Technology Acceptance

For the last two years or so, I have been looking at and thinking about the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and wondering how it can be applied to K-12 education. Basically, TAM says that technology that users perceive to be easy to use, useful, and used by others who are doing the same task will be more used.

Seems kind of a "no-brainer," that we should try to design our computer systems in schools to be easy to use, and useful, and widely used if we expect every teacher to use it (I know that seems redundant... but stick with me). Unfortunately, educators seem to have missed the boat on this one. The research in business and industry is full of thousands of articles in which TAM was used to measure people's perceptions of ICT systems. The research in education has maybe a few hundred.

I have been working to develop a tool that we can use to measure technology acceptance in K-12 educators (actually, I have been working on a slightly different model, but the idea is the same). Check out the details, including a draft of my current survey here... please note the survey has not been validated, but it can be used for action research... if anyone is interested in doing a pilot study and perhaps validating the survey, drop me a line!)