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No matter what a department has been doing with computing, every few years the status quo (again) can begin to look inadequate

Six Barriers to Revolution

A Small Window of Opportunity

Zigzag

Chip-based technologies come and go quickly, thanks to Moore's Law.

If that revolution in goals is going to happen, it needs to start fast or, long before the pedagogical revolution matures, the technology it depends upon may already have disappeared.  That sounds bad. The reality can be worse.

At first, not many people have the new technology

At first, the new technology is not as good for instruction as the old technology still is

Moore's Babel

Moore's Law also makes it harder for technology support staff and technology users to speak the same language.  If Moore's Law didn't exist, and technology remained the same for decades, the problem wouldn't be as serious

thanks to Moore's Law, users are periodically find themselves beginners all over again.

The Interactive Courseware Mirage

Since the days of the mainframe computer, most predictions of revolution have been based squarely on hopes for a particular type of interactive curricular courseware.

The problem begins with the fact that interactive courseware remains expensive to develop and update.  With each new generation of technological change we hear promises that, at last, courseware of this type will become much cheaper to create. That promise is based on the false premise that slow computers were to blame for the last generation of failures.  The real problem is the human expense, however. Designing and debugging branching educational pathways, for example, takes thousands of hours of highly trained, expensive human time. 

the more revolutionary the courseware's implications for transforming the instructional program, the more cautious potential users become: making a change in their teaching this big could lead to unforeseen problems so why not wait until someone else has done it first.

Moore's Amnesia

f these failures keep occurring, why has no one noticed?  The first reason is "Moore's Amnesia:" each time computers become cheaper and more usable, they attract droves of new users who weren't around for the last cycle of error.  They don't realize that they're about to make the same mistakes as their predecessors.  Because of the influx of new funders, advocates and users (and the departure of those who were too badly burned the last time around), the field loses most of its memory of all the previous generations of disappointment.

Rapture of the technology

We are so mesmerized by the newness of the hardware or software that we are blinded to factors important to the successful use of that technology.  It's easy to understand the rapture.  Moore's Law guarantees that we will periodically be confronted with fresh, mysterious instructional tools and media that are dramatically more powerful than their predecessors.  The vendors of the newest technology reinforce our love affair by advertising and other forms of hype.

Unfortunately, rapture of the technology often dictates that all available funds are spent to get the best computers and the fastest connectivity.  That's self-defeating because the technology by itself almost never causes the outcomes we seek. To create a revolution we need all the ingredients for the recipe; technology is "merely" an ingredient, like yeast for baking bread.

Seven Strategies for a Revolution

Create coalitions to make sure that your program has all the ingredients needed in your recipe for revolution

technology's role in any educational revolution is to enable fundamental changes in what educators and learners do. Those changes in their activities in turn can alter who learns, what they learn, how they learn, and what it costs.

If technology is to enable a revolution to make education more creative, or equitable, or collaborative, or multi-cultural, everyone who cares about creativity or equity or collaboration or a multi-cultural approach will need to share what they know and pull together to make sure that the revolution gets all the ingredients of its recipe, not just the computers or the connectivity.  It takes a coalition to create a revolution

Relate your efforts to the technology-based educational revolution that has actually (though just barely) begun internationally

If your push for change is linked to this one, you should be able to get and receive more help than if you are moving in some unrelated direction.

Build today's educational revolution on yesterday's new technology.

When a new generation of technology appears, it's time for investigations and experiments, not (yet) a large-scale push for to buy new hardware and software for everyone. Before making a large-scale investment in a totally new technological platform for an instructional program, questions we've so painfully learned from history should be addressed.

Base the educational change mainly on hardware and software capabilities that are likely to persist beyond the next generational change in technology: "worldware." 

Worldware is hardware or software that is used for education but that was not developed or marketed primarily for education.

worldware can reduce stress on the exhausted, understaffed technology support units at your institution.

Worldware may lack of some of the short-term value of interactive courseware but it more than makes up for it in long-term viability and ease of support.

Emphasize forms of instructional material that most faculty members find it quick and easy to create, adapt and share. 

The bigger and more complex the courseware, the rigid it is: a challenge for instructors who want to adapt it to today's students, today's events, or their own ideas about how a skill or topic might best be learned. 

Study what's actually going on locally so opportunities can be seized and problems avoided.

Our intuition often doesn't do us much good in such situations because that our insights were shaped by stable times.

if you want technology investments to pay off for learning, study why people do or don't use technology to make educationally important changes in what they do; don't just monitor satisfaction with the hardware and software.

Seek an unprecedented level of information sharing, coordination, and collaboration.

Today's world relies upon on rapidly changing computer technology in almost every phase of life.  That creates a breakneck pace of change for the academy.  In this new world, the old "muddling through" approach to educational improvement doesn't work well anymore.  The window of opportunity associated with each new generation of educational technology closes too quickly. Ironically the solution is not move faster.  We have already tried, "Ready, fire, aim!" and, time after time, that prescription has failed.  Instead, we need to take a moment, study thirty years of past failures, and, this time, we need to get it right.