This week’s discussion questions got me thinking about SUCCESS SECTIONS (Bates & Poole 2003) again.  In particular the idea of “Cost”.

In our forums we were responsible for discussing a fictitious character “Benoit” who had to decide which platform he was going to deploy an upcoming post-secondary course on.  A forum that he was familiar with but lacked a responsive tech support team or a new open source model that wasn’t supported by the university but had many of his peers using it.

Naturally this question doesn’t have a win win and is acting as more of a conversation piece but, it got me thinking about the hesitations of many of my peers (K-12 Teachers) who are reluctant to make switches to technology.  The old adage of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  The question in response might be “what if you are missing something from not using technology?”

The problems that can arise from technology are numerous, sometimes that means a tech support that is bogged down in so many requests that they aren’t able to tend to them.  In addition, the cost of one’s time and energy invested into making a system work can be taxing.  It may be like opening a can of worms.

The last discussion question was asking how much time we thought it would take Benoit to build his course from scratch.  I have built a wiki for my classroom (in no way is this a course) but it was interesting to think how much time I had invested in the project.  The recess and lunch hours trying to make it work. Not including the weekends and evenings fixing, monitoring and posting new material.  I had never sat to think about it because to me it was all worth the effort for the students (they still use it to micro-blog on it 2 years later!).   It’s difficult to think what else I could’ve done with that time, but I guess that is why we are teachers.

Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003).A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A.W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 4.