The question of just what should we educational technology professionals spend their time and energy doing and what school leaders should expect of the IT professionals they hire is one that has been raised by several within my network in the last year or so. The answer that I tend to give is this one: Read More
Category: Technology Planning
Avoiding Red Herrings: Technology Support that Works
I made this presentation at the 2015 Association of Educational and Communications and Technology conference. Avoiding Red Herrings: Technology Support that Works Abstract Information and computer technology has been incorporated in teaching and schooling for several decades. Despite on-going efforts to provide both technical support to maintain functional systems and support for educators to integrate Read More
Review of Digital Habitats
Between 2008 and 2011, I wrote several brief reviews of books which appeared on the Education Review web site. Since then, the editors ceased publication of that type of review and removed the previously published brief reviews from the site. I am making the original drafts of my reviews available here. Smith, J. D., Wenger, E., & Read More
Situational Awareness in Instructional Design
64: Situational Awareness in Instructional Design As we think about the work of creating appropriate, proper, and reasonable educational technology, our decisions and actions are often biased by the perspective of our position. Educators are biased towards ease of use and effectiveness for teaching; technologists are biased towards reliable, robust, and secure computer systems. School Read More
On the Need for Translators in #edtech
I am of the option, that effective educational technology must be appropriately, properly, and reasonably configured. I am also of the opinion that the individual who can make decisions in all three domains of educational technology is exceedingly rare. (Most who claim they can do it are mistaken.) Fundamentally, technology professionals and education professionals understand Read More
What the Tofflers Wrote About Rates of Change
In 2006, futurists Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler captured the relative speed of change throughout society with this scale: businesses appear to be adopting new information technologies and adapting to them at 100 miles per hour, with other organizations (such as professional organizations and non-governmental organizations) moving almost as quickly; families in the United States Read More
Frameworks Defined
61: Frameworks Defined A continuum can be created with educational scholars placed at one extreme and educators at the other; educational theory is placed on the extreme with scholars and models of instruction are placed on the extreme with practitioners. Between these two extremes, there exists a gap that must be filled if instruction is Read More
Putt’s Law & School IT
The situation regarding IT management in many schools is well-captured by the hypothetical (and sarcastic) Putt’s Law. According to Archibald Putt, “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand” (Putt, 2006, p. 7). Further, Putt articulated a corollary, Read More
Progressive Discourse
Appropriate Proper Reasonable As a wicked problem, the process of education—and thus the planning for education—appears different depending on many personal and societal factors that influences one’s perspective. (Stakeholder groups are commonly identified to categorize those with different perspectives on education; but that does not capture the individualized nature of one’s perspective, nor does the Read More
Theory in Planning
In the vernacular, “theory” is associated with ideas that are incomplete or not necessarily true. Among educators, and other pragmatic professionals such as technologists, theory is often associated with unrealistic or idealistic thinking that has little connection to her or his work The interpretations of theory are unfortunate, however, as theory can inform and focus Read More