Van Horn's Rules

WARREN Buffett's first rule is Never lose money. His second rule is Never break rule Years ago, Isaac Asimov issued three rules for the robots in his book I, Robot. His first rule was Never harm a human being. If these people can have rules, so can I. Here then are the rules regarding technology that I have developed over the years. Rule 1. Technology should be designed from the user to the network center, not the other way around. This rule is so important, I may want to borrow Buffet's rule 2. Over the last 20 years, I have done consulting work in school districts and universities across the country. Almost without fail, I have had to remind Information Technology (IT) personnel of rule 1. All too often, IT people spend most of their time and energy thinking about servers, networks, switching gear, bandwidth, district databases, and other things in the network operations center that are well removed from the typical user. I find that school district IT people commonly spend most of their time and energies on administrative computing at the expense of teachers and students. Since superintendents and their staffs sign the IT people's checks, this may be a natural phenomenon. I visited one district with 50,000 students that had a dozen or so people devoted to administrative computing and just two people devoted to instructional computing. When I visited the district's schools, the situation was bleak. Specifically, technology systems should be designed in the following order: user [right arrow] output/input device [right arrow] software [right arrow] interface (operating system) [right arrow] hardware [right arrow] local area network [right arrow] wide area network [right arrow] operations center (servers and mass storage) [right arrow] extranet. All too often, people start thinking about hardware, not the user. My university recently changed the online program that lets faculty members enter final course grades. The old application had radio buttons for each possible grade. All you had to do to enter a final grade was to push the right button next to a student's name. The new application requires you to pull down a menu next to each student's name and scroll down to the grade you want to enter. Four hundred faculty members teaching about 1,200 courses now have to take more time entering final grades than before. I guess someone cared more about ease of programming an application than about the program's user interface. Rule 2. Not all users are alike in what they need or will use; match the technology to the user. Here are a few examples of the importance of rule 2. My eyesight is not what it used to be, so I have some trouble when I write on the computer--which I do a lot. Every few years, the university updates its computers to keep the faculty current. The last update was two years ago, and I was to receive an iMac with a 17-inch screen. I scrambled around and persuaded my department chairperson to pay the difference in price so I could get a 20-inch screen. The larger iMac screen is a blessing and allows me to write comfortably with my aging eyes. Someone needs to remember to ask users what they need. A prime example of designing technology to fit the user is allowing teachers to have a say in the kind of technology that is placed in their classrooms. Many teachers, if given the choice, would choose to have a document camera and a data/video projector instead of new classroom computers. The point here is that users are different and they have different needs. Several years ago, when I was in charge of my college's program to update technology, I classified users into three categories: power users, regular users, and occasional users (i.e., computer haters). Power users taught our high-tech courses like Instructional Design for Multimedia, and they needed workstation- class computers with very fast drives. Some regular users needed desktop computers; others needed laptops. …