Technology

Whether Rogers Diffusion of Innovations theory has become a revolution in the process of reconsidering the role of innovations in social life is difficult to decide, but it is clear that the theory creates a general picture of how innovations work and can work for the benefit of the social development. According to Rogers (1983), diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system (p. 5). Because innovations are neither authoritative nor collective, every individual is bound to pass a unique process of innovation-decision that comprises several essential stages knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation.

What makes sense is that the members of social system are inherently interdependent, and thus, the quality of their innovation-decisions depends on the quality and direction of innovation-decisions made by other social system members. That means that some members will be riskier in their decision to adopt innovations, and the rest of society will seek to follow their example, as soon as the beneficial character of these innovations is confirmed. This is exactly how innovation-decisions work in education and public schooling while some schools and instructional designers set the stage for using innovations, others readily adopt the same innovative approaches as soon as they can see their positive effects on education. However, in the context of education, innovation-decisions of other social members alone cannot promote successful implementation of technologies according to Sahin (2006), diffusion of innovations is being driven by social, organizational, and personal variables social variables comprise friends, peers, and faculty members decisions about innovations organizational variables include physical resource support and university mandates, while personal factors imply personal interest in instructional technology, in using innovations to improve teaching, in enhancing instructional technology, etc. (Sahin, 2006). All these factors equally contribute to the development of innovation-decisions in education and can successfully expand the pool of those, who are willing to become the primary instructional innovators.