Efficacious Technology Management: a guide for School Leaders

The Barriers to Efficacy

Fundamentally, educators and IT professionals understand technology different ways. Even steps that seem to be necessary for promoting reliable and secure environments for technology-rich teaching and learning can be differently perceived and understood by different groups. Consider complex passwords; IT professionals perceive these as a simple strategy for keeping the network secure (which they do), but teachers perceive them as an impediment to quick access, especially for those students with emerging keyboarding skills. Consider, as well, the example of operating systems. IT professionals will recognize the importance of installing updates to operating systems in a timely manner as an essential step of keeping systems secure, thus reliably available. Teachers, however, who find their lesson delayed as they wait for computers to finish installing updates before they can begin will see those same updates as interfering with the reliability of the machines (of course updates are becoming less disruptive as school have adopted Internet-only notebooks). The school administrator who is an enthusiastic user of his or her tablet for personal and professional and work may not understand the difficulty of managing those devices in multi-user environments that leads IT professionals to push back against his or her suggestion tablets be purchased for students.

Negotiating what is appropriate, proper, and reasonable is difficult when the participants in the management decisions approach the problem from different perspectives, have different concepts of the same terms, and interpret the same circumstances differently. Efficacious IT management is also made more difficult because of the disparate approaches to problems solved by the three groups who must collaborate for efficacious IT management.

Designing IT systems is a typical tame problem (Rittel & Weber, 1973); it is understood and it can be solved with known procedures. IT professionals can clearly describe the networks they seek to build and maintain, and the procedures for building and troubleshooting computer networks are well known and can be transferred reliably from one design project to another. Further, IT systems can be tested and redesigned before they are deployed to users. Teaching, on the other hand, is a wicked problem; it is not clearly understood, there are multiple and interconnected factors that affect how its effectiveness is judged, those factors are incompletely known, and different individuals will judge the same outcomes differently. Successful teaching depends on learning (which is both a physiological and a psychological process as well as social one), and many educators recognize the best teaching does not always influence learning in the intended manner. School leadership is largely a political process, so the manner in which it proceeds and the measures of success are entirely dependent on perceptions, power, and priorities.

Because of these fundamental differences in their work, technology professionals, teachers, and school administrators can find their IT management is affected by the silo effect. For most of their work hours, these professionals work in separate locations and they apply different knowledge and skills to the problems and accomplish the tasks specific to their area of expertise. While educators, IT professionals, and school leaders all assume responsibility for effectively and efficiently realizing their logistic goals, the nature of those goals and their connection to the strategic goal must be understood collectively if IT management is to be efficacious.

Becoming Efficacious

For teachers, IT professionals, and school leaders to make decisions and take actions that build effective digital learning environments, they must build a common language and understanding of the nature of the problems and how acceptable solutions will be recognized. When IT managers in schools share understanding of what needs to be done, what everyone can expect to see when it is done, and how they should approach the work, they will be more successful in achieving strategic goals.

Through this book, I seek to support those who are interested in generating common language, understanding, and actions so that communities realize the goal of creating and sustaining schools that are places and spaces for digital learning. I define the context in which educational technology is used, the dimensions of educational technology, and the processes that can facilitate this collaboration. My work is grounded in assumptions about the users of IT in educational institutions and it recognizes the role of theory in IT management.

My Assumptions About Users of School IT

The government oversight that marks educator licensing is not required for those who work with IT systems in schools. IT professionals become qualified to enter the field in two ways. First, they earn degrees from colleges and universities. Second, they pass exams created by professional organizations and companies that build and sell hardware and software. Interestingly, these two are not coincident. Consider an individual who earns an undergraduate degree in information systems. The graduate will have taken courses in network management, network security, databases, and other aspects of IT systems. Those courses are likely to be vendor-independent, so students learn the theory and practice of IT management common to all information systems. Cisco, the manufacturer of networking devices, certifies individuals who pass the exams they publish can properly configure the devices they sell. The information systems graduates may be unable to pass a Cisco exam, but the degree program was not intended to prepare students for those tests. Because the contents of the tests are very specific, one may be able to pass a Cisco exam without holding a degree. Both individuals, however, may be qualified to properly configure IT systems in schools, but neither the undergraduate degree nor the Cisco exams address the needs of users in specific organizations.

IT professionals who arrive in schools are likely, also, to have experience working in fields other than education. While the steps needed to properly configure IT networks are the same regardless of the nature of the users, the appropriate configuration does depend on the nature of the users. The differences between users in schools and users in business are relevant, and IT professionals may find that configurations that were proper and appropriate in business are proper but inappropriate in schools, thus they must reevaluate what they believe to be the best practices for managing and configuring IT. The differences between users in business and industry and those in educational organizations (especially K-12 schools) are based on both the skill levels of the users and the nature of teaching and learning as information tasks. These differences are summarized in table 1.1.

Some users of school IT do resemble users in other businesses and organizations; for example, in the business office of any school, there are professionals who manage finances. Those individuals need access to accounting software, so they can process invoices and pay bills just as finance professionals in all organizations. Those individuals will know the task they are assigned and will have been trained in how to do it. They will do that job daily (with regular and predictable variation such as completing and distributing tax forms) and indefinitely. The computer room in an elementary school served by that business office will be used by students who are early in the process of learning to read as well as teachers who are working on graduate courses, so the users of the computer room have much more varied need.