I recently worked with some education leaders to design some educational technology projects that were organized around educational design research. Some of their reflections after we finished give us insight into the workflow of leaders. Rachel (one of the leaders) made observations of the differences between the planning that was commonly expected to be followed Read More
The adjectives “robust” and “reliable” are used to describe IT networks. Robust describes the capacity of the network to connect users and provided them with the network information each request in a timely manner. A robust network will allow many users in a classroom to connect with little delay, and there will be little latency Read More
The leaders of almost every school face the same challenging situation: They must create schools that reflect the dominant role of digital IT in society and they must prepare students for that world; but the changing landscape of teaching, inadequate technical expertise, and limited resources are genuine barriers to this work. What we know, how Read More
Conceptual artifacts are ideas that we use in planning, but these are ideas whose definitions never change. We are all familiar with the compromises that we make when planning and decision-making, but when planning is organized around conceptual artifacts, we do not compromise on what we mean. When planning with conceptual artifacts we cannot even Read More
Early in the history of electronic digital computing, computers were large devices that filled rooms. During this phase of their evolution, the calculation to be performed by the computer was hard-wired into the circuits. Changing the calculation required technicians to physically reconfigure the circuits following the direction of the computer engineers. Lohr (2001) observed the Read More
If we hope to make technology an easy-to-use and useful educational technology that is also secure and reliable, school and technology leaders must gather data to understand the information and instructional technology (I&IT) in schools: Users’ perspectives—There is a rich body of research that supports the conclusion that perceived ease of use and usefulness is Read More
In many ways, an information technology network is much like other technologies in that the expertise needed to design and build it is much more specialized and expensive than the work of managing and operating a network. Network engineers are the professionals with the greatest understanding of how to design and build robust and secure Read More
Educational data has been a recurring theme on this blog. In this post, I continue considering the nature of data in education and the nature of data in science… comparing and contrasting the two. Constructs and Instruments Scientists are always specific about what they are measuring, and there are accepted methods for measuring these quantities. Read More
A colleague and I recently had a conversation about “data” and its role in education. I maintained that advocated for using data have a fundamental misunderstanding of science and evidence. I further maintained that misapplication of the principles of science and inquiry makes the decisions made by “data-driven leaders” in schools dubious at best. This Read More
I recently rediscovered a glossary that a colleague and I started a few years ago… we had been collecting terms we heard educational leaders using for years, and we reflected on what they meant when they used them. These still seem very appropriate today, so they will be appearing in this blog until the collection Read More