From Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery pg 10:
The change described in this book is like this. It’s not a single event, nor is it a change that’s happening quickly. It’s a slow revolution that has quietly been gathering steam for years. Indeed, it’s a change that many scientists have missed or underestimated, being so focused on their own specialty that they don’t appreciate just how broad-ranging the impact of the new online tools is. They’re like surfers at the beach who are so intent on watching the waves crash and recede that they’re missing the rise of the tide. But you shouldn’t let the slow, quiet nature of the current changes in how science is done fool you. We are in the midst of a great change in how knowledge is constructed. Imagine you were alive in the seventeenth century, at the dawn of modern science. Most people alive at that time had no idea of the great transformation that was going on, a transformation in how we know. Even if you were not a scientist, wouldn’t you have wanted to at least be aware of the remarkable transformation that was going on in how we understood the world? A change of similar magnitude is going on today: we are reinventing discovery.
Almost fifteen years since he wrote this, the waves are now crashing down upon universities with enormous force, threatening to wash away elements of practice which would have previously seemed irremovable. But what matters I think is still the tides themselves. These are the deeper structural changes underway, the shifting plate tectonics in which the sociotechnical conditions of knowledge production shift in a fundamental and irreversible way, which the poetics of disruption hinder our attempts to analyse and articulate in practical and actionable ways.
If we make what I have described in the past an epochal cut, suggesting at this point we have entered a new world with new rules, we obscure the manifold continuities which account for why our present conjuncture is the way that it is. The basic principle involved in treating educational technology in a sociological way (or anything else for the matter) is that context matters. From a realist perspective that context always needs to be understood historically, as emergent configuration expressing the outcome of past rounds of interaction. This is exactly what the poetics of disruption hinder with their asinine insistence that everything is deeply, profoundly new.
Mark Carrigan 