Fiona Collard
fionacollard@hotmail.co.uk

Aims:
• To demonstrate that disruptive technology does not always need a power supply.
• To challenge assumptions of who is likely to be most resistant of new technology.
• To describe how to manage the introduction of social networking to students and the removal of existing technology.

Audience: Teachers of adults, e.g. lecturers, but would be relevant to teachers of other age groups too.
Key words: New pedagogies and practices, Social Media and social networking, Digital literacies, Classroom learning technology

Working with undergraduate technology students (programming, design, gaming, music, and management) is informative, fun and frustrating in equal measures. They often arrive at university with strong opinions on what technology they approve of and have tasted many different ones. Many of their modules will involve using software or hardware to achieve skills in their interests, for example Photoshop to manipulate images, and they are generally comfortable with this. Some modules require using technology to primarily achieve the university’s aims, for example Moodle for access to information. For this, technology students are less enthusiastic and more critical.

Most modules follow a formula of lecture (always with PowerPoint slides, sometimes with electronic voting kit) and practical (working individually on tasks in a computer lab) with self-study materials available online (slides, handouts, instructions, links to supplementary information sources). Students are expected to be looking forward, designing the future and finding novel ways to use technology.

These are highly technology literate students; so what happens when you take the technology away from them? This paper presents a case study of a module that removed most of the technology that students were used to and replaced it with something a little more retro (remember paper and pens, anyone?) and social/communication tools. As both tutors and students were stripped of their PowerPoint comfort blanket, together we passed through stages almost mirroring a grieving process (denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, and finally enthusiasm) to see technology in a new light.