Mission Impossible
This blog comment is related to Olga Caprotti's blog entry "Mission Accomplished."
We are in the business of advancing the use of information technology in education. At times I feel that this is a Mission Impossible. It may be just as easy for us to advance the use of ICT in education as it is to advance the arriving of a summer in Finland by melting some of the snow and ice away by hot water. Things happen at their due time, and then with great force. In Finland, winter turns into spring, and spring into summer just in a few weeks. The hot water, that we used as kids, has absolutely no effect in the process.
At the Trondheim meeting talks about the EUROPEAN VIRTUAL LABORATORY OF MATHEMATICS were given. Talks were good. It seems, however, that many people talk the talk but do not walk the walk. The European Virtual Laboratory's hit counter reports today, that it has received 3471 hits. This is a repository set up by Community funding within the Leonardo Programme. The data seems to be since last October.
This statistics means that nobody is using the Web Site, not even the creators of the site. I get that many hits just in a day or two to my online calculus course. And I consider this just scratching the surface.
Our Mission Impossible is now "How to Break the Enormous Inertia of the Academia" to improve education, to make it more affordable, and to make it much more accessible.
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Missions Accomplished
For those who view the above blog entry as either provocative or pessimistic, I would like to remind you that, in the Mission Impossible tv series, the team always managed to accomplish the impossible missions. My intent is to do the same.
If you build it, they will come...
That phrase (it comes from the movie 'Field of Dreams') was behind so many failures of 'web 1.0' in the late nineties... Building a site, even a good site with good content, is not enough to get visitors and then convert them into users.
YouTube was not the first Flash video site on the web, and it is not the best but, somehow, it managed to get a strong user base (I resist the term community) behind it and has become a poster child for user generated content. What happened? What made it such a success?
I believe that quite a few of the web efforts around using IT for education, even the ones for mathematics, are well beyond the 'good enough' point and we have to begin wondering whether IT for education presents special challenges that haven't been met yet, or if it really is a matter of waiting, or there's some fine tuning to do, or some other aspect I can't quite grasp.
Some general pointers can be found at If you build it, will they come? 21 tips for getting people to your web site - publicity, promotion and marketing, and Google has led me to If You Build It, They Will Come: Building Learning Communities Through Threaded Discussions, which looks promising after some quick skipping. Then again, I'm sure we'll learn a lot from Christine's work, as pointed by Olga.
Anyway, a big challenge ahead, offering some interesting times...