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Consider people's fears and concerns about
the technology (and the study itself), not just their hopes and goals.
Concerns about technology, the
activities, and the outcomes (the triad): Among
potential targets for your studies:
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Concerns about the technology itself,
e.g., its cost (relative to other uses for the money),
time and skill needed to master it, and its reliability.
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Concerns about the use of the technology
for the activity, e.g., do some people believe that this
use of technology will warp and distort the activity? If
so, is there a way to test to see if their concerns are
justified?
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Concerns about the activity itself.
There are only 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week.
If technology is going to enable one activity to expand,
might this result in a decrease in time available for
other activities? Is that shift an important topic for
study? What about changes in program outcomes resulting
from that shift? For example, if students are given more
laboratory assignments (because technology has made it
possible to do laboratory experiments over the web, as
with MIT's iLabs) does that decrease other kinds of
assignments? Are there consequences of this reallocation
of time? When personal response systems are used
during lecture courses to foster student small group
discussions of difficult concepts, less time is
available for the lecture itself; are there observable
consequences of this shift in how the hours are spent?
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Concerns about outcomes: use of
technology may figure in a shift of emphasis toward a
new outcome (at the expense of an old outcome), e.g.,
graduating musicians who are more expert in electronic
forms of music but less often as expert in traditional
musical instruments. Some people may have concerns
about job markets or the program's identity or
traditions. Is it possible to test whether their
predictions are in fact coming true?
Concerns about the study: It's
also very important for anyone doing a study to confront the
darker side of assessment itself. We discuss that
issue in a different chapter of this Handbook, "Frequently
Made Objections to Assessment, and How to Respond." We have
several options for learning about this topic, including:
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