September 2007 — Policy/Advocacy
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Which Way, IT?
Smith provided a compelling illustration of the dichotomy between making changes to infrastructure and making changes to teaching and learning. CMU's course management system is used mainly to save time, both for students and faculty. Smith's staff heard concerns about the efficiency of the grade-book component, tweaked the system, and were able to save everyone even more time, all with a few months' work.
On the other hand, seven years ago, CMU offered an online statistics course. Three months after the course ended, students were unable to recall its key concepts, and worse, they were unable to apply what they could remember. The university assembled a team of cognitive scientists, instructional designers, and technologists and set about redesigning the course and testing the results. Seven years later, CMU offers a hybrid (part online, part face-to-face) statistics class that takes half the time of a standard course and has proven much more successful in ensuring that students retain the material they learn as well as apply it. Changing software or installing boxes and wires is usually quick and easy compared to changing the content, approach, and teaching of a course— and proving that the changes worked.
The local policy implications of this debate over the proper role for IT are deep, but not new. As a technology coordinator in the early 1980s, I remember talking with my colleagues in other districts about forthcoming power struggles over who should control the Corvis network in the one computer lab, and how I didn't want any part of responsibility for telephones.
In my 11 years with the Texas Education Agency, I experienced a number of reorganizations. The instructional technology division grew from six people to 45 when our technology plan passed the state Legislature, with its mandate for the building of infrastructure to support an electronic network and a satellite dish in every district. Later, a new commissioner merged information systems, including the statewide data system, with instructional technology. Part of the rationale was that he wanted to examine using the statewide electronic network, operated by instructional technology, to transport data to the data system watched over by information technology.
The following three years I tried to coax very different cultures into working together. Yet another reorganization moved instructional technology, and me with it, over to curriculum, assessment, and textbooks. The rationale this time was that technology, including digital content, should be used throughout the teaching and learning process, and the instructional technology staff needed to help curriculum, assessment, and textbook people learn how technology could be incorporated in all aspects of schooling.
Organizing technology departments continues to be a concern that takes time away from a more appropriate focus, such as pedagogy or the objectives of the organization.
