How to measure success?

The Blue Skunk Blog has a nice mixed salad of entries, including a link to the Bulwer-Lytton equivalent for bad sex in literature awards and an outsourced Santa cartoon, but what I wanted to mention was this pdf file published by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) entitled “Measuring Sucess: How will we know when we get there?” It examines the question of whether, after twenty years and billions of (presumably US) dollars, the effort to bring technology into (presumably US) schools has been worthwhile. It ends with a quote from Reinventing Government by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler:

  • What gets measured, gets done.
  • If you don’t measure results, you can’t tell success from failure.
  • If you can’t recognize failure, you can’t correct it.
  • If you can’t see success, you can’t reward it.
  • If you can’t see success, you can’t learn from it.

Not sure I agree with the first or the last one, but some food for thought.

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