By Dr. Gordon K. Dahlby, CIO Advisor
As then-potential presidential candidate Ron Regan once quipped
in one of his debates, “There you go again.
Or you may recall Vice President
Mondale’s quip; “Where’s the beef?”
In a September 3, 2011, New York Times article, “In Classroom of the Future, Stagnant Scores—a part of the newspaper’s series “Grading the Digital School: The High-Tech Gamble”—the efficacy of instructional
technology investments is once again called into question. Perhaps the readers
here are not surprised. Education
researchers frequently admit to the difficulty in expressing direct causal
research to any particular treatment or innovation. Such difficulty is often tied to an inability to control all
the variables and/or that social science research is weak in its use of
analytics. The fact that businesses do not have to justify the use of
technology is irrelevant to the discussions.
For the school district CIO, though, there is a lesson to be
learned. The article points to
several potential issues within our community. Much of it can be laid at the feet of poor-quality
communication. For example, the
article points out the efforts of a district to renew a bond issue to be used
to keep the technology refreshed and to have resources for newer technologies. Some of what seemed lacking in the
article was an understanding that the resources in the bond cannot be
repurposed to salaries or supplies, nor that there would likely be significant
pressure on other parts of school budgets if technology investments must come
from the general fund. For
districts working on their transition to e2-curriculum (electronic x
enhanced) materials by morphing textbook or other budgets to accommodate a
variety of new media, applications/software, data and BI tools, it is important
for administrators to update their community on the shifting use of their
financial resources in an easy to understand way. It is important to be honest and forthcoming on costs and to
include all technology staff as contracted consultants and resources in those
communications. It is known the total
cost of ownership is not just bound by costs for hardware and software. It must be know to the public
community. It is important for
senior leadership to share how important it is to the district.
Top CIOs have structured in an ongoing communications plan
ways to capture and communicate to those many different constituents in your
community not only the evolving way schools do learning-related activities
using the new tools of this century, but also the myriad of new learning
activities that have not been available to most classrooms of the past
century. Most parents and
community members have not experienced the use of technology as a learner. One needs to find the best avenues for
getting the word out. One might
think that PCs and the Internet are not new. To many of your parents and much of the taxpaying
community without students, the multiple new platforms, applications,
software, and form factors are still viewed as new visitors to the education
environment. You are encouraged to
invite them into your classrooms to observe.
In a reaction to the article, several postings, position
statements, and projects are in the works to repudiate concerns listed in the
article. Some will say they are
asking the wrong question, some will insist it is obvious to spend on
technology because the page has turned to a new century and some will answer
questions not raised by the article. What will be interesting will be well-developed responses that match the
designed reasons for the investments with the measured outcomes and
accomplishments to date. The educational technology industry welcomes masters
and doctoral candidates as well as their professors to publish research
summaries in commonly read periodicals. It will be interesting to watch.
Dr. Gordon K. Dahlby is an educational consultant for leadership in policy, planning and practice.