Class Acts

Innovators face the challenge of obtaining acceptance of their ideas among their peers.  The fears of traditionalists are absolutely justified though; why should educators innovate?  What real benefits to learning will be realized through bold use of new technology?  Customers buy new products because businesses create real value in those products.  Unless a product is going to be of use to a customer, that customer has no reason to pull out the checkbook.  Students and educators are no different than consumers.  Unless technology possesses value to the learning process, they will not invest their time, talent, and resources in making a program work.
There are many different potential values of educational technology, but a good way to start thinking about your value proposition is to remember that schools fulfill three fundamental academic missions.  In a discussion I had in April 2006, James Groves, a Dean at the University of Virginia, specifically suggested that schools:

• Generate knowledge; schools—be they primary, secondary, or universities—are in the business of generating knowledge; whether a student writing a paper at her desk or a professor researching a chemical anomaly in his laboratory, schools constantly create, repackage, and output new information;
• Keep knowledge; universities in particular have long served as repositories of vast amounts of knowledge; libraries, individual scholars, and archives possess some of the world’s most significant academic information;
• Disseminate knowledge; the most obvious purpose of any school is to share knowledge with the students that attend.

The Internet has surely changed the specific nature of these three purposes.  Knowledge is increasingly generated not by scholars concentrated on single campuses, but by diffuse networks of many thoughtful minds around the world.  Knowledge is kept less on the shelves of great libraries, and more and more on the millions of Internet-connected computers worldwide.  Finally, knowledge is no longer available solely to students in classes, but rather to the Internet world at large.  If nothing else, these fundamental changes ought to provide motivation for educators to adopt new technology so that they may adapt to the changing knowledge networks of the world around them.
Policymakers, administrators, and educators are challenged—given these three core missions—to implement technology applications that create value in these areas.  A good test of success for any new program is to determine if it improves either the ability of schools to generate knowledge, store knowledge, or share knowledge