eMining for Gold and Finding...

...very little.

I'm continuing to follow up on my brilliant idea of a while back and investigating some of the factors that create resistance to technology implementation in the K-12 environment. In other words, why do teachers hate technology in their classroom and will avoid it like a plague.

When I started my digging, I checked out the C-TAP (California Technology Assistance Program) website and found a fair amount (4-5 articles) examining the digital divide between teachers and their students. A good start, but I need more (at least 8-10 articles) for a decent lit review. Additionally, none of these have been published, as far as I know, in the all-mighty peer-reviewed publications. Time to do some rooting around EBSCO.

EBSCO is the acronym for the Elton B. Stephens Co., Inc., a large conglomerate that has, as one of its holdings, one of the biggest subscription research databases on the Internet. A private subscription to the database, which contains about 4,000 professional journals, is horribly expensive, so most students access it through their university library; I gain access through Touro University's library website, so my access is from anywhere I can plug in my laptop.

EBSCO, surprisingly, didn't turn up much. My first search was with the words "k-12 teacher resistance technology implementation" and turned up nothing. Next I tried "technology implementation": too broad, with strange articles such as implementing computer-controlled hydroponic crop production. An additional filter with the word "education" turned up one article on implementation, published in 2004 in the magazine District Administration.

Back to the CTAP articles. Each article--unless it is based on primary data--has endnotes and/or a bibliography; the bibliography of an article can provide a wealth of additional sources. Some of the articles have extensive bibliographies, but again, there are obstacles: the authors' literature reviews are of papers prepared for private organizations, such as the Pew Foundation or the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, or the journals containing the articles are not available through Touro's library system. I'm now starting to dig down through these articles. It's slow work but occasionally I find a bit of gold to add to my little pile of research.