Technology Training is a Waste

Synopsis: Conventional wisdom (to which I have long subscribed) says that spending money on technology without providing sufficient training is a waste of money (emphisis added). Recently, however, my definintion of sufficient has changed dramatically. What teachers need is hardware and software that work reliably and are easy to use.

K12LTSP: I've now tested K12LTSP servers in 4 classrooms, with less than an hour's training. We're talking about a new operating system, new applications, and a new infrastructure (a terminal server and thin clients). That's it. I walked away. Left. Didn't come back. For months. (OK, people had my phone number and email address.) This seemed irresponsible. As it turned out, the old hippy guy--you probably know him in your school---the one who'd always refused to use computers in his classroom used computers every day. And so did his students. No training, but a significant change in how he and his students used computers.

Moodle/Drupal: Forget HTML. Use CMS. Jerry Pournelle (whom, now I think about it wrote about computers much the same way that Jeffry Steingarten writes about food) said that if he couldn't figure out a program in 15 minutes he wouldn't use it. Period. I think that's a good measure. If we're suggesting that teachers (or any Normal People) a computer program, it ought to be clear how to do something useful with it in less than 15 minutes. Sure, I've spent the better part of today futzing with Drupal, but I'm thinking that with 100 hours or so, a school (or College of Education, Health and Human Sciences) web site could be put together such that Normal People (that is professors and secretaries) could keep stuff updated and looking right. Without training and without expensive sledgehammers like Dreamweaver. I recently attended a conference workshop touting "free" FrontPage Express, but according to this Microsoft bulletin you can't use it if you "upgrade" to Windows 2000. This is one more reason that we should be suspicious of proprietary software even if it is free. What's free today, may not be tomorrrow. Some make the distinction of Free as in speach, vs free, as in beer. Though everyone likes free beer, few of us would trade our free speech for free beer (recent polls of students notwithstanding). If you're convinced that you want to create HTML pages that you upload to a server, you might want to know about NVU; it's Open Source, which means that it will be really free. Forever.