A train wreck
Virtually met up with a bunch of friends last night and the talk eventually turned around to education technology implementations in colleges, universities and other teaching organisations. Here are some of the thoughts.
Education technology. Some people feel uncomfortable with that term. Education technology. It is just technology. Education technology has been around for a long time now. In recent years there has been much hype about education technology. It is like a journey on a train, an education technology train.
Many organisations and individuals have jumped on the education technology train. Some of these individuals are driving the train but the trouble is they do not know the destination and they have no idea where the train came from in the first place. They announce, “all aboard”, blow the whistle “toot! toot!” and the train begins its journey, rattling along the tracks, with no stops along the way, to a destination unknown.
What will the passengers on this train journey think? Can they alight, change trains and consult a map so that they at least have an idea of the destination, know where they are headed and take a rest from time to time to reflect on the journey so far? Do they have a say on the route for the journey? Will they reach the destination? Are they headed for a train wreck?
Decision makers in education control the budgets and the vision. They need to pay closer attention to what is actually happening and not accept the situation at face value. Decision makers should understand the technology. Not just be users. They should be able to grasp, mould and work the technology so that it seamlessly facilitates the desired teaching and learning outcomes. The technology should be rendered invisible and not be deployed as a gimmick or a marketing point.
Technology implementations are being effected in education where an understanding of the technology is not a core function of the equation. It is simply usage. There is a profound lack of depth in the decision making process in some instances. In some education sectors technology implementations are being driven, in part, by marketing considerations and the unforeseen availability of funds. That is not education technology per se. It is marketing technology. It is driven by politics. There is no vision.
Technology implementations are taking place without a fundamental grasp of the whole process. The implementations lack research, stakeholder input (particular from the students) and SWOT analysis. In some instances the students have not been consulted at all. In other instances the implementations copy and paste implementations elsewhere.
Ineffective and shallow software tools, particularly some online tools, are being promoted. Tools that were never designed with education in mind. The tools are promoted and it is the up to educators to make sense of it all and endeavour to fit a square peg into a round hole. It does not always work.
In other instances content management systems are being deployed in a manner that is inefficient in terms of time management and ineffectual in terms of pedagogy. The learning content management systems are simply distributing content. No learning is taking place. They are content management systems. They are not learning activity management systems.
In short we all agreed that decision makers must understand the technology. They need to know the technology. Not simply use it.
Attribution: Train wreck at Montparnasse 1895. By Studio Lévy and Sons (Studio Lévy & fils) [2] ([1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Apr 05, 2012 @ 19:39:24
John – Your post is very timely, as I was having a similar conversation in the past few weeks with regard to school improvement here in the States. The question I keep coming back to is how can we get our educational leaders to learn about the pedagogy behind implementing technology?
One of our biggest barriers that appears is available time. Because of the job responsibilities of our building principals and other administrators, they have very little time to attend to their technology professional development. This then causes the decisions to be, as you put it, copy-and-pasted, from other deployments that might not be correct in the first place, or do not fit the situation it is being placed in.
We’ve tried running professional development around the ISTE NETS-A as both a face to face and blended courses and end up with a rather large attrition rate. I wonder, what have you found most successful in building capacity if your decision makers in Australia?
Apr 05, 2012 @ 20:21:23
Ron, yes time is an issue, yet I have worked in environments, such as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the University of Wollongong in NSW, Australia where the decisions makers made the time to get skilled and thus get a handle on what was happening in the classroom. The Principal at my own school, as well as other members of the executive, took time out today, for example, to attend an iPad workshop. They made the time. That is the right thing to do. I was so happy to see it.
There has to be a real buy-in by the decision makers. I know it is difficult but the decision makers need to be teaching as well. I have worked in schools where the principals are still teaching at least one subject each year. It is good policy to do so. They are in touch. They are aware of what is happening. They get a feel for what is needed. They participate in the staff professional development days as well.
Another plus is to ensure that the edtech decisions makers are teachers as well. Real teachers. Not hired help from industry. Not out-sourced. I have worked with schools overseas where the edtech was outsourced to third party organisations. Did not always work. I once worked in such an organisation however most of the team had teaching backgrounds.
The executive also need to publish, communicate, share and lead by doing. Present, collaborate, teach, learn, fail and succeed.
The decision makers need to be hammered sometimes. Not sure by whom. Worked in an environment where the key executive did not use email, at all. (I will admit however that I am not a big fan of email personally. If they work in the same place as me I will go and talk to the person.)
I am simply a classroom teacher Ron and I can only base my responses on what I have observed first hand when working overseas and here in Australia during the previous 25 years. Basically the decision makers need to have a real connection to the coal face of the classroom, take part in the teaching and learning of the organisation, and at the minimum get themselves out of the office and pop their head into a classroom somewhere, once a week or more, in a school here and a school there.
You can tell when an organisation has an executive in which those at the top are light years away from where the action is at and, in contrast, those organisations where the executive is in touch with the “workers”. Decades ago when I was a bank officer and later an auditor it was the management that got in to their cars and actually went out of their way to meet staff in bank branches far and wide that made effective decisions and generated more productive outcomes. Good leaders get out and mix it with the their team at the coal face.
I have no ready solution for the bureaucratisation of the education system. It seems that teachers around the world are being dictated to by marketing executives, accountants and politically correct policy makers (in terms of syllabus requirements). They have no idea what a classroom looks, smells and feels like.