In my recent #fote10 talk, We have the technology. We have the capability… all we need is love, I offered an incoherent response to an audience question about the usefulness of Rogers Diffusion theories of Technology Adoption, so I’ll try again!

Rogers’ is useful and has been used in technology adoption strategies at universities, for example see Bell & Bell, It’s installed … now get on with it! Looking beyond the software to the cultural change His theories are based on information diffusion and rational choice leading to a decision to adopt an innovation or not.

Most useful of all as the questioner pointed out are some of the characteristics that Rogers identifies as being key in the decision to adopt or not, in particular complexity, compatibility & trialability.

The limitation of Rogers is its sense of inevitability & that his theories don’t really deal with non-adoption. The theories model full adoption with the premise that eventually even the “laggards” (Arrgh!) will adopt.

Foe more detail on this see pp8-17 of my Master’s project: Why Don’t All Lecturers Make Use of VLEs? What Can the So-called “Laggards” Tell Us?