Sometimes this happens close to the beginning and sometimes almost at the end of a project, but it always involves a meeting with someone in the client organisation realising that the technology solution they’ve opted for is not the automatic route to profit/sexiness/increased student retention/a BAFTA (delete as appropriate) that they were hoping for. In other words, the magic beans they thought had been planted have resulted in a fairly standard-looking plant, not the mighty forest of their dreams.
To be fair, most of the people I work with don’t believe in magic beans. They’ve been around educational software and hardware long enough to understand that there are always limitations; that technology is not a substitute for good teaching or good instructional design, but there will always be some people - often those who control budgets and decisions - who believe that technology alone is enough.
One of the hardest things about being a consultant is having to deliver the news that I can’t perform miracles. At one meeting, a senior person in a technology team actually asked me to tell him why the software he was working a 70-hour week to build wasn’t ‘just a gimmick’. I went away and thought long and hard about it, but in the end I wasn’t able to reassure him. I decided that his product was potentially very useful (in conjunction with great pedagogy and teachers), but that wasn’t the headline-grabbing answer he was looking for. In short, I couldn’t give him the magic beans.
