If you build it, they will come.

So here's the problem. You've got this really cool stuff(tm) that will help improve learning. You know the pupils get it, but you can't get teachers to implement it. Pop quiz hotshot. ...What do you do? What do you do?

I was planning to do a long overdue research blog entry but made the mistake of trying to catch up a bit on some of my Bloglines feeds. I found myself eavesdropping on a conversation between Ewan and John which seems to have been prompted by an EdTech Coast to Coast podcast. Ewan wanted to know, "Is there any other way of showing blog power to the masses, other than going round bit-by-bit and showing kids and teachers in classrooms?" John picks this up and says that even that doesn't work because the response is often, "cool, but where will I get the time."

The trouble is, just as the Coast to Coast chaps discuss, you can be utterly convinced about the value of something (wikis, podcasts and blogs or whatever) but unless the teachers you are talking to get passionate about it, you'll get the reaction that John talked about. As the great Stan Laurel said:

"You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead."

{It works better if you say it out loud.}

Beckett on the mound,
originally uploaded by Pichichi.

The title of this post comes from the film Field of Dreams. In the film, a character builds a baseball park in the middle of nowhere confident that once it is built someone will come and play on it. The trouble is that all too often we build the virtual eLearning playground only to find that it ends up virtually empty!

However, I think that part of the answer is to keep plugging away at it "bit-by-bit". Only once a teacher is convinced that the benefits outweigh the costs will that teacher seriously consider classroom blogging. Make the teacher an enthusiastic blogger and you're pretty much there. One of the speakers in the podcast describes this process. He got teachers using the technology and describes how an enthusiastic Music teacher came to him and said, "If we can do this, can we do that?" The classroom uses took off as the teachers got enthusiastic.

It's not all bad though Ewan. I used to be a sums teacher, and I do remember a bit about exponential growth. If the three of us manage to get three teachers each to be enthusiastic blog readers and writers then that means there are now twelve of us. If that twelve now manage to convince another three each, that takes us to forty-eight. And if that forty... you get the picture. Think small, but aim big.

Finally, to pick up on some specifics from Ewan and John's posts and comments. It's very flattering of Ewan to describe me as carrying out "one man effort" to promote social networking tools but that sounds grander than I think it deserves. {Still not happy with "social networking tools" as a name, but I prefer it to Web 2.0 or read/write web. I'm still open to suggestions.} I'm particularly pleased the way a Flickr thing is going this year. It's all in a private group at the moment, but I may be able to make some of it public later. John's comments about the need for more networked computers chimes nicely with Steve's comments on Would you want a computer without the Internet?

Ewan asks about a "child-safe environment for blogging". I suspect you know about this already, but David Warlick's Blog Meister looks interesting from that point of view, although a totally teacher moderated blog would be a real pain for the teacher, but may not bring significant gain.

And finally, on Ewan's comment on John's blog. He says, "The FE and HE groups have more time to run blogs, and treat them as interesting from a research angle, which therefore makes them legit conerns in their day-to-day work." All I can say as lecturer in HE is that the other man's blogsphere is always greener!

Tags: education | ewanmcintosh | johnjohnston | distributed conversations | blogs | davidwarlick