benshead

Here’s part of a comment I left on a post of Tom’s about the lack of IT infrastructure in many schools and the cognitive dissonance between that reality and many of the loftier voices in EdTech:

I’ve decided to stop feeling badly that I haven’t managed to lead a web 2.0 revolution at my school. If I’ve simply provided a functional, available, and friendly infrastructure for our users, I should feel pretty good about that.

That might sound like a cop-out. Isn’t it like saying that as long as I’ve built a good foundation, it doesn’t matter what kind of house I build? I guess at its root, though, this is an issue of what should be expected from EdTech in K-12 schools. If you try to do the fancy stuff without sound fundamentals, you quickly get nowhere.

I have come to believe that most people who work in schools have no clear idea of what they should be getting for their IT dollars. The corollary, of course, is that they don’t have any idea how much they should be willing to pay for it.