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Created June 5, 2013 20:15
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Geeks and Non-Geeks: From Contraxioms to Collaboration in Higher Education [comment]

[Comment on this article http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/geeks-and-non-geeks-contraxioms-collaboration-higher-education]

This article is great! "Contraxiom" - I love this concept.

I would add another complicated, perhaps even paradoxical incompatibility in the worldview of "geeks" and "non-geeks:"

As a tech expert, I view technology as fundamentally flexible and malleable around my needs and desires. With this mindset, I often think about my end goals and fit (or design) technology into those goals. This is likely because I naturally have a wider vocabulary about what's out there and how everything works.

On the other hand, the non-technical colleagues I work with who may be less comfortable with technology and who have a narrower perspective of this stuff, view technology as a rigid, opinionated monster. They see technology as something they need to fit into, changing their ways of being and teaching to fit new processes and form factors.

So to people like myself, questions like "what is a wiki and how do I use one in my class?" don't make sense. I would approach that totally differently, maybe asking "I need students to work on a collaborative document for x, y, and z purpose. Which collaborative document tool should I use? Maybe a wiki would work?"

I think there's a general tension here between being purely a consumer of technology vs. a participant in technology that's difficult to overcome. One side is constantly competing with tech, the other working with it.

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