My interaction with teachers and administrators over the past couple weeks has reinforced a belief I’ve had for some time, the language associated with educational technology is one of the chief impediments to its application in schools. We’re suffering because the host of Web 2.0 sites are trying to out-weird each other for attention. What else explains “Diigo”, “Spurl” and “Moodle”? No one appreciates these services more than me, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to talk about them with a straight face. How can you convince someone that these tools are worthwhile when they have such ridiculous names? Such drastic deviation from common language automatically sparks suspicion, it should be no wonder that teachers and education leaders are not incorporating them into the schools faster. I’m as much a educational technology advocate as the professional presenters and consultants, but I have a great deal of sympathy for teachers who intrinsically know that technology must be able to help them somehow, but have a tough time accepting that it has the same value as things like the “Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature”, “Chicago Manual of Style” or Library of Congress.
Beyond the goofy names of the Web 2.0 sites and services, even the basic structure 
of the tools have weird names. What exactly is a podcast? (and how did Apple find a way to manage marketing by pulling another “Xerox”?) Is there a word more ugly than “blog”? How does a “wiki” work? Names like that make one yearn for the old days when the name of a tool explained exactly what it does. You don’t need Julia Child to tell you what a cheese grater is used for.
“Horseless carriages” and “cars” had some connection with the technology they replaced, in today’s world only an “online forum” has that quality. Blog, wiki and podcast come out of nowhere, manly because they did. The incremental changes in transportation were not as revolutionary as changes in information and communication. There are no antecedents to connect with, despite Wikipedia’s effort to take a chunk of an old word to make one.
We are left with the task of explaining the difference between a website, blog and wiki to people who don’t know the difference between Google and Firefox. Although I look at this as a type of illiteracy, I’m not at all comfortable with the condescending chuckling of the edublogger-types, twittering about the converging worldwide singularity of their ustream conferences while at the same time, content to cash in on this ignorance by making a living with flash and dazzle presentations. Educational technology will not find any traction in schools without an effort to explain these communication and information tools in simple terms (like CommonCraft’s “In Plain English” videos). Combining this with a sustained professional development program and simple teacher-by-teacher, day-after-day grunt work is the only hope for true progress.
To figure out where we should start, I’m tempted to ask you readers a question, all four of you. What is the most misused word in educational technology today?
Steven,
This is a great post. I believe you can add “Twitter” to your list of ill-named applications. The very sound of it makes it seem inconsequential and something that only a “twit” would do. And perhaps keeps me from accepting it as a useful tool.
All the best,
Doug
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In the third paragraph, you wrote “manly” instead of ‘mainly”. 🙂 Good post though.
Steven,
Well done and well said. Caught this through Doug’s post.
I have struggled to get my colleagues to take me seriously because of the names of the tools. I believe many of the sites that schools have blocked come because of the names and not the content.
I have also found it interesting that our school system default search engine (once the tech dept ghosts new machines) is MSN. I now wonder if they believe that has more “credibility” due to the name than Google or Yahoo!
It’s an interesting psychological study for someone…not me…but someone.
Peace,
Ric
Steve,
I think if you look at how many teachers use technology, they use it for grading programs, PPTs, to show animations/clips of videos–basically things they have always done in new formats. To encourage teachers to use more technology (at least those that are reluctant at first) we should show they how they could improve what they presently do with technology. The transition from keep a journal to keeping a blog isn’t that big a jump, but diving into Diingo may be. Hopefully with some success, they will be encouraged to use more educational technology and encourage others to use it as well.
sd
@Doug and @John – appreciate the compliments, wish I thought of the Spurl poster
@jerratt – mea culpa, thanks for the spot. No doubt a karma payback for the post about proofreading [sitting down and shutting up]
@Ric – I wonder if the tech department even thinks of that as they ghost the machines. Tech departments do tech, not teach. I’ve always believed there is a profound disconnect between administration, teachers and IT. Are there many districts that pull representatives from these three groups to make decisions that determine default desktops, homepages and filtering?
@Sean – Funny you should mention that, I was thinking of just that dynamic to make a case for what I believe should be our next step. I’d like to get teachers to open their planning calendars to teachers and parents through a Google calendar embedded on their teacher page on the school website and start digitizing all of their content.
I agree about names like “Twitter,” “Spurl,” and “Moodle,” but “website,” “blog,” “podcast,” and even “wikipedia” are fairly straightforward and, in my opinion, valid. They are all compound words, a few of which have lost a letter for convenience. “Wikipedia” is perhaps less obvious (according to dictionary.com, “wikiwiki” is Hawaiian for “quick”), but is at least grounded in real words (and, at that, real words that relate to its content and function), unlike – to the best of my knowledge – “Moodle” or “Spurl.”
On a different note, some non-educationally directed sites – such as Facebook and Myspace – have clearer and more content-driven names. The name “Facebook” may not reveal its function to the extent that “cheese grater” does, but it beats “Moodle.”
@Merdith – Yes there are degrees of palatability so the terms that include familiar words or sound like they do have a greater chance to scale among the “non-connected”.
But there are subtle differences in the conversations and interaction on blogs, wikis and forums that are difficult to describe. Perhaps the only way to understand them is to participate in them, which I advocate to teachers all the time.
“Podcast” bugs me because it seems to have consumed any audio recording on the web eliminating the difference between recordings published on a regular basis in installments and just one audio recording. In the edtech world podcast is the fresh red carpet celebrity in a slinky dress, while “talking into a cassette tape recorder” is an overweight, stone-age boor.