A prophet should design for implementation in his own land

Patrick Dickson

I've been brooding lately over the observation that the software products developed with major funding by respected academic researchers rarely last longer than the funding. Perhaps no software endures for long--VisiCalc didn't--though it did spawn spreadsheets. But what has most caught my eye is that software developed at a university appears rarely to be used even in the teacher education programs at that institution, let alone anywhere else. Perhaps 'cutting edge, basic research' should not be judged against the criterion of successful application, and perhaps many 'basic' researchers have no particular interest in whether their research and development leads to application.

Nevertheless, it seems poignant that so few of the products, whose development and study are reported in research journals and read diligently by our doctoral students in preparation for their comprehensive exams, exist in forms that could be integrated in any substantive way in our teacher education program. If the developers had sought to integrate their products in the teacher education programs at their own universities and been rebuffed by their teacher education colleagues, at least the attempt had been made. But it is my impression that under pressures of time and resources, this question has not even been posed in many of the design teams out of an unexamined sense of 'if we build it, they will come.'

The benefits of simultaneously developing new applications and testing models for their integration into teacher education programs would accrue to the design-and-revise process of the software itself and to discourse within the teacher education community. In view of the rate of change in technology and the need for thoughtful integration of technology into the preparation of teachers, such a model would compress the time between development and deployment of new software and the ideas about teaching embodied in the software. For the researchers, students in teacher education and the classrooms where they work with cooperating teachers could be readily accessible contexts for gathering data on the products, as well as insights into improving software design for usability in classrooms. If the product doesn't 'sell' with colleagues and students in one's own college, is it really likely to be adopted elsewhere?

Having arrived at this critique of research and development of educational technology in academic settings, I was confronted this afternoon with an absolutely perfect example of this egregious failure of researchers to design for local use.

I was asked to conduct a session today on the Personal Communicator at the College of Education's Technology Conference. The Personal Communicator is an award-winning product for that contains over 3,000 American Sign Language signs in QuickTime format. The interface is designed to facilitate communication between a hearing-impaired user and and someone who does not know ASL. A user can type a word or a sentence and the program shows an interpreter expressing the written language in signs. The program includes a dictionary for looking up signs, seeing them, and reading about them. Thus, it can also be useful for students learning ASL. The software is available on CD-ROM and the Web (http://commtechlab.msu.edu).

After presenting the program to the dozen or so attendees at my session, I asked for questions. The audience included undergraduates in our teacher education program preparing teachers of the hearing impaired, as well as recent graduates working in classrooms with hearing impaired students. Immediately these students expressed their disappointment that this program had not been called to their attention. They felt it would be useful for them in their courses on ASL. One said, "I'm in my fourth semester of ASL here and no one has ever mentioned this software. It would have been so useful in practicing interpreting ASL. Why have we never heard of it?" I thought, "We have met the enemy and it is us."

Thinking back to the project, I found myself wondering, "Could our design team have engaged with the challenge of also designing with the intent and exploration of how this product could be integrated into MSU's ASL courses? What kinds of "lesson plans" and technology resources and curricular redesign would have been required?"

If we had made the effort, and if the Personal Communicator were being used each semester at MSU, perhaps we would have learned a lot more about the product and how to improve it. And if our own graduates in special education were going out into their internship years and teaching positions, with this knowledge and CD-Rom in their teaching toolkit, perhaps more of the children whose lives and learning we were funded to improve would receive those benefits.

If we had it to do over again, knowing what we know now....