Some thoughts on technologists and teachers

One thing I have been thinking about a lot lately is the phrase;
'Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he'll eat forever.'
This is a philosophy I think most good teachers follow, and I have also followed this in the past when working as a technologist implementing new programs in schools. Part of the implementation is always trying to get the staff up to speed so they can sustain whatever program we are putting in place.
In all of our experiences I can only really think of one case where this has occurred - and in that case it was for ulterior motives. To turn back to the phrase, in that case the guy in question wanted to become a fisherman himself.
In other settings despite massive expenditure and a lot of effort, educators have failed to really engage with these technologies.
As ideal as everybody catching their own fish sounds, it's not sustainable - most of us work long, hard days, and we want to simply turn up at the fishmongers and order what we like. There are so many issues I would have to overcome to go out and catch enough fish to feed my family. It is similar for teachers with technology.
There will always be those who live on the fringes of technological change, or by the sea, who will be happy to do their own development or fishing, but these people are the exception, not the norm.
I believe in future for education and technology to work, there needs to be a clear division of responsibilities. Teachers cannot be expected to learn new technologies on top of their already heavy teaching loads. Likewise technologists cannot be expected to become educational experts overnight. Working out how these two areas can work together is crucial.
For us at The Lab this has some important implications as it leads to the question of how this model, if proven successful by rigorous research, can be expanded to other settings.
One of our original plans was to embed what we have learnt into existing teaching practices, potentially through student teacher placements or talks to groups of student teachers.
In our case with young people with Asperger's, I think perhaps we can assist the teachers in identifying such students, but I am then not so sure about their capacity to deal with them. This requires a very different mindset to traditional education, and even if we do train up student teachers, what is relevant today probably wont be by next year. Engaging these young people takes constant devotion to technology.
What I do think we could help the teachers with, is how they should deal with technology and technologists to achieve their pedagogical objectives. I don't know much at all about teacher courses, but I suspect this is an area which has not been properly explored.