Making the move...

Judy Perry jperryl at ecs.fullerton.edu
Tue Mar 21 01:00:37 EST 2006


Holy Batcrap, Dan!

Like, is it a full moon?  Are the planets in alignment??  Did I miss a
supernova somewhere obvious???

:-)

You know, I have always held that rumours of our supposedly concrete
disagreement status are greatly exaggerated.

Yeah, I've seen something very like what you are talking about (Point No.
1, that is; probably the others as well).  Something very similar is why,
although funding has been approved, my FrankenLab won't be fixed anytime
soon, if at all.

As for your points 2 & 3 (which to me seem to be the samething), I've
seen that too.  While in the midst of a rather painful msidt (see how it
relates to midst???  msidt = master of science in instructional design and
technology; sorry for the pun; it was a really dreadful program), we
students were in the midst of this small (as in, *really* small) unit on
copyrighted materials and fair use in the classroom, and a rather vocal
seeming majority of my fellow students stridently held that their mission
to educate trumped basic property rights.  When I objected, I was
basically called a "pie in the sky" and "ivory tower" higher-ed type.

And I'll bet their software budget is bigger than mine.

Judy

On Mon, 20 Mar 2006, Dan Shafer wrote:

> OMG, Judy, two things we can agree on in, what?, less than a month? Perhaps
> the end of the cycle is imminent!
>
> :-)
>
> I spent two years once trying to sell a product into the "education market."
> (I use quotation marks because in my experience -- which may well have been
> unique for all I know -- there is no such thing as a "market" called
> "education".) Here's what I ran into (enough years ago that some of it may
> no longer be valid and it specifically applies to K-12, not secondary):
>
> 1.  The decision-maker is often hard to find. This was a real deal-blocker
> for us. I'm not kidding. In one case, we found out that the key decision
> maker in determing what software a school district (a large one, at that)
> would buy was the nephew of the superintendent who worked as an outside
> consultant. He wasn't on an org chart and we could not make a direct
> presentation to him. That was the extreme but it was only a matter of
> degree.
>
> 2.  Educators often cried poor-mouth, seeking deep, deep discounts that
> would have resulted in our inability to stay in business but then they also
> wanted reliable tech support (including pre-sale) and training.
>
> 3.  Too often, educators felt justified taking our proprietary software and
> duplicating it for their fellow educators, on the same basis as #2, i.e.,
> they were under-funded and under-paid.
>
> Now I'm not going to argue that educators are adequately compensated let
> alone overpaid. And I know that in the U.S. at least the priority we place
> on education in our budgets is horrific in contrast to the lip service we
> pay to the importance of education in our society. But even programmers have
> to eat (though they seem able to subsist of Jolt and Twinkies for extended
> periods of time, with the odd pizza tossed in for good measure.) But what
> does seem to me to be the case is that, as I think I hear you saying,
> educators seem (in general) to be OK with taking advantage of people who
> supply software technology to make their jobs easier but are not OK with
> others wishing to take advantage of their good nature as altruistic
> participants in the social discourse.
>
> And at the end, I just find this very interesting, not necessariiy negative
> or problematic.
>
> On 3/20/06, Judy Perry <jperryl at ecs.fullerton.edu> wrote:
>
> I suspect that there are remarkably few educators who would apply
> to themselves the sentiment that they seem to demand of software
> developers.
>
>
> --
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author
> http://www.shafermedia.com
> Get my book, "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
> >From http://www.shafermediastore.com/tech_main.html
> _______________________________________________
> use-revolution mailing list
> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
>




More information about the use-livecode mailing list