Admitting Mistakes in Applying Technology in Schools: The Virtue of Saying Oops!
Image by Domain Barnyard via Flickr
“I absolutely think we learn from failure, but getting people to talk about it honestly is not so easy,” said an organizer of FailFaire held last summer in New York.
Bringing together World Bank specialists and nonprofit groups advocating technology to improve the lives of the poor, FailFaire thinks the way to build success is to talk openly about what went belly up, crashed–pick your metaphor for going kaput. The prize for the rendering of the worst case of failure: “a garish green-and-white child’s computer nicknamed the O.L.P.C.–for One Laptop Per Child,” a program regarded by some as a failure to achieve the changes promised by its promoters.
Technologies that crashed are well known. Time magazine in 2009 listed the top ten failures of the decade. Others might have their favorites: video phones, Apple’s NeXT Cube in 1989, Segway in 2002, and Microsoft’s VISTA in 2007.
