The Sweet Spot vs. the Sweat Spot <!– Replace the following line with this: –>
Source: Gartner (August 2007)

The news headsline: “Web 2.0 Advocates, Recant.” What came to mind when I read this post on the Total Cost of Ownership 2.0:

Web 2.0 Education Advocates are recanting their position regarding Read/Write Web technologies, and K-12 school district administrators are quietly chortling as the money to fund rocket start-up, Web 2.0 quietly evaporates in the economic downturn. “We always had to worry about some teacher or other publishing something online–student work, notes to parents–that might be inappropriate. We couldn’t stop ’em and we couldn’t keep up with the new Web 2.0 services that were cropping up. Now, as the pendulum swings back to schools, we can continue to uphold CIPA and better contain these rebellious teachers who endangered student privacy through the use of Web 2.0 tools!” The position of school district network admins is solidified as Web 2.0 education advocates, like Ryan Bretag, point out, “There is great excitement at the possibilities but then the bottom falls out. One by one, the free web 2.0 tools that this entire movement is based upon start to charge and no one accounted for funding because web 2.0 equals free. “
Source: Miguel’s Imagination and the final quote attributed to Ryan Bretag comes from TL Advisor

As we watch Web 2.0 tools begin to disappear in the face of a tough economy, school districts employees are turning to their organizations and saying, “How can YOU support the kind of Read/Write Web learning we’ve become accustomed to?” The irony is, do school organizations even have to support what the Read/Write Web learners have become accustomed to? Just because I can use Gcast, do I have to have a K-12 school district, in-house alternative provided for me?

Ryan’s point is well-taken. Systemic use of Web 2.0 tools may be occurring among educators (it’s not everywhere) but there has been no real change in the organizational structure of schools to develop capacity. School organizations and staff are stretched thin by what they have to do now, much less consider trying to rebuild Web 2.0 in their own districts. Some free, open source tools do exist, but those can quickly become support nightmares!

Consider my experience with Joomla. Joomla 1.5.x is setup to run on a Windows 2003 server using IIS. Joomla 1.0 can handle the hundreds of simultaneous hits, but a switch to the new version of Joomla results in failure, the end result just like a denial of service attack.

Or, consider that Moodle is a free, open source tool. However, once you start using it system-wide, it requires a level of support and complexity that is far beyond what its “launchers” imagined when they placed it in the school organization pond.

Simply, are our schools geared up to support Web 2.0 in any fashion, and with precious funds disappearing (beyond the short “catchup” spurt of stimulus package money), should they even start to embrace free, open source tools like that mirror Web 2.0 apps?

Ryan Bretag makes an excellent point in a follow up comment. It’s one I’ve come to appreciate over the last few weeks:

What I’m talking about is sustainability and the movement of schools, not individual teachers, to adopt these tools systemically without considering that they may lead to paid services.

When I consider OpenOffice being a free desktop app with minimal support issues–if it’s about training for you, I don’t think that’s as bad as some imagine when abandoning MS Office 2007–I’m excited about what it would mean to save money. Here’s an app that works on your computer, netbook or otherwise. But when I think of the work that has to go into maintaining a Web 2.0 app, or one that facilitates that in schools, that is hosted by the school organization, then, I start to feel the same emotions I get when I go out to mow the lawn at the end of a miserably hot summer day in Texas…a desire to reach for my wallet and pay someone else to do the hard work.

Are school districts ready for THAT kind of hard work? Are teachers and leaders who advocate the use of these tools ready for the systematic, and more importantly, systemic kind of response needed to ensure content management and learning management solutions will work day after day, 24/7?

I’ll give you the response from one network administrator by way of a hint:

“We’re just not staffed or funded to provide 24 hour/7 day a week support our current initiatives (e.g. web-based gradebook). How can you pile more on?”

Is it time to out-source the whole technology department and get back to our core mission of teaching students from paper-bound curriculum guides that get updated once a year and whose wisdom is shielded by a thick layer of dust where it sits on its wooden perch atop a classroom shelf?

Some questions to ask:

• Can we sustain this solution if it goes district-wide and everyone starts to use it?
• In the time it takes from start (one school) to full implementation (everyone), will our technical support staff have the opportunity+time+desire to learn how to support it?
• Will Curriculum and Instruction Dept’s choose to embrace these solutions as part of our core mission, or it will have the equivalence of a firecracker in an open palm (noise but minimal impact)? And, even if it’s clasped tightly, will these technologies help or damage the organization?
• If “minimal impact” from the initiative results, what are the resulting consequences for staff morale, perception of negative innovation quotient (i just made that up with apologies if some else did already)?

The negative innovation quotient increases because everyone is “bummed out” that the initiative failed. Too late, organizations realize that they should have been pouring everything into the innovation but then find it’s just too late. They’ll have to back up and consider a more strategic approach.

Thoughts?

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure