What Do You Think You "Hired" Your Technology To Do?

Educational technology and milkshakes have something in common.

MacDonald’s, wanting to increase the sales of their milkshakes, hired researchers to help them figure the characteristics the customers seemed to care about. They wondered should they make the shakes sweeter, or thicker, etc.

The researchers observed customers buying shakes and realized something strange. Many customers weren’t buying them as a dessert item to go along with a meal as most might assume, but rather these customers were buying a single shake in the morning.

Seems customers, who were on the morning commute to work, were buying shakes to drink for breakfast. MacDonald’s had never thought of shakes that way, so it was surprising to them. MacDonald’s had “hired” their shakes to do the job of a dessert item, but many customers had “hired” the shakes to do the job of an easy to drink breakfast.

This concept was noted in the findings of two Harvard researchers in their essay, “Finding the Right Job for Your Product” and also recounted in Clay Shirky’s recent book, Cognitive Surplus.

The key to understanding what was going on was to stop viewing the product in isolation or your understanding and notions of what it was “hired to do”, and instead look to what the customers had actually “hired it to do.”

You may have decided that you want to bring technology into your school and see it utilized across the curriculum to engage students in 21st  Century learning. You may have a certain notion of what the technology can do and how it will be utilized. You will “hire” technology for one job, but don’t be surprised if the students themselves “hire” it for something else.

For example, you want to give your student access to the web to look up information and learn information literacy skills. That seems implicit to you. However, your students want to use the web to share information. You wanted them to consume, they wanted to produce and share. You have “hired” the web to do a different job than the students have “hired” it do.

You “hired” Google Docs so students could work in small groups in the classroom on projects. Your students “hired” Google Docs so they could collaborate with people, including content experts and other students, across the globe.

You “hired” technology to aide student collaboration is groups of 2-3. The students “hired” technology to aide collaboration in groups of 200-300.

You hired PowerPoint or Keynote for students to create in class presentations. Your students hired it to turn into Slideshare presentations and then share across the web.

You “hired” NoteBook as a way to keep students organized, they “hired” it as a way to make digital talking books.

You “hired” the technology to help students consume. They “hired” it to help them produce. You hired the technology to help students connect. They “hired” it to comment and critique.

As Clay Shirky points out, new tools in new hands, take on new characteristics. In other words, what you “hired” technology to do may not be what students or teacher end up “hiring” technology to do once it is in their hands.

Because sometimes a milkshake is actually breakfast. Are you ready for that? Can you deal with that?

Comments

[Sue Boudreau]

And then there's the common mis-understanding that '21st Century Skills' means learning to use a computer and internet better... That, and the way that my district constrains us (no social networking allowed!), means that technology is less likely to shake up the status quo.