Are "cool tools" always cool? Indeed, are they always even tools? The reason I ask is that, in this day and age, it is very easy to become so carried away by the sheer excitement of new developments in software -- innovations that enable you to do almost anything you can imagine -- that it's very easy to lose sight of the actual point of it all.
I believe that some so-called cutting edge thinkers have fallen into this very trap. I read some bloggers on a regular basis, and all they ever seem to talk about is this new Web 2.0 tool they've just come across, and how they can't wait to try it pout, or how they have tried it out and now they're doing everything with that tool from now on.
Nowhere in such outpourings do I find any educational evaluation, be it in terms of pedagogy or, more mundanely perhaps, teacher workload.
Let's take a SuperGlu as an example. There is no doubt that this is a clever piece of software. What it does is enable you to create a web page which brings together the content from various sources, by making use of RSS feeds. You can see one in action by looking at the page I set up for the Web 2.0 booklet I've been working on: http://web2booklet.suprglu.com/
Now, there are a number of issues with this. Firstly, from a purely practical point of view, I cannot fathom out why the content from my own web page's RSS feed doesn't update itself automatically on the Superglu page -- and I don't have time to find out. OK, I've probably not done something simple and trivial, and were I a teacher I'd (hopefully) have someone who could do all the technical stuff for me. Nevertheless, this glitch does have the effect of making me not devote much time and energy to thinking of uses for Superglu in education, because if it doesn't update itself then its usefulness is limited as far as I'm concerned. (I did do some research, and updating seems to be a bit of an issue, so it isn't just me!)
The updating issue is frustrating, but it's not actually the point I'm trying to make here, which is this: if you call yourself an educationalist, you have t go a step or to further than just mentioning some great new "tool": you have a responsibility, in my opinion, to evaluate it from the point of view of how it will actually work in practice. If, as in this case apparently, it would only work if a teacher or someone else manually updated a load of RSS feeds every day, someone needs to ask if the benefits really outweigh the costs.
Secondly, a tool is only a tool if it enables you to do something, and it's only cool if it enables you to do something exciting or more efficiently or better in some way or all of the above. Now, Superglu enables you to pull together content from a variety of sources, but how is that useful in an educational context? Obviously, it can be, but it is not maintenance-free.
For example, the Web2 booklet page I just mentioned was originally set up as a means of enabling the contributors to the Web 2 booklet to continue to update it online, and to involve others in its development. The trouble is, unless each of us creates a separate RSS feed for booklet-related posts, or agrees on the tags we're going to use, all that happens is that anyone looking at the page gets everything that each contributor has written on their website or blog. That may be great, but it is not what was intended!
Ultimately, all innovation and development should be greeted by educationalists with the question, "So what?". Unless it can be shown to have a positive impact on educational outcomes, and to be able to achieve that in a cost-effective manner, so called "cool tools" should be treated as interesting but idle curiosities.
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