you do, and open the door for others to follow, is by exploring the feelings behind the change. This holds up even in, or perhaps especially in, organisations that focus on analysis and quantitative measurement, or where good accurate information is key to operations and progress. Considering change as emotive is even more important in professionalised situations such as universities where people are used to taking individual responsibility and accountability.

One of my PhD students, Carol Russell of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, focused her study on the power of academic disciplines on cognition (thinking and action). Teaching is shaped by the prevailing paradigm of our discipline or profession, continually reinforced and rewarded to the point at which our view becomes almost ‘hard wired’ in the brain. These are what we call ‘cognitive maps’, and provide a framework for who we are and what we do. Changes to ways of teaching must involve being able to think differently about the discipline that we have ‘grown up with’ over many years, often tapping into feelings to explore the maps. So you can see that complex approaches and new experiences, rather than demands or targets, are needed to fully engage people in transitions.

But what’s this to do with my university’s strong move towards e-learning? Well, of course we have strategic targets that include getting all students online for some part of their learning support and other highly rational approaches. We have to justify everything we do, as there’s the spending of precious funds. But in our implementation plans we focus most on prospects for everyone in the university to explore the opportunities and relevance of the myriad of technology enhanced and mediated experiences for themselves, before expecting them to make major changes in the way they operate. It’s not quick and it’s not tidy, but I believe it’ll leave us with the key components of our cognitive maps intact, though I suspect the links will have been rewired.

Surf it!
* You don’t believe the scary resistance to personal change stuff? Check it out at www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/open_change-or-die.html (There’s a good summary article by Alan Deutschman.)
* Some practical models of personal change in action. www.businessballs.com/personalchangeprocess.htm

 

Dr Gilly Salmon is Professor of E-learning and Learning Technologies at the University of Leicester. Prior to this appointment, she worked at the Open University Business School for 15 years. Gilly can be contacted at gilly.salmon@le.ac.uk

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