I’ve been reading a lot lately about “early adopters” of new technologies and practices, particularly related to much-hyped new gadgets like the iPad. These are people who like being on the leading (or even bleeding) edge of innovation, often lining up to be the first to get their hands on new tools and products and then evangelizing them to their friends, families, and colleagues.
The conventional wisdom is that it is this group that drives innovation in marketplaces of goods and services. I wonder if this is actually the case, especially in the world of education.
It seems more likely that it is actually “early abandoners” that really make change happen.
Because the phrase “early adopter” is most often used in conjunction with technological gadgetry, let’s start there. Consider Apple, for example. This is a company that is often seen as creative and innovative. (And, for the most part, rightly so.) Certainly Apple has an enviable capacity to get customers to line up to buy new kit, sight unseen, and to grab popular media attention like no other company. And, Apple fan or not, you have to admit that the company has been a key driver to popular adoption of new (or at least new-ish) technologies.
However, it really hasn’t done this through “early adoption.” Apple did not invent the graphical user interface. It was not (by a long shot) the first company to manufacture a digital music player. It wasn’t the first smart phone manufacturer (RIM and Palm had been in the market for years before the iPhone debuted). It wasn’t even the first to offer touch-based interfaces or tablet-style computers.
So, if it’s not an “early adopting” company, why is it seen as innovative?
I would argue that it’s an “early abandoner,” and that abandonment, not adoption, is really what drives mass adoption of new technologies.
Continuing with the Apple example, take the humble USB port. Today, it’s pretty much impossible to buy a computer without USB ports. Heck, even most newer cars come equipped with USB ports to charge and connect everything from cell phones to GPS devices to coffee warmers.
Before USB, however, almost everything you connected to a computer had it’s own particular kind of connector. Mice and keyboards had their own connectors (usually PS2 on PCs and ADB on Macs. External hard drives used another (usually SCSI). Printers used another type of connector. So did networking devices like external modems.
This state of affairs was confusing and annoying to end users and expensive for PC and peripheral makers. So, in the early 1990s, a consortium of companies including Intel, Compaq, and Microsoft (and, notably, NOT Apple) came together to develop a “universal” connector that could make connecting devices a more user-friendly experience for consumers while saving manufacturers money by reducing hardware and development costs.
When USB came to market, however, it didn’t immediately take off. Rather than instantly being “the” connector, it just became “one more.” Instead of making computers cheaper to make, it increased costs because, instead of making computers that had PS2 ports, serial ports, and SCSI ports, then new computers had PS2 Ports, serial ports, and SCSI ports AND the new USB port. It was just one more way to connect a gadget, so peripheral makers continued to make and market devices that still relied on the old connectors.
That is until “early abandoner” Apple came along and introduced its first generation iMac, it’s first “must have” product after a long and nearly fatal downward slide. It enticed buyers with its unique translucent, candy-colored body, all-in-one design, speedy (for its time) processor, friendly interface, and low price.
Other than it’s unique industrial design, however, the iMac offered nothing truly new. It was what it did not have that made it a change maker. Specifically, it had no legacy ports. This meant that if other companies wanted to sell their printers, keyboards, mice, joysticks, floppy drives (oh yeah, the iMac was also the first modern mainstream computer to come without a floppy drive), graphics tablets, etc. they had to use USB. Thus, in relatively short order, almost every new peripheral came with a USB connector, which let other PC makers in the larger WIndows market move away from supporting the legacy connections as well and helped establish USB as the standard for connecting our gadgetry today.
In other words, the fact that USB was “better” than the legacy connectors wasn’t by itself enough to put the “universal” “U” in USB. Early adopters couldn’t drive the changeover. Instead, it took a major player to abandon the older alternatives to really drive a shift.
In many schools, a similar phenomenon occurred with the adoption of e-mail as the primary mode of communication between administrators and teachers. In education, as in any other field, there are early adopters. Early adopting principals saw e-mail as a faster and cheaper way to communicate with classroom teachers, especially regarding whole-district or whole-school issues when compared to copying and distributing paper memos or meeting face to face.
However, many principals encountered resistance to the changeover from teachers who were not comfortable or willing to use computers. In every school, there were a handful of teachers who never read or responded to e-mail. So, in most cases, principals sent e-mail AND continued to produce and distribute paper copies of announcements and memos. In these schools, e-mail didn’t really save time or money because now information was being distributed in two ways (e-mail + paper) instead of just one (paper.)
Again, abandonment, not adoption, was what finally brought everyone online. It wasn’t until principals simply started refusing to communicate via paper-in-mailbox that the savings of time and cost of electronic communication could be realized. When checking e-mail became the ONLY way to be in the loop, recalcitrant teachers finally got on board.
I suspect similar measures will be needed to drive adoption of digital media in the classroom.
Many educators, policy makers, and technophiles believe that the real barrier to adoption is the lack of access to technology in classrooms. As true believers in technology, they seem to believe that if each student and teacher had his or her own computer or tablet, the digital revolution would finally move through our education system.
Certainly, the full potential of the Web in education cannot and will not be realized until every student and teacher has their own web-enabled device. However, I am skeptical that “one-to-one computing” initiatives will, by themselves, will really take the digital revolution to scale in K-12 schools.
I suspect that it will take “early abandoners” to really change things.
Therefore, I would love to see a state or large district step up to the plate and offer schools a new deal. Instead of trying to figure out how to finance “one laptop per child” initiatives on top of existing funding for “analog” curriculum (like adding USB ports without doing away with PS2 and serial ports), I would love to see a state or local government say, “we will provide additional funding for you to provide a netbook or tablet for every single student if (and only if) you buy and distribute no more than one paper textbook/workbook and no more than 50 pages of photocopies in a year to each student who gets a computer.” Let’s call it the “one textbook per child” initiative in which, instead of financing computer access with non-existent “new” money, we do it by eliminating costs elsewhere. (Specifically, paper.)
Today, the variety of quality of open educational resources (OERs) is staggering. Repositories like Curriki, Connexions, Thinkfinity, MIT OpenCourseware, iTunes U, and the Open Education Commons offer top notch free and customizable resources developed by experts, tested by teachers, and aligned and organized by academic content standards. (Also, did I mention almost all of the material is free and customizable?)
And yet, only a tiny percentage of teachers know about or use them, instead relying on traditional print textbooks and workbooks that are far from free, not at all customizable, not easy to share, not interactive, and impossible to update with new information.
It’s not that I’m anti-book. (I would much rather read a novel in paperback form than on my phone or a Kindle.) I’m not even necessarily anti-textbook. I still have many of of the texts I bought for college and grad school courses, and even refer to a few of them on occasion. (Unfortunately, because textbooks are so expensive, few K-12 schools can allow students to keep them once they finish the course or grade level where they’re used as part of the curriculum. Therefore, even good textbooks have time-limited value for individual students.)
It’s just that I suspect it might take an “early abandoner” like a state or large school district to move digital curriculum out of “early adopter” niche status in the K-12 world.
Giving every student an iPad or netbook may not be enough, any more than adding USB ports to computers with serial and PS2 ports was enough to let the computer hardware industry move forward in the 90s. It might just take a forced choice (e.g. do you want this cool iMac OR your old keyboard? Do you want each kid to have computer OR a set of textbooks?) to bring online learning into the classroom mainstream.
If virtually everyone agrees that (a) technology skills will be essential for today’s students in the future, (b) inequities in access to technology threaten to widen economic gaps in our society and achievement gaps in our schools, and (c) scarce fiscal resources for education (and everything else) requires making hard choices, maybe its time to use the need to make hard choices as an opportunity to do so and finally get on with the digital transition in schools.
