I Skype weekly with Jeff Nugent, the Center for Teaching Excellence associate director at Virginia Commonwealth University. Jeff and I have connections as international educators and from the instructional technology program at the University of Virginia. We share thoughts on our separate but connected worlds of education as we work with our teacher partners to design instruction.

Jeff took The following notes after our last call with my responses.

Jeff- The notion of the “Digital Divide” (in an educational/social context) has been transformed radically, making it more subtle and difficult to detect. It is no longer about access/boxes/wires… it’s about making meaning on the web. It’s about organizing the open web to make it a meaningful learning environment. This means understanding how to connect, create, and participate in meaningful ways with others on the web…it is about participation, exchange, and social interaction. This is NOT a given… Students need to learn how to do this. If they don’t get it at home and they don’t get it at school….they don’t get it….EVER. The divide is subtle, and I fear…expanding.

David- Jamie McKenzie termed the over-purchasing of computers and leaving them with limited teacher training or instructional technology support as a “screen saver disease,” as that is what one often viewed in empty computer labs in American public schools. It was one thing not to use the hardware and newly connected Internet; as Jeff points out, it is now the case that some students are gaining rich learning experiences via teachers and whole schools supporting the building of online learning communities. Others are not.

Besides the learning that takes place in well-structured forums and wikis, online journaling with one’s teacher, and blogging on current events, there is a whole world of various literacies as connected students access online databases, search for visuals to support their ideas, concept map Essential Questions, storyboard learning projects with their teams, choose the right tool to meet their needs- the list goes on and on of what a learning 2.0 environment can offer a student. The skills gained in this environment are transferable to the ones they will use as employers look for students with 21st-century skills.

Jeff- School administrative leaders must be centrally involved, knowledgeable, and concerned about the educational value of the web. As a school principal, you MUST be one of your school’s most savvy web researchers. This means having many of the fundamental understandings that you and I routinely take for granted.

David- Jeff and I spoke briefly about the UVA pre-service teacher training. It was recently celebrated as an innovative program by the George Lucas Educational Foundation. I asked Jeff about what is happening at the Edu Leadership program at VCU as we reacted to a recent post by Jeff Utecht on administrators realizing the value of hiring networked educators. We had the same reaction of administrators probably needing more experience in the blogosphere and understanding what a well-connected teacher blogger can bring to a school. Jeff hit it on the head that administrators need to be the instructional leaders of their schools, which in today’s world means being networked into the benefits of the read/write web.

Jeff- The conversation needs to include school-level leaders (principals, admins.), and I don’t see where this is happening. There is a lot of focus on preparing the individual classroom teacher; however, I need to see Educational Leadership programs in schools of education engaging school leaders in the kind of dialogue/inquiry that results in them taking seriously the radical transformations we are witnessing. I am wondering what the question is that needs to be asked the answer to which results in them saying: “I must engage my faculty and students in this process of understanding, creating, and participating on the web because it is fundamentally transforming all aspects of society…if my students don’t get this here they will emerge from my school disadvantaged.”

David- Jeff ties all our points together nicely in the statement above.

Jeff- I enjoy the dialogue unfolding on the Edu-blogger playing field. However, much of the talk about technology focuses on cool tools and their potential uses in the classroom. This kind of stuff is interesting and of value to some classroom teachers and those of us who promote it and try to make sense of it. At the same time, this stuff is often at too fine a level of granularity to be of central interest to school admins. It rolls off of them like – as my father was fond of saying – “water off a duck’s ass.” There needs to be a more fundamental experience – in their preparation as school leaders – that helps them make the tough decisions about where they stand concerning education technology. They are not ever really encouraged/forced to ask the questions.

David- I will add that I am finding too much “tool talk” in the posts I follow. The leaders in the field need to speak in broad terms to try and entice teachers in professional development settings to try something new. From an instructional technologist’s perspective, our training focuses on the individual needs of the teacher or group of teachers working towards some learning goals for their students. As we partner and work from the teachers’ expertise, our learning community often becomes a rich environment for creativity and new strategies to support student understanding. The tools slowly work their way into the process. It certainly would make a big difference if administrators sat in on those conversations, asking questions about learning outcomes and the best ways to build personal learning environments for the children.

Jeff- When they get into a leadership position, where do principals look for guidance about the role IT should play in the school? How should it be used? Who is in charge? Who decides? More often than not, they offload this decision to the system admins. (or maybe worse, they have no say). Managing boxes and wires and securing the network – have little to nothing to do with decisions about the meaningful and powerful uses of technology in education… Yet, at the same time, this has everything to do with it. Locked-down networks become the mental model for understanding how technology should be viewed. They succumb…

David- great point, Jeff. You point to the next step in the evolution of the instructional/educational technologist. I consistently find in my reading of journal articles and blogs that IT/ET is present in many schools in the US and international schools. However, I have not heard of a Director of Educational Technology position until recently. Some schools try to combine the educational role with the technology infrastructure upkeep, just as schools once tried to do the same with computer and printer repairs for the Technology Coordinator and hoped they had some time to work on the educational side.

The International School of Bangkok is advertising a Director of Educational Technology now. This individual will be the go-to person at that school, along with the Curriculum Director, when the administrator needs big-picture advice and guidance to support learning. One can only hope that more schools follow ISB’s leadership to separate the need for educational technology and infrastructure leadership into two positions.