Maybe it’s the money – nee Thoughts on Collaborate III

Just after I posted yesterday about the knee jerk reaction, and I started to get hits from a number of sources (thanks to an OLDaily link), the bubbling that I referred to started to get going, and after the lighter thoughts had left, I was left with something odd at the bottom of my brain… maybe that knee jerk reaction has more to do with the impression that many people in the education world have of never having enough funds. It certainly seems to be the case with public institutions, as I don’t know many private educational organizations that are complaining too loudly about the actions of BB. In fact, they might see it as a net gain as they can essentially outsource even more functions to a single trusted corporation. But public education seems different.

In the public education world, people are happy with “negative zero” budgets – happy that they have a job and trying to make due with budgets that never really grow at any rate fast enough to keep up with anything, much less get ahead (if they even come on a regular cycle). Public education leverages open source – as D’Arcy mentioned today – to save those pennies (spending time over money, increasing that intangible worth of the organization) and when they do spend money, it tends to get spent on those smaller solutions (like Elluminate once was) that are kindred and sensitive to the plight of the education sector. Education doesn’t have a lot of money, so don’t expect us to pay very much for things (it’s a sad lament and an even worse comment on our educational priorities).

But then when a smart company comes by and starts to assimilate all those little dollars into larger sums, public education seems to take notice all of the sudden. But here is the catch, a smart company sucking up all those little line items into a larger one (plus a handsome little buffer for the convenience of a single bill), doesn’t fit into public education’s world of changing budgets and it’s ethos of growing small ideas into larger solutions. One large bill means that if you can’t make the payment one year, you may or may not be able to provide service that year. A number of smaller bills means that you can pick and choose what you want to pay. Perhaps not the smartest way of doing things, but that seems to be the case for public education. Public education likes to be “cheap”. It seems to revel in it’s ability to make do in spite of what the world thinks is “real”.

So maybe that reaction to Collaborate was because of the money angle. The assimilation of all those line items and the individualization that comes from having those options evaporated when the “suits” decided that all those little items were to be assimilated. We’ll have to see what happens over the next few months and years to see if we were just doing a Chicken Little or if there was something real to be concerned about. But in the mean time, I think this does move education one step further into one of two camps – one open and one closed. Determined not by the haves and have nots, but by how individual one chooses/desires to be.