Staring into the Abyss and Finding a Topic

A recent early-morning online conversation:

Me: What do the following things have in common: Open Source Software; programming languages (i.e., PHP, Drupal); the ISTE National Ed Tech Standards for teachers?

TechRiter: They all came from the military?

OxDon: You have to combine them in an interesting and scholarly way?

Me: Yes, I do. Hmmm...I like the military slant, but I don't think it will hold up. Most of the OSS is a reaction to the proprietary stuff that meets MilSpec (Military Specifications).

SciTeachr: All are considered way too complicated by your average teacher?

Hmmm...let's look at this for a minute. This is 2010. The Internet has been around, in some form or another, since 1969. Marc Andreessen unleashed Mosaic in 1993 and Netscape Navigator in 1994. Friendster--the first social networking website--has been in existence since 2002, and Twitter has been filling cell phones with inconsequential messages since 2006. With all this technology around us, why does it stop at the classroom door? Why do teachers who otherwise are completely wired in revert right back to the teaching strategies used by their teachers? The much talked-about "Digital Divide" seems to be between teachers and their wired-in students, and this divide is taking on the characteristics of an abyss. So why are teachers frightened by technology?

Some additional questions:

• Teacher age. In 2005, 42% of K-12 teachers were 50 or older. Only 22% of K-12 teachers were under the age of 30, putting them in the range of the "Digitals" (those born after 1982, considered the start of the Digital Age). Are teachers frightened of technology because it's new to them? Is tech too techy for them?
• Teacher training. Since new teachers are trained by older teachers not wise in the ways of technology, is this area being shortchanged by the system created to turn out classroom teachers?
• Time. Are teachers so overloaded with teaching "bell to bell" an ever-expanding content area and meeting increasingly rigorous standards that they simply don't have time to learn, much less develop, new digitally-based teaching strategies?
  
• Money. Are teachers resistant to adopting new technology because they know that once they return to their classrooms, they are working with marginal, obsolete equipment not capable of fully exploiting the new technology? Are certain content areas, such as English/Language Arts and Social Sciences, historically passed over in favor of adopting technology in Math and Science?

To swipe a line from Casablanca, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful paper." It examines a different aspect of a Moodle adoption, and can dovetail into my main thesis.