People's attitudes to 'new' technology never fail to suprise, frustrate and (occasionally) delight me. I was working with a group of people yesterday to show them about the possibilities of using existing multimedia, from databases, YouTube, the BBC etc, in their teaching. I thought using delicious would be a useful tool to help them so this, as it can act like a personal content management system, where you store all the links which you think are useful. You can then combine and recombine them in different activities.
I completely over estimated where they were technically speaking. They listened politely when I told them about where you could get the multimedia from, and how to use it in activities, but what most excited them was using delicious. Maybe they will come back to multimedia when they have mastered delicious.
Feedback on the session was positive, but I realised that they hadn't achieved the aim of the session. This didn't really matter, as I think they still got something important out of it, but at the back of my mind I feel like I've failed. I am on a personal mission to turn people on to using multimedia in education. Not becuase it is fancy, but becuase it can be an incredibly rich tool when used effectively. Yesterday was an opportunity to do this, and I failed.
