THE DIVINE TRAGEDY? For Dante, purgatory was the seven-step intermediary between the Hell and Paradise. In the edtech world, it's that stage when new products begin to pick up traction through small pilots, says e-Literate blogger, Phil Hill. Unfortunately, "too many ed tech innovations [are] stuck in purgatory," he observes, since successful pilots (which nearly all startups can claim) rarely translate to mainstream adoption. Taking a page from Everett Rogers' theory of diffusion of innovations, Hill opines that:
What we are seeing in ed tech in most cases, I would argue, is that for institutions the new ideas (applications, products, services) are stuck [in] the Persuasion stage. There is knowledge and application amongst some early adopters in small-scale pilots, but majority of faculty members either have no knowledge of the pilot or are not persuaded that the idea is to their advantage, and there is little support or structure to get the organization at large (i.e. the majority of faculty for a traditional institution, or perhaps for central academic technology organization) to make a considered decision.
