Technology's Driver Seat: Are We There Yet? - administration of technology in the school environment - Brief Article

School Administrator, April, 2000 by Joseph J. Cirasuolo

This past summer, I represented AASA at the annual conference of the chief school officers in England. The conference was held in London and as part of the experience we visited the Millennium Dome in Greenwich.

When I visited the dome, I learned that it will eventually house an education section that will have as its centerpiece a place where any school-age child can have a virtual experience with children from around the world. Children would be able to see others from various locations, speak with those children and feel as if they were face to face. All of this would be possible because of technological advances.

This experience confirmed my conviction that technology is sparking a transformation of every facet of our lives. No social or economic institution will be immune from this transformation. Our choice is whether to direct the transformation or to let technology control us.

As school system leaders, we can apply this choice to the enterprise we lead. We can let technology itself determine what schooling will be in the future or we can lead the use of technology to transform schooling.

The choice that we should make is obvious. The enterprise that we lead has as its product the education of human beings. We know a great deal about how people learn and what has to be done so that people will learn. Technology will not change these processes that are rooted in our humanity. However, technology can enable us to transform schooling so that it is much more consistent with how people learn than it is at present. For this to happen, we need to direct technology.

As we engage ourselves in this task, we need to open ourselves up to the possibilities that technology will present by disengaging ourselves from the structures of our present schooling system. This will be difficult because it is a human tendency to put anything that is new into a conceptual and spatial framework that is familiar. We need to resist this tendency because it would blind us to the healthy changes that technology can cause, changes that go to the root of how we conduct schooling.

For example, if we remain wed to delivering schooling with school buildings as our base of operation, we will miss the opportunity for students to learn through the sort of virtual experiences that they will have soon in the Millennium Dome. On the other hand, if we can conceive of schooling as Web-site based, we will begin to give our students the benefits of what technology can deliver.

What this boils down to is the fact that technology is transforming our world in ways as profound as what happened with the invention of the printing press. Before the press was invented, literacy was a gift enjoyed by very few people, most of them monks who spent their lives transcribing portions of the Bible by hand. The press democratized literacy and made the monks obsolete.

We need to make sure that at the dawn of the next millennium a thousand years from now, we will be remembered as those who embraced and directed technology. Conversely, we need to also make sure that we are not remembered as the 21st century's version of the medieval monks who quickly went from being the fulcrum of scholarly effort to being museum curiosities.

We have it in our power to embrace exciting possibilities of the present and the future and in doing so, to make the schooling experience everything it should be for our students.