Tom Hoffman struck a chord with his most recent post:
| …to present his work at a fake educational technology conference I’m pretending to begin planning. The working title is “Why doesn’t all this shit work? 2004.” The imaginary theme is “Cheap, robust technologies to make the computers actually work in your school.” Or something like that. Topics would hypothetically include Rendezvous, K12LTSP, LDAP, RSS, weblogs and wikis, wifi, when to use PHP, where you can use Python, how to buy gear on EBay, how to figure our what’s wrong with and return that new computer that crashes intermittently but persistently but passes all the manufacturer’s diagnostics, etc. I’ll round up some imaginary sponsors at NECC. |
Why doesn’t all this shit work? 2004. I love it. A first love of mine at the intersection of programming and toys is the LEGO Mindstorm. Truthfully, the toy just works, but there is a lot of ugly to managing between 15 and 30 of these things in an educational setting. Batteries, hardware, connectivity to the host PC… everything.
Supporting technology—simple or complex, useful or cool—in the classroom is hard work. This is made harder by the fact that many teachers A) don’t know what is available to them, B) don’t have time to learn the technologies, and C) have good reason to be wary of them in many cases. Switching from floppies to USB keydrives is a no-brainer—but what can LDAP do? Python? Students using weblogs? I’d add open-source courseware to the list—tools like Moodle, for example. I don’t understand why schools pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for products like WebCT and Blackboard when they could send those thousands of dollars (or none, if they prefer) to open-source projects that benefit the larger community in direct, observable ways.
Why doesn’t all this shit work, indeed. These are hard questions, and simple answers are needed before enabling and empowering technologies find their way into the schools in a broad, consistent manner.