Meeting challenges with ICT - A conversation

Among other things, it's my job as the Learning Technology Advisor at Jhpiego to identify opportunities to support the learning process through the appropriate application of technology (usually ICTs). This is not an easy task: there are various ways to go about this, from different perspectives. But there's one approach I think is probably most often successful (you observant types will probably have guessed what I'm about to write based on the title of this post and the diagram above :P).

1. One approach starts with the challenges and then looks for appropriate applications of technology. This is the most common at Jhpiego - people are looking for very specific applications of technology to well-defined challenges. This is easy for most folks at Jhpiego because their expertise is in public health and they're very familiar with the related challenges.

2. Another approach starts with the technology and then searches for an application. This approach is very tech-heavy and, many times, frightening (for various reasons) to people at Jhpiego. It's easy for me to come from this perspective because my expertise is in technology.

Both of these approaches amount to something akin to "pin the tail on the donkey" - I often feel like I'm searching around blindly, looking for the perfect match between the challenge and the technology. There's something about starting with very specific expectations - from either side - that just makes things very difficult: like trying to "square a circle."

3. What I think is the optimal approach is to start from a perspective where neither the challenge nor technology is overly specified, rather through conversation and iteration an optimal application of a specific technology to a specific challenge is discovered.

Of course, this optimal process takes time and sometimes there's not nearly enough of it. But I think it's critical for those involved to realize that it won't always be the case that the marriage - the alignment of the technology and the challenge - is obvious from the start. And there will likely be times when one realizes that a challenge does not have a specific technological solution or that a technology does not have a specfic application to a challenge. If either side comes to the process with highly specific expecations, unless the challenge or the technology are common (almost to the point of being overly simplistic), it's highly probable that the outcome will not be exactly what was expected or hoped for.