Candidate Pattern: DogFoodPrinciple

Summary	If it's good for your clients, it should be good enough for you.
Status	seed	Confidence
details...		Group	HCI

Problem

When experimenting with innovative technologies, we need a simple, quick and reliable "sanity check". A litmus test that would allow us to immediately evaluate if a new technology or practice have any chance of being effective.

Context

Teachers, or other education practitioners, designers and researchers, experimenting with new technologies.

Solution

In an environment where changes are frequent and new tools need to be habitually evaluated and assimilated into educational practice, the practitioners, designers and developers are themselves constantly learning. If a new tool or practice has a potential to enhance students' learning, then it logically follows that it should have a potential to enhance the practitioners' learning.

The term Eat Your Own Dog Food is considered common wisdom in software development: a company  producing software should use its own tools. In the case of developing innovative educational practices and tools, it has even more advantages.

• When evaluating a proposed tool, first consider how you could use it to support your learning. Think about the advantages as well as the challenges it would pose for you, and how it would fit it with your existing schemes. Then think how these issues would apply to your students.
• Make a concious effort to use the new tool as a habit.
• Observe the changes that occur in your learning processes.

Notes, Links and References

Liabilities, potential risks, extensions, expected side-effects

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.