Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Reflections on Rob Reynolds Five Laws of Product Development for Education

In XplanaZine, author Rob Reynolds offers Five Laws of Product Development for Education in the 21st Century.

Claiming the following assertions as “Laws” is quite a bold statement, if not egregious. Universal principles? Maybe. Healthy speculation? Closer. Hypothesis? Now you’re talking.

Here’s my take on the author’s contentions. The original article can be found here.

We no longer know how they want to know
This idea is a misnomer. We can certainly predict what our current students will need to know in order to be successful: they must be able to use reason and logic; they must be able to express themselves clearly in a variety of mediums; and they need to be able to transfer what they know to new and different environments. It also wouldn’t hurt if our students were sensitive to issues of social justice and compassion for fellow humans. It also would be nice if we taught students how to think reflectively. How students receive and process information will always be in flux, so trying to predict what technologies will work best seems a bit like chasing one’s tail. So I agree with the author on this point.

Convergence will stay ahead of content
While devices change and evolve, content remains somewhat static (there are only a few ways to solve a quadratic equation, right?). Since technology developments move faster than content providers ability to keep up, I think convergence will always be over the next hill. I also know many techies who still keep a paper calendar, you know, just in case….

One plus one equals infinity
I believe the author is dealing in generalizations again. Product thinking regularly determines the market. As long as professors publish texts through a large company, the producer, i.e., the textbook publisher will determine when to roll-out new editions. Why? Because they have a larger stake; they hold the purse strings. And as long as professors and writers rely on publishers to pay for their work, the publisher will determine when texts will be published. Wouldn’t be interesting if professors started self-publishing on the web. Would they be allowed to assign a book they wrote if they weren’t making any money from it? Hmmm. Now there’s an idea. What the market demands is indeed critical to the success of a product, but if a particular industry has a virtual monopoly over the market, what the market says has little impact. Am I missing something here?

Failure is a repository of possibility
Amen. This is the beauty of reflective thinking, a skill that we could say is one we believe all students should develop. As Buckminster Fuller used to say "If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them."

While I applaud the author's attempt at codifying lifecycles of product development, I have found from my own experience (i.e., making lots of mistakes) that attempting to concretize what is naturally fluid and dynamic makes one apear nebbish, or worse, pedantic. I prefer the terms guidelines or reflections; this leaves one open to making changes as required.

I do appreciate the author's willingness to share his thoughts. I believe that many minds working on a problem helps to refine and address the issue from multiple perspectives. In that sense, technology is moving us all along in the right direction, convergently.