And now for something completely different… As an educator who has organized and attended many education conferences over several decades, I have made a few observations about the unique relationship between educators, and vendors of education materials or educational technology. The reason for my consideration of this topic is because I will be participating in the Software Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco next week. Most of my conferences have been with a majority of educators in attendance and a minority of vendors. At this conference it will be mostly vendors and very few educators aside from me. I am actually flirting with the dark side in answering the many calls for consulting in regard to my Social-Media-in-Education experience.
Of course my reference to the “Dark Side” is a perfect example of what I now plan to address. Just how do many educators view vendors? The ironic point to this teacher-vendor relationship is that many of these people took the same education courses in college, but found that damned divergent road in the woods and travelled down different paths. I have often told students in education methods classes that the skills that they were learning were skills that they could apply in many places other than the classroom. I often thought that to be sound advice to kids trying for hundreds of teaching jobs sought after by thousands of applicants.
An often voiced complaint by conference attendees is that they don’t want too many vendor directed presentations or workshops. I always found that surprising in that who better knows the product and its potential than the vendor. Vendors are the product experts. Of course teachers would often say that vendors did not know the classroom, and that might be true of some, but not all vendors. It has been my experience that the industry looks to recruit teachers whenever possible, so that their personnel do have classroom experience. Unfortunately, I think it takes about a year out of the classroom however, before credibility as a teacher is diminished if not wiped out altogether.
Additionally, I wonder if the comfort, and ease of the vendors demonstrating their products, especially in the area of technology, doesn’t in some way intimidate some educators. Surprisingly, not all educators are at ease with technology. It doesn’t fall within their comfort zone. Then there is always the fear that some educators may have, based on the mythology that teachers can actually be replaced by technology. Using that perspective, the vendors are then trying to replace educators with their wares. Dastardly Tricksters!
Of course the most common complaint heard from educators is: The only reason why vendors do these workshops is to sell their products. Is there a loftier, more altruistic reason why vendors should demonstrate their products? Their products serve educators, help kids learn, financially support education conferences, and yes, it puts food on the vendor’s family table. Of course the vendor is there to sell products. That is the purpose of being there.
In this emerging era of collaborative learning, we need more educators and vendors reaching out. Teaching and learning is not easy. The more we move forward, the more we have to learn. If technology is required in our culture in order to aggregate, create, collaborate, and communicate, then great, let’s use it. Let us engage the experts who can best help us help ourselves. We need to engage them in a common effort to improve what we do, and how we do it. Let’s take their vision for teaching and apply it to what we know about learning. The term “Educator” can be broadly defined beyond a classroom teacher. Corporation and Education may need to strive more to find similarities and common goals together, rather than assume the solutions separately.
In the interest of full disclosure: My wife, a former professor, has been an education technology industry executive for more than two decades. We have often discussed the educator-vendor issue. We have managed to get along in harmony for a very long time with a bigger and better perspective on what we each do.
This is a survey that SIIA has asked teachers to take. It is an attempt by the industry to take in to account the needs and concerns of teachers. SIIA Survey
My Island View 
I am one who does tend to avoid vendor presentations at conferences-mostly because I am more interested in good practice than good product. That being said, we do have some (not many) vendors at our BLC conference and we do work hard to strike a balance. For our vendor sessions, we make it a practice to have the vendor bring a practicing educator who is using their products in the classroom. This allows participants to learn about great practices and great products with the appropriate expertise on hand to cover both.
Hi Tom:
Here is one problem with vendors – did you see the article this week about the school district in the state of Washington state ending an online program provided by K12 Inc. that has been in place since 2006? They decided to eliminate the program because of changes to the contract requested by the company. The dissolution of the contract means the elimination of the district’s online education program. The district expects to lay off teachers as a result of the closure and has instructed families to seek online services elsewhere.
As necessary as vendors are, the bottom line is – it’s the bottom line that rules. Our primary focus as educators is the education of the students; vendor’s bottom line is profits. As long as the two fit together, fine. But if not, they have the shareholders and dollars as primary concern, not the students.
(Except maybe Joyce …)
The article is here http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/04/30/2126809/pierce-county-online-school-to.html
To clarify what branzburg posted, it wasn’t just the contract changes from K12 that led to the end of WA Virtual Academy. It was also cuts in state funding for online education programs. There’s apparently plenty of blame to go around (and no, I have nothing to do with either K12 or WAVA, even though I live in Washington State).
The story from the Bellingham Herald:
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2012/04/30/2503710/pierce-county-online-school-to.html
All that said, I look forward to being on the SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit panel with Tom on Monday. As a PowerPoint-free zone, it should be quite lively.
Thanks for another great post. Although I am on the dark side, and not a classroom teacher, I consider myself a passionate educator.
Whenever I present, I showcase incredible project work from students. I focus on ideas, strategies, tips, lesson plans, curriculum extensions, and PEDAGOGY. The samples I show are, of course, created in my software, but those are also the samples I get sent to me and have releases to show. So it definitely irks when I get lumped into submitting as an exhibitor.
That being said, I have definitely sat through quite a few presentations that were sales pitches without value (sorry to anyone else who has too). I have also worked with many conferences where the incredible people running them take on the full-time job of organizing after their full days in the classroom, so if lumping us all together is what it takes to make the most people happy, I can live with that.
When my two partner’s and I started Tech4Learning 13 years ago, yes, we were looking to start a company. We were inspired by the awesome things we had seen working for HyperStudio and wanted to bring all that great constructivist stuff to every classroom. But we wanted to make a company, not just a product and that does require profits.
While I love working with students and teachers and bringing great products that make classroom learning fun and exciting, our company is also our family. If it takes profits to help me make sure that my employees can get good healthcare, buy their first home, send their kids to college, and have the finances to support their families (we had another new baby added today – congratulations Richard!), then I laud them as an equal partner of our bottom line.
Well, I guess I might have overstated my point a bit. As Frank Catalano shows, it looks like it is more complex than the article I read paints it! And as melindace mentions, of course profits are important so that good companies like hers can continue to bring good products to market.
I think this is a great conversation with lots of passionate opinions. I am guessing it must be very hard for educational conferences (some of which are essentially also businesses) to find a good balance. I wish there could be more talking and collaborating by people on both sides of the aisle.
I’m glad to see that you’re so open minded about this, especially because I am technically a representative for an edtech company. To set the record straight: we love teachers and we don’t want to replace them! We just want to make some tools that can make their lives a little easier. I think most vendors work for companies that feel the same.
Hi Tom, thanks for this post, you made some great points and it really got me thinking about the relationship of ed tech companies and educators. It was the inspiration for a post I wrote on the ShowMe blog today: http://www.showme.com/blog/2012/05/our-awesome-educator-community/
This was one week when I really needed to read a post like this one. Thank you, Tom.
I am a former teacher who left the classroom what seems a lifetime ago. My hope and dream was that I could accomplish the following in building a career in for-profit world:
* have an impact on more children than the 20-30 or so I had each year
* to collaborate with educators from all over the world
* bring my degrees in education, child development, and curriculum development along with my real-world teaching experience to companies that were, in many ways, out of touch or in ivory towers
* accomplish and build and experiment and research educational practices that the traditional school walls I worked within didn’t make possible nor available
I could go on… I have, indeed, accomplished many of these goals. And, like my colleagues who posted before me have stated… I love teachers. I love teaching teachers about the ideas, practices and tools that I think (and see) are making a difference in the lives of students and teachers… Even more so than when I was a teacher myself. Why? Because I get it! I know how damn hard your job is. I know that YOU make a difference no matter if you have 10 pencils and a pile of paper in your classroom or 100 laptops with every software imaginable.
And- yes– there are some companies out there who are making much noise. There are questionable practices in ANY business. This, however, is why I encourage educators to seek out companies to partner with. I invite teachers to challenge the content, critique it, and make sure (demand) that the market has the tools that educators and students NEED.