Is your school ready for a change?

Ewan McIntosh writes one of my favorite blogs about introducing tools of the new web into schools. Last week he attended a conference at Edinburgh University where one of the speakers, Terry Anderson, gave a presentation on strategies for adopting social software.
Ewan posted some of his notes from Anderson's presentation, and lists conditions that facilitate or accelerate technology changes. First of these was:

• dissastisfaction with the status quo

I would take this to mean that we are aware that things could be better, and this awareness makes us want to learn something new in order to fix whatever is missing or wrong.

What I've read and seen about technology integration indicates that students get excited when they learn tools that enable them to be more creative, even when it means more work. We could say that students felt that these tools gave them an outlet that was lacking before (dissastisfaction motivates learning).

Teachers, on the other hand, might feel negatively about using new technology because they are simply required to do so as part of a blanket tech integration plan,  even though they are not motivated or equipped to do anything with the new tech that they couldn't do with the old tech. So the status quo (and the dissatisfaction it might bring) in some cases could, by itself, hinder genuine integration of technology.

Other conditions cited by Anderson included expertise, incentives, participation, commitment and leadership.  To me this basically means that tech adoption happens best an organizational climate that encourages people to deal with their dissatisfaction in creative, constructive ways. From the looks of Ewan's post, Anderson said nothing about infrastructure, the size of your monitor or the speed of your connection. It's not really about the tools, it's about the people.

I suspect the way a school perceives and strives to enable any kind of learning --with or without computers and Internet-- is what makes the difference between a preoccupation (and dissastisfaction) with knowledge about tools, and an enthusiasm for the things discovered and made with those tools.

Click here to read the rest of Ewan's notes.