Education-specific Tools Face Many Challenges

I might have mentioned this in a previous post, but one of COSL’s philosophies was to adopt and adapt existing general web tools and services (social bookmarking via Delicious, or source code distribution via Sourceforge) rather than building education-specific tools and services (I don’t have a really good counter example for social bookmarking, but eduForge for educational open source projects).

The general thinking being, that the primary distinctions between education-only and the general web is a perception of quality and a “shared space”. Neither of which, I believe, really holds to be true. It’s all about perception and I have yet to hear a compelling reason for why “education” has to be different and separate. And certainly these perceptions don’t provide enough inertia to overcome neither the scale and support and nor usefulness of general web tools.

Here’s the punch line: education-only tools are likely to be challenged to generate enough users and use and are not likely to have sufficient support to grow and evolve.

The big, often unrealized consequences of this is that the potential maximum audience for the tool or service starts off as restricted. This limitation, combined with the perception from educators at all levels that they are “too busy” to adopt a new technology or technique, and a tool/service has to be a “home run” or even a “grand slam” to get the attention of enough of them. This is especially true when developing a service that requires a large number of users to be successful, as in a community of participants.

The end result? Education-only tools and services often ultimately fade into obscurity.

[I should probably expand on this, but I don’t have the motivation to write more right now –Brandon]