Surviving the implementation dip

Changing one's planning practices is frightening business, perhaps mainly because teaching is (among many things) half performance art, half crowd control, and half content expertise.

In the face of this recipe for anxiety, when one has found what "works" ---the three-ring binder with sheet protectors, grids, and prompts. The inbox. The spreadsheet. The manila folder system. That special tote. ---one tends to cling to it like a fetish. When others profess of better ways, it can be as though dog owners are passing in a park. Oh, that's cute, (sniff sniff) but our pet practices tend to remain loyally by our sides as we go our separate ways.

I say this as I think about the challenge facing us in the domain of online collaborative curriculum building. The concept of open-source intellectual property is sound to the core, and has been around since the dawn of language, but ONLINE it has still not truly evolved to a high level outside of the production of computer software.

A teachers' work ultimately happens at a physical place and time, and it is instantiated in the discourse and behaviors that arise from teacher-student relationships. It is no small shift to expect classroom educators to invest time and energy outside of their traditional workspace...in a virtual place where discourse takes a different form, where new methods and processes must be learned to author documents, and where one's unfinished work is perhaps visible to an audience far larger than a single classroom...

The key, as I've seen with most of our users, is to persist beyond the first frustrations faced when trying the site. Like trying a new diet, open-planning can seem like the next great thing to get involved with. The reality is that it's like most work habits: really difficult to form, especially if the habits it is replacing are a safe bet and well within reach. I call this phase the implementation dip. 95% of our new users simply do not survive it. I, of course, welcome their curiosity...however I also urge those of you who are new to this concept to be persistent with it...visit teams that have created lots of content...see what is possible and ride the learning curve!

I continue to be optimistic that an open planning community can work, however because of the natural implementation dip we face, I expect it will take quite a while before things mature to a level of collaboration that resembles what the open source software community has achieved...