Caution rules

One of the things you learn in marketing is that you should never overpromise. Or maybe that's my own thing. I grew up always hearing about how much potential I had and how I wasn't living up to it. So for better or worse, I've made a habit out of holding back a bit so as not to raise expectations too high. I can't honestly say that I think this is a good idea, but it is something that I do.

What's made me think of it is the professional development thing that I've occasionally referred to as Awesome Teaching Techniques (not its real name). The idea is to incorporate newer technology into the classroom. I have no problem with the idea of doing that, but to a great extent I find the program self-referential, meaning that I think the program measures success based on how much you use the program, rather than achieving actual goals. One of the buzzwords I keep hearing is collaboration. Here's a quote: "... 'evaluation' can be embedded in the collaborative projects, not the quality and quantity of them..."

What in the world does that mean? The purpose of the project is to evaluate itself? The ATT program talks about transforming education and then I hear the people who run it praise the idea of using an ATT-provided tool to have a faculty book club as a "great idea." I actually like the idea of online book clubs, but in what way is that transformative? How about instead you say, we'll have an online book club to help the faculty become more comfortable using the web as a social network and a way of sharing insights? That's a nice little step, but if you promise it as transformative then you run the risk of people saying, "Is that it? That's all?" And once that happens you're dead. You can't get those people back.

It's the same box Apple has put itself in with the iPad. They've introduced it as something that will change your life. If all it is is a bigger screened version of an iPhone but without the phone, it's going to flop and flop hard because it doesn't change your life at all. It's just a nice incremental change that would be appreciated if that's what you called it.