In fact there has been virtually no research about the educational life cycle of software packages. The price of ignorance, however, has been years of waste, as investors, faculty, support staff, publishers, software houses, hardware vendors, government agencies, and foundations attempt to develop and distribute types of software that promise to be revolutionary but rarely attain wide, persistent, and beneficial use. Therefore I am safe in investing in the newest, most mind-blowing software. Once we decided to examine the roots of success and failure, our first design decision was to focus on success Past success, being so rare, might be more informative and also more likely to attract attention from people in our field, a field noted for its rose colored glasses. We then turned to questions of definition.
Software is valuable if it has the capability of being used to help improve teaching and learning.
As the cases show, indicators of value can include evaluation results, awards won, testimonials from users, and the like. Rather than leaving anyone feeling burned out, cheated, or in any other sense a loser, viable software leaves the various players receptive to the next generation of software. We have assumed, and our cases seem to confirm, that software that is both valuable and viable can be considered successful. Its value, namely, its potential for educational benefit, has in fact been realized. Having arrived at these definitions, we decided to devote our inquiry to learning whether there are particular types or families of valuable software that are more likely to be viable.