Thanks for this thoughtful piece---many technophiles are quick to reject technophobes out of hand instead of, as you are doing here, asking what is the source of the resistance and why.   When I was Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies (essentially, an R and D person for all of Duke's colleges and professional schools), I was the first one so I didn't really have time to make converts.  Instead, I found the most visionary faculty and worked with them to build visionary programs.  My thinking was that, if something proved compelling and productive, it would entice them, be a test case and model in how the change works and coud work for them.   It worked brilliantly.  It's mindboggling to think of how much we accomplished.  But it didn't really touch that many people who were resistant and continue to be.  The philosophy of "parallel structures" allows for innovation but doesn't have to make a dent, even, in the original, traditional structure to succeed.  This is different from change at the margins, since you are making a new center.  (John Seely Brown talks about his "center for the edge.")  But it is often a Venn diagram and the traditional center can either grow or shrink . . .

Sadly, for much of the humanities, the circle that represents our part of the Venn diagram has shrunk drastically over the last decades.  

So that is another question:  if we live in the Information Age, and teachers of reading and writing feel they have nothing to say about the Information Age and its affordances, then is shrinking inevitable?

To say one is satisfied with one's "tried and true" way of doing something is well and good when one's field is flourishing.  When there is an exodus, perhaps it is time to think about whether the "tried" is either "true" or "productive."

Those are some thoughts in response to your very interesting post.  Anyone else have ideas on this one?

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This is long and may sound didactic in places. If it does, I apologize in advance: it is meant in a spirit of collegial conversation.

I haven't tackled the specific situation you're up against, so I can only offer speculation, which I've tacked onto the end of this comment. My own experience in presenting technologies in public comes from a period I spent as an interactive exhibit designer in a large museum, where I canvassed museum-goers about what they wanted out of interactive exhibits, tested pieces on the floor and revised them based on user feedback and, most usefully, had a chance to observe them using, or not using, things I'd made. I repeatedly found that members of the public were reluctant to engage with interactive exhibits tout court, partly, I think, because it meant a change in their behaviour - breaking their stride. The greatest success I had was with pieces that could accept multiple, largely independent users at a time: once people saw stuff in use they were more inclined to engage. I'd say it was almost necessary to trick a lot of people into interacting - there was a certain percentage of museum-goers who would stop and play with a touchscreen kiosk, a larger percentage that would try out something that looked novel (not like a device), and a much larger one that would stop and play if they saw the interactive already interacting with them (as in the case of pieces you activate by walking through them, for example). Pretty much by definition, you need to start interacting with an interactive piece to get anything out of it, so this first moment of engagement is critical.

What use is this to you? First I'd say, unequivocally, that soothing anxieties is a good and necessary thing, and far from easy to do predictably. All novelty involves learning, technology is increasingly learned through free play and experimentation, and all of that is best achieved when the user feels that they can try stuff out without fear of bad consequences. Second, I'd say that there exists, for most persons who are not yet users of a technology, a barrier to engagement, and that barrier needs actively to be overcome. With a few famous exceptions computer programs and interfaces are usually not enticing - the grass does not look greener from a distance in this case. To the greatest extent possible, I would advocate pressing the device, whatever it is, into the hand of the potential user rather than hoping they pick it up. If they engage, and still don't see the use of the technology, that is the moment we promoters should ask ourselves searching questions.

Regarding the situation you cite, it sounds like you're running up against a couple of classic problems for presenting any novel tool. First, how to explain what it's for and how it can be used without foreclosing any exciting, innovative applications the potential user might have in mind: the question here is how to help the person imagine how they will use the technology, in their own way and on their own terms, rather than offering them models from outside their own field, that are solutions to problems they don't feel they share. Second, to show that the technology can benefit the speaker themselves, as well as their audience: this may seem like a reductive sort of thinking - if the result is better communication then the speaker should be happy, right? - but it's far from obvious that a change will be good when it opens up a new problem space with potentially novel pitfalls that the speaker does not currently face; all change represents a cost or risk, and it needs to be clear that there's a substantial reward.

Unfortunately the Millionaire example is probably not very helpful here: apart from evoking a (probably unwelcome) image of the lecturer as entertainer, it also represents a social relationship between speaker and audience quite different from that of the lecture theater: the contestant (not the presenter) willingly cedes control to the audience, interrupting their power of decision making in order to receive new data to react to. That sounds exciting, but it's also something that I think many public speakers dread - the line between invited feedback, especially for what might actually be rhetorical questions, and heckling, could be a hard one to negotiate.

All of this is compounded by the lecture theater itself, which is a fairly high-stakes environment; public presentation is an anxious business and the speaker may be worried about failures, either of the technology itself or of their method of applying it.

So I wonder if you would get different results from getting the potential users to experiment with the technology on first presentation, and allowing them to try it out in a lower-pressure environment: a less formal gathering, a smaller group of people, with smaller power distances between them.

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