Week 3 Discussion Board 3-1: Resistant to Change

Why do you think educators are so resistant to change, especially when it comes to technology? How do other institutions, such as business, deal with technological change?

While reflecting on the discussion prompt, I stumbled upon a section of an article, entitled: Changes in Technology in Business that read:

“Accessibility 

Advancements in mobile technology allow employers and employees to communicate in newer, faster ways. Laptops, tablet computers and mobile devices like PDAs keep workers constantly connected, raising networking to another level. Companies have access to their clients and customers on-line and vice versa, increasing the frequency and speed of communication, and making companies more available to their customers. 

Application 

By utilizing the connectivity offered by changes in technology, businesses can easily keep customers and clients up-to-date with the latest information and news. They can also use this access to conduct faster research on what clients are looking for, leading to more rapid business development. Many businesses are already using social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to stay in constant contact with their customers and learn more about how they can better their company.”

As I was reading my mind immediately began replacing words that reflected educational terms instead of business terms, e.g., parents for clients and students for customers, etc. The results made sense and were in fact true. But why then does it feel so uncomfortable as we read it. (The paragraphs below are the same as those above with the bold and italicized words below replacing the underlined words above).

Accessibility 

Advancements in educational technology allow teachers and students to communicate in newer, faster ways. Laptops, tablet computers and mobile devices like PDAs keep students constantly connected, raising collaboration in education to another level. Schools have access to their parents and students on-line and vice versa, increasing the frequency and speed of communication, and making schools (or content) more available to their students.

Application 

By utilizing the connectivity offered by changes in technology, schools can easily keep parents and students up-to-date with the latest information and news. They can also use this access to conduct faster research on what students are looking for, leading to more rapid educational development. Many schools are already using social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to stay in constant contact with their teachers, parents, and other students and learn more about how they can better their educational environment.

However, the reality of its use is different. Businesses and other institutions embrace technology change. For them, they know that to change and incorporate technology means a change in revenues. The right technological change could mean a serious increase in revenue and a wrong move could mean a loss. In business this is considered a business risks and in many cases considered acceptable and may be recoverable. This could result in little or no major or long-term effect on the business or its employees. However, in education the risk is much greater if the implementation of a technology fails. If technology adoption or implementation fails the results are immediate and long lasting in terms of student expense and therefore considered unacceptable risks and losses to stakeholders.

This is one of the factors that make educators so resistant to change, especially when it comes to technology. Hixon & Buckenmeyer (2009) showed there are many factors that hindered teacher adoption of technology in classroom instruction. Identified were the lack of teacher technology training, the lack of funding for technical support, the lack of focus for the intended use of the technology, and from personal observation, the fear of the technology for whatever reason.

I have found that as veteran teachers (those approaching retirement age) begin to attrite from in-service to retired, newer younger more tech-savvy teachers are picking up he mantle of technology implementation with little effort. However, unless there is a fundamental institutional change of attitude from educational leadership and the way we are preparing teachers to use technology there will be no change in technology adoption in education (see my AR project).