The educational technologist as a variety-handlerVideoconferencing for remote music lessons as a case in point

In this work, we theorise the role of the educational technologist in an educational institution as a “variety-handler”. That is, we theorise the educational technologist as responsible for the orchestration of educational and technical resources, namely tools, either to attenuate systemic variety or amplify regulative variety at a certain level of recursion. To do so, we carried out a single case study that focused on the work of the educational technologist in a Music College. The educational technologist provided support to an accordion teacher and his student in remote music lessons. We collected qualitative data from the practice of the educational technologist and the experience of both the teacher and the student over six months (mainly observations and interviews) and we analyzed them building on research from managerial cybernetics, in particular, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM). Our case study indicates that, depending on the context, the educational technologist may overtake many roles, such as be a designer, technician, researcher, planner and so on. But the central role is that of handling variety in order to avoid disruption that could potentially affect the lesson negatively.