That is how Alan Levine describes a project he is relucantly invovled in (CogDogBlog » Blog Archive » I am a Reluctant, Invisible Participant in a Wretched Project). And he has my sympathy – anyone involved in educational technology has been dragged into a project because someone (usually of the pointy haired boss variety) had a brilliant vision of how everything could work together in one glorious monolithic system.
Ugh! My tendency, and perhaps you agree, is that such systems tend to collapse under their own weight. But now, thanks to Alan, I have a better description – they fly with the grace of an iron pigeon. Hmm – I can think of a couple right off the top of my head (and if you read the blog regularly, you can probably guess). Leave a comment with your favourite iron pigeon stories.
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I’m curious to know what you think of what myself and other educators are trying to do over at http://www.techsavvyed.net. I launched the web site without dragging anyone along; it’s completely voluntary, open to new ideas, and should be open to evolving as the users see fit. So far we have RSS feeds, comments, and a tagging and “Fresh Daily Links” system going online in a few days.
Thanks for passing on the link to your site, Ben. It looks quite useful, and I’ll be sure to keep track of what you have on there. You may also be interested in The EdTech Posse, a site and podcast for anyone interested in education, learning and technology.
Great description. I haven’t encountered too many problems like that in educational technology, but in the medical world – where my focus is – I’ve seen some crazy things happen when people try to bend archaic systems to produce modern-day results.
Them: “So, what we’ve got is this proprietary database that we want to be able to access over the web. Right now it’s stored on [Monkey #1]‘s workstation and accessed via this MS-DOS app that someone made for us 400 years ago, but we want to put it on a server and make it more accessible. But we want to keep it in that proprietary format, so that Monkeys can still use their MS-DOS app to get to it.”
Me: “Let me get this straight – Thousands of critical medical records for patients are stored on this dolt’s 486 and you want me to keep your impotent system in place but set up a web up so you can see pretty graphs? That doesn’t make much sense… instead, what we should be doing is finding a way to export it, and then we can easily come up with a sol…”
Them: “Shut up! Do as you are told, pleb!”
[After the job is done...]
Them: “Ah, you did it. It works perfectly; no one can even tell it’s the same system! Such finesse… and you said it was a bad idea!”
Me: “Indeed. All the finesse of a dead swan.”
LOL – OK, that’s another figure of speech I must try to work into my conversations.
Seriously, I agree with you completely about the damage that is done by tweaking out of date tools just one time too many. Sadly, this is usually done by someone who does know better is forced by someone who has no clue but refuses to keep up to date with what tools are available.
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