Folklore suggest that the Chinese symbol for “crisis” is combined of two characters, “danger” and “opportunity.” While this is untrue, it’s still a great concept.

Recently, a colleague sent me a wonderful column by Gus Speth, dean of the School of Forrestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. The entire article is worth reading. But I want to focus on one particular point he makes:

“Perhaps the financial crisis will teach us to live more simply, with less consumption. Materialism, psychologists report, is toxic to happiness, and our hyper-consumption is one of the main drivers of environmental decline. Being less focused on getting and spending (initially, in part, because there is less to spend) can help us rediscover that the truly important things in life are not at the mall nor, indeed, for sale anywhere.”

This sentiment is close to my own heart, but I will admit to a high amount of personal discontinuity between my beliefs and my job as a technology director in an elite college prep school.

Technology is arguably one of the most materialistic, consumerism-driven (not necessarily, consumer-driven) enterprises on the planet. Just today I was sorting through piles of perfectly functional equipment dropped off at our school for an electronics recycling fund raising drive. And while I am delighted that the equipment will be responsibly recycled, and that a worthy charitable organization will receive the proceeds from the drive, I am also appalled by the waste.

I suffer from my own “techno-lust” and its related waste, having purchased an iPhone this past year well before the contract on my perfectly good LG phone had expired or the phone shown and visible wear and tear.

For years my school has had an “evergreen” policy for “refreshing” computers before they got too “old.” And why did they get too old? Not usually because they wore out. Rather, they got slow. And why did they get slow? Because software companies created new versions of products that consumed more CPU cycles, laden with new features and bug fixes that also occupied more RAM and hard disk space. But optimizing the code to make it smaller and perform more efficiently mattered little to them because hardware was getting faster. And so this unholy alliance between software and hardware companies led to phenomenal growth in each sector. And as educational technologists we bought right into it, always complaining about how our schools did not have enough money to keep up, how our computers were antiquated, our networks slow, and our file storage capacity meager. And, by comparison to business and industry, we were right.

Time out! King’s X. Or as Quick Draw McGraw used to say to Baba Louie: “Ho-o-o-old on there!”

What’s so “green” about an “evergreen” policy? It’s not particularly good for the environment, and it’s expensive. Color me red with embarrassment to be so slow on the uptake about this. Or covered with red ink. Take your pick.

“But wait!” says the angel (or devil) sitting on my shoulder, “what we’ve been doing is actually showing how schools could and should operate in the 21st century, this digital age that we live in. It’s not conspicuous, mindless consumption, it’s leadership. It’s innovation. It’s what these kids need, and what society demands.”

Perhaps so. Our western minds aren’t very good at holding something as completely true and completely false at the same time. (I wonder what the Chinese character is for that idea?)

We do consume too much. As individuals, as families, as institutions. And the technology adoption cycle is crazy. And technology holds the key to solving many of the world’s crises, from increasing communication between people, to better managing our scare resources, to finding cures for diseases.

“But, but you can’t have it both ways!” yells my devil/angel provocateur.

Yes you can, and yes we must. We must consume more, but mindfully. We must waste more, but mindfully. We must use more power, but mindfully. And we must also consume less, waste less, and use less – mindfully.

Our economic recession has created a great deal of anxiety among millions of people. And each day I thank my lucky stars that I am employed, have reasonable house payments, and despite a frightening hit to my retirement funds I am relatively okay. And so it is perhaps easier for me than others to try to treat the recession as an opportunity rather than as a crisis. It is both, and by simultaneously holding that dualism and that tension within ourselves perhaps each of us can deal with it more effectively.

The young woman who created this video and this project is a former student of mine. She is a woman of compassion and integrity.

Many moons ago (1962 to be exact), Helen Gurley Brown, the then editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine, published Sex and the Single Girl, which went on to be a best-seller and eventually made into a movie. In many ways it was to the sixties what Sex and the City was to the 2000’s, a manifesto about the sexual freedom of women.

Almost fifty years after the publication of Sex and the Single Girl and just a few years after the airing of the last episodes’ of HBO’s Sex and the City, we now have young women who have very different attitudes about sexuality than perhaps even Brown or Carrie and her posse might imagine; one in which sexually charged text messages (aka “sexting”), including nude photos, is becoming commonplace amongst teens.

Or at least this is the thesis in a wonderful article by Slate columnist Dalia Lithwick, which also appears in this week’s Newsweek magazine. Lithwick describes the conundrum facing parents, school officials, and law enforcement when teens send, receive, and sometimes distribute nude photos of one another. None of us are equipped to deal with this using conventional rules, regulations, or law. And as for the students, as Lithwik says, “We seem to forget that kids can be as tech-savvy as Bill Gates but as gullible as Bambi.”

Right on, Dalia! It would be far too easy to overreact, as some have done, by charging these children with child pornography. (Ironic, no?) As for kicking these kids out of school, they need to be in school where they have a support system to learn how to deal with dumb mistakes.

There are dumb criminals who deserve to be punished, and then there are dumb acts that deserve consequences. As adults, it is incumbent upon us to be able to distinguish between the two and act with justice and compassion in each case.  We know that always holding children to adult standards of conduct is not developmentally defensible. Adults have every right to be concerned and offended by sexting by their children. How we respond more about ourselves and our maturity as it does about our children’s.

In a previous post, I reviewed Generation Text: Raising Well-Adjusted Kinds in an Age of Instant Everything by Michael Osit, and promised to follow-up with a review of a  new text from ISTE, Raising a Digital Child: A Digital Citizenship Handbook for Parents, by Mike Ribble.

Judging by the title, one might think that these books might be redundant. But they are not, for reasons that I will describe below. Both deserve a place on the educational technologist’s bookshelf, but for different reasons.

Ribble’s book is based on his previous volume from ISTE, Digital Citizenship in Schools. It takes the themes he developed there and extends them to the family.

Ribble’s central tenet is that we need to teach students how to be digital citizens, and that such citizenship is comprised of nine elements. These nine elements, in turn, may be broken into three categories.

HOME AND COMMUNITY

• Digital Access: full electronic participation in society.
• Digital Commerce: the buying and selling of goods online.
• Digital Communication: the electronic exchange of information.

HOME AND SCHOOL

• Digital Literacy: the capability to use digital technology and knowing when and how ot use it.
• Digital Etiquette: the standards of conduct expected by other technology users.
• Digital Law: the legal wrights and restrictions governing technology use.

HOME

• Digital Rights and Responsibilities: the privileges and freedoms extended to all digital technology users, and the behavioral expectations that come with them.
• Digital Health and Wellness: the elements of physical andd psychological well-being related to digital technology use.
• Digital Security: the precautions that all technology users must take to guarantee their personal safety and the security of the network.

What I like about Ribble’s approach is that it is “not simply a list of rules… but ideas and guidelines for thinking about technology.” This is consistent with my school’s alternative approach to “acceptable use” policies for students, which eschews a long list of “thou shalt nots” (and the regular need to amend the list as technology changes) and instead focuses on “honorable use.” Learning how to think about technology is also consistent with the new concept of “digital wisdom” espoused by Mark Prensky.

In the not-so-distant past, parents could rely upon their own experience as children and teens, and the guidance of their adult mentors, to help them navigate the challenges of childhood and adolescence. But parents today often lack experience in social networking, collaborative web technologies, text messaging, blogs, wikis, and other elements of the technology landscape so familiar to their children. Without context and the practical experience that comes from the mistakes, parents have little experience to inform their intuition and therefore be able to act as competent, wise coaches for their children. Lacking such experience, parents may be clueless about what their children are doing, think that everything on the Internet is harmful or dangerous, or abdicate all responsibility for digital education to the schools. There are obvious shortcomings to each of these approaches.

The only approach that has really makes any sense is to engage your child in conversation and practice about technology, learning as much as you can about the technology yourself by participating in it, and talking with other adults (parents and teachers) about technology.

Ribble describes a four stage process for parents to address digital citizenship:

1. Awareness
2. Guided Practice
3. Modeling and Demonstration
4. Feedback and Analysis

My experience is that most approaches to parent education about the technology use of children stop at stage 1, Awareness. This may be followed by (2) hand wringing, (3) installation of blocking software and/or keystroke capture software, and (4) lectures about the perils of the internet. Ribble’s model makes much more sense.

I am particularly fond of the idea of parents practicing with their children, and then modeling for their children, the responsible use of technology. I wish Ribble’s chapter on this model went into more detail about this process.

And this leads me to my major caveat about this book. Raising Digital Children will work best, I think, when used as a textbook in a parent education class led by an experienced educator. There are many open-ended questions that beg for an opportunity for parents to discuss among themselves before bringing these questions to their children. Similarly, while I believe it is instructive for parents to learn something about technology from their children, I also believe there is safety and security to be had when a group of parents learn how to create a Facebook account together, from another adult who knows about things like recommended security and privacy settings.

Taken together, Raising a Digital Child and Generation Text are two different yet compatible takes on the role parents have to play in rearing children in a digital age. The former would make a wonderful text for a class on the subject, while the latter would make an excellent companion reader.

For some time I have been reading about the challenges social networking present to schools. Not the students in school, mind you. They have taken to social networking like ducks to water. But the adults are a different story and are largely playing catch-up. Some schools have responded by banning all of use social networking by students and employees. Others (a small number) are using social networking tools in interesting ways. Most seem to be in the middle, engaged in much hand wringing and asking colleagues in other schools:

• What are YOU doing about Facebook and MySpace?
• Do you have a policy we can look at?
• Our faculty and staff are asking for guidance in this area. What do we tell them?

I don’t have the answer. But I do have some opinions, and I’d like to float them here to see what others have to say about them and then, in the best of social networking tradition, incorporate your suggestions into something that I can run by my colleagues. So here goes.

Proposed Guidelines for Use of Social Networks by School Faculty and Staff*

New technologies, such as social networking tools, provide exciting new ways to collaborate and communicate. Nevertheless we must exercise care to be sure we use such tools with students in ways that are both age-appropriate and consistent with the mission of the school.

School faculty and staff are expected to behave honorably in both real and virtual (online) spaces. Activities which are improper, unethical, illegal, or which cause undue discomfort for students, employees, parents, or other members of the school community should be judiciously avoided in both physical space and cyberspace.

To that end, we offer the following guidelines for school employees who use online social networking applications which may be frequented by current or former students.

1. COURSE USE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING: In order to provide equal, age-appropriate access for students to course materials, faculty should limit class activities to school-sanctioned online tools. New social networking tools and features are being continually introduced which may or may not be appropriate for course use. The same care must be taken in choosing such tools as other tools and support materials.
2. MODEL APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR: Exercise appropriate discretion when using social networks for personal communications (friends, colleagues, parents, former students, etc.) with the knowledge that adult behavior on social networks may be used as a model by our students.
3. FRIENDING ALUMNI: Accept social network friend requests only with alumni over the age of 18. Do not initiate friend contacts with alumni.
4. UNEQUAL RELATIONSHIPS: Understand that the uneven power dynamics of the school, in which adults have authority over former students, continues to shape those relationships.
5. OTHER FRIENDS: Remind all other members of your network of your position as an educator whose profile may be accessed by current or former students, and to monitor their posts to your network accordingly. Conversely, be judicious in your postings to all friends sites, and act immediately to remove any material that may be inappropriate from your site whether posted by you or someone else.
6. GROUPS IN YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK: Associate with social networking groups consistent with healthy, pro-social activities and the mission and reputation of the school, acting with sensitivity within context of a diverse educational environment in which both students and adults practice tolerance and accept competing views.
7. PRIVACY SETTINGS AND CONTENT: Exercise care with privacy settings and profile content. Content should be placed thoughtfully and periodically reviewed to maintain this standard.
8. MISREPRESENTATION: Faculty who use social networks should do so using their own name, not a pseudonym or nickname.
9. PUBLIC INFORMATION: Recognize that many former students have online connections with current students, and that information shared between school adults and former students is likely to be seen by current students as well.

===

*Some of the ideas for this list come from a Facebook group I belong to, Faculty Ethics on Facebook. It is geared towards higher education, and so if you stumbled upon this post and really want to read about colleges and universities, head on over to Facebook. I also appreciate colleague Matt Montagne’s feedback via Google Docs on an earlier draft of these ideas.

Eight years ago, academic Marc Prensky provided us with two useful terms to differentiate between a younger generation of technology users who have grown up surrounded by the Internet and computers, from older users who had not, labeling them “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” respectively. In a recent article in Innovate, “H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Native to Digital Wisdom,” [free registration required] Prensky writes: “Although many have found the terms useful…the distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants [has] become less relevant. Clearly, as we work to create and improve the future, we need to imagine a new set of distinctions. I suggest we think in terms of digital wisdom.”

I agree. Chronologically a digital immigrant but spiritually a digital native, I have struggled with this distinction as I have watched clueless young people struggle with technology, accept information uncritically, and behave horribly online, while older people, sometimes even “senior citizens,” are as facile, excited, and connected as the best of the “natives.” As Prensky states, “Technology alone will not replace intuition, good judgment, problem-solving abilities, and a clear moral compass,” qualities which one often associates with experience gained over time. Prensky predicts the emergence of “digital wisdom,” a marriage of sorts, of “wisdom arising from the use of digital technology to access cognitive power beyond our innate capacity and to wisdom in the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities.” [emphasis his]

Prensky references Nicholas Carr’s provocative article, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Prensky’s response is not surprising. “In fact, what’s happening now is very much the opposite: Digital technology is making us smarter.” So while we may not be as good at memorizing as students in Socrates day, telling time by the position of the sun in the sky, or we may struggle when reading a map or passing spelling tests, these “losses” pale in comparison to the gains to be had with a digitally enhanced mind and its access to a greater expanse of  collective memories and collaboration.

At this point in his article, I am really getting excited about the three questions he poses next:

• What constitutes digital wisdom?
• What habits do the digitally wise use to advance their capabilities and the capabilities of those around them?
• Can digital wisdom be taught?

But here is where the article begins to falter. Some examples of digital wisdom are provided in the form of the Obama campaign’s use of Web 2.0 technologies, and the use of blogs and wikis by journalists. And Prensky is quick to point out that there’s a difference between digital wisdom and what he dubs “digital cleverness.” But the exposition ends here. We’re left with an enticing idea that needs discussion and augmentation to make it as clear and useful as his earlier work.

Perhaps this is not so surprising. It is (to my knowledge), Prensky’s first article on digital wisdom, and no doubt deeper thinking is on the horizon. And as someone possessing digital wisdom, I expect we’ll here more from Prensky and that he, too, will hear more from the members of the digital community to augment this tantalizing proposition.

To that end, let me offer the following suggestions as food for thought.

A person is digitally wise when she or he:

• uses technology to contribute to the “marketplace of ideas” for the purpose of authentic assessment and to further our collective knowledge.
• uses technology to find arguments and counterarguments to propositions, uncover biases, and examine ideas from multiple perspectives.
• recognizes that technology can and should be used to augment human connections, that true wisdom lies in the exchange of ideas with others and not in the solitary confines of person and machine.
• uses technology for artistic expression to amplify and deepen the human understanding and representation of truth.
• trusts their instincts as well as the data; makes intuitive leaps beyond the data.

This is fun. Let the comments begin!

Please respond to the following:

A person is digitally wise when she or he…

Technorati Profile

In Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novel, The Naked Sun, he imagines a world in which personal human contact with one another is taboo. When Earth detective Elijah Bailey arrives on the planet Solaria to investigate a murder and insists on face-to-face interviews with people he causes no end of consternation.

In Dr. Michael Osit’s book, Generation Text: Raising Well-Adjusted Kinds in an Age of Instant Everything, he reports “when a high school student wants to talk to a friend on the other side of the school cafeteria, he may be more inclined to call or text the friend on his cell phone than to walk across the room…. It’s not uncommon for kids to spend more time relating to machines than to each other…”

One wonders, or at least I can imagine Dr. Osit wondering, if the technologies that our youth are so rapidly adopting and conversant with is a foreshadowing of Asimov’s Solarian society in which human intercourse (yes, that kind, too) is depersonalized and machine-mediated.

I found Osit’s book to be alternately frustrating and satisfying. By the end of it I determined that I liked is more than I thought I would at the beginning, and that any differences we may share about the subject of Internet use by today’s teens is a matter of perspective, similar to whether one sees a glass as half-empty or half-full. I attribute this to Dr. Osit’s profession as a child psychologist who spends a great deal of time with troubled teens, and in that role is exposed to clients whose Internet addictions and practices may be part of a larger dysfunctional family or personality. Spending more time with well-adjusted kids may temper his fear about the effect of the Internet and technology a bit.

To be fair, Osit’s book is more than just about technology. At its heart it is a book about parenting children in the 21st century, and the technology tools available to them are just part of the culture (Western, particularly American culture) in which they live. This culture presents special challenges:

• an overabundance of choices
• a sense of entitlement and immediate gratification
• addictive behaviors (for some) associated with electronic services and devices
• a lowering of the ages at which children engage in activities previously thought appropriate only for adults
• children who know much more about technology than their parents
• a conflation of self-worth and possessions and of wants versus needs
• child-centered families that have led to an erosion of appropriate parental expectations for children; parenting by guilt
• more individual activities and the cost of less time spent as a family
• learned helplessness and a lack of self-reliance among children
• blurred boundaries between appropriate personal and online behaviors
• adult models (or lack thereof) that demonstrate mature, responsible, and ethical relationships and technology use

The author acknowledges that despite these challenges, “The good news is that the basis of effective parenting is really the same as it has ever been.. Once you establish a strong foundation of tried-and-true traditional methods, you will be well on your way to effectively parenting your nontraditional Generation Text child.” So apparently while technology has presents us adults with  unprecedented parenting challenges, it’s really a lack of proper parenting techniques that contributes to the problem. The list of these “tried-and-true” parenting methods will sound familiar to many of us:

• agreement between parents as to proper behavior on their part and that of their children
• boundaries for child behavior and consequences for straying from those boundaries
• assertiveness and flexibility
• active parenting that keeps you connected with youth culture
• communicating with your child about choices, helping them gain perspective, talking about tough subjects
• help children become better stewards of their time and privacy
• encouraging appropriate individuation with teens
• communicating with other parents, especially those of your children’s friends,
• adjusting your parenting based on each individual child’s needs and personality

I was really pleased to se that Osit includes a chapter for parents on “How to Make Technology Work For You,” and “find[ing] ways to emphasize the positive aspects of technology and [to] use them to our advantage as we help our children navigate into adulthood.”

Ironically, given how the preceding eight chapters is largely comprised of stories about the dangers of technology, Osit advises parents to “let go of their fear that all those electronic, Internet-connected gadgets only have the ability to harm and endanger their kids.” This means that parents need to learn about the sites and technologies their children are using, so that “It is not just about fighting off the evils. It is about facilitating your child’s growth so that she becomes a happy, healthy adult.” The author then goes on the suggest ways in which parents and children can work cooperatively using technology, good sites for age appropriate Internet activities and reference, and speaking with about and sharing with your children interesting technologies and web sites.

As educational technologists, we are often asked by parents about social networking, IMing, Internet pornography, and related issues. Many parents are unsure of what to do, or even where to start. Generation Text: Raising Well-Adjusted Kinds in an Age of Instant Everything is a good place for parents to start, and one that I can and will recommend to parents.

I expect delivery from a new book from ISTE entitled Raising a Digital Child and will publish a review on this blog at a later date.

Much has been written about 21st century teaching, learning, and schools. But I’ve had little success in finding information about 21st century school technology departments.

What does a 21st century school look like, and how will its adults be organized? How can we leverage 21st century technology and practices to lower operational costs while still fulfilling our academic mission? Will there still job titles like Technology Directors, Academic Technology Coordinators, Help Desk Personnel, Database Managers and Network Managers?

In mindful meditation practice there’s a concept called “don’t know mind.” It’s illustrated with this story:

The Chinese tell the story of an old man who owned a wonderful stallion. One day the horse ran away. The old man’s friends, trying to console him, said, “We’re so sorry about your horse, old man. What a misfortune you’ve had.” But the old man said, “Bad news, good news-who knows?”

A few days later the horse returned home leading a a beautiful mare. Again the friends came running. Filled with jubilation, they cried, “How wonderful!” But the old man whispered, “Good news, bad news-who knows?”

Then the next day, when the farmer and his son were out riding and the young man was thrown to the ground and broke both legs. The friends were aghast with his misfortune. The old man stood still and said, “Bad news, good news-who knows?”

And a short time later when the village went to war and all the young men were drafted to fight, the farmer’s son was excused because of two broken legs. Good news. Bad news. Who knows?

So with the above in mind, let me state that I don’t know what the future will bring for educational technologists like myself, my colleagues, and friends of BAISnet, Classroom 2.0, Ning, and my other online communities. Good news, bad news-who knows? Nonetheless I find it interesting to think about, and invite your comments as well.

The Needed Characteristics of a 21st Century Technology Department

For technologists to be successful in 21st century schools, they must:

• Be comfortable and facile with the use of open source and commercial software, multiple operating systems, and a wide range of technology devices and brands
• Possess a high tolerance for ambiguity and failure
• Be able to balance the needs of the organization for secure, reliable technology access with user-centric, empowering practices in which students, faculty, and staff regularly install new programs or use new web services without the need to seek permission from the organization
• Be able to integrate disparate hardware and software components through the use of standards-based interfaces
• Be a regular participant in and a contributor to pertinent online communities
• Possess “digital wisdom” (Prensky, 2009)
• Be comfortable with participating in and in leading ad hoc collaborative teams
• Be comfortable with distance learning and technical support
• Be able to critically evaluate and integrate new products and practices
• Be technology generalists with complementary skills sets who know when and how to work with experts as needed
• Be curious, flexible, empowering, transparent, approachable, non-hierarchical and non-territorial
• Pursue sustainable practices to maximize product life, minimize waste and power consumption, reclaim and re-use resources, and promote such practices within the school
• Have interest in a supporting education without the normal constraints of geography, time, and roles

How might these characteristics play out in terms of the various functions technology departments currently perform in most schools?

Implications
However 21st Century learning manifests itself in schools, there will continue to be a need for robust, reliable infrastructure, end user support, sustainable practices, and professional development. The question is: will these needs require us to have the same type of staffing and roles as are currently present in most organizations?

For the short term, I think the answer is yes. But over time, entirely new models of staff will emerge in response to the following developments:

1. Savvier, more capable and independent end users. As more digital natives (possessing what Mark Prensky calls “digital wisdom“) enter the school and assume adult roles, the type of support they will need may change radically from that tech departments currently provide to its largely digital immigrant adult population.
   • In one sense, the goal of any IT support team is to put itself out of business by creating fail-safe systems and educating its users to be to have the knowledge and confidence to be able to solve their own technical problems. However, there will, always be new, immature technologies that are not very fault tolerant and for which the knowledge base is limited. This suggests that there will be an ongoing need for people within an organization to be leading the exploration of new technologies and working with colleagues to determine if and how the technologies might benefit the school. But it does not necessarily mean that these people needs to be a member of a technology “department.” Other adults – or students – within the community might also fill such a role if given the proper support and time.
2. More self-service support options, intelligent help systems, and self-healing computer systems.
   • We bank online, do our taxes online, buy products online, search for houses online, and enroll for school online. When we need help, we’re directed to online services or elaborate menus of automated help within the phone system. Organizations are doing all that they can to make their customers and clients self-serving, in the positive sense of the phrase. Computers can suggest various actions (”It appears as if you’re making a list. Would you like to use the List Manager function?”–Microsoft Excel.) Enterprise level computer systems are “self-healing.” They recognize when something is wrong and apply sophisticated logic rules to diagnose the problem and attempt to fix it. They can even ask for human intervention when the problem requires such help. (”I feel better now, I really do.”)
3. Advances in wireless networking.
   • The trend towards more wireless networking is irrefutable and inexorable. At the present, most wireless infrastructure is really a hybrid of wireless and wired devices. For example, wireless access points are usually plugged into an Ethernet cable. The need for faster Internet speeds at the backbone level is so great that it is unlikely that wireless speeds will approach the necessary throughput to completely supplant wired infrastructure. Therefore, the need for schools to maintain both wired and wireless systems will remain with us for at least the next decade. However, the need for in-house expertise to maintain this hybrid network is open to debate. More and more organizations are outsourcing such support. As networks become more reliable, administrators can securely login from anywhere in the world to make changes to servers, switches, and routers. Support organizations can dispatch technicians to the site as necessary when remote connections are insufficient to solve a problem.
4. Changing models of professional development.
   • The mechanisms available for ongoing professional development will expand in 21st century schools. Distance learning opportunities will blend with on-site training. The need for face-to-face collaborative work with colleagues will continue, though face-to-face may be in virtual space as well as physical space. Time and distance lose relevancy. The digitally wise flourish, while the digitally impaired lag.
5. Less hierarchy and more positive chaos.
   • Schools in the 21st century will be less hierarchical and more organically managed in the past. But as progressive educator A.S. Neil wrote about his Summerhill school some forty year ago, freedom does not equate to license. Software standards and protocols provide one level of organization on technology, but other factors must play a role as well. Large scale experimentation for its own sake can be costly, in time if not money. There is a necessary tension between planned development and serendipitous development. The need for transparent, coordinated technology planning will remain and must be accounted for in 21st century schools.
6. A greater focus on environmental sustainability.
   • Technology is a large consumer of the Earth’s resources–including the manufacture, use, and disposal of products. Technology programs in the 21st century school should play an important role in helping a school lower its carbon footprint. Aside from technology as a source of carbon emissions, technology also plays an important role n the mitigation of carbon emissions by offering less carbon intensive alternatives to knowledge production and distribution, monitoring and increasing energy efficiency, eliminating or reducing the need for travel through distance learning and conferencing, and forming the core of smart buildings and vehicles.
   • Where will the responsibility for environmental stewardship fall in the 21st century school? In one respect it will fall to all members of the community and, in time, will become so embedded in the culture and practices of the school that such distributed responsibility can be assumed. But until then, there will need to be at the very least a core group or individual within the school tasked to help with this transition. There are several logical places for such a position in most school’s current hierarchy: business operations, buildings and grounds, or environmental science. Technologists will be players, but they probably will not be the drivers.
7. Changes in financial forecasting, controls, and new revenue streams.
   • Tightly related to technology planning and environmental sustainability is financial forecasting and controls. New technologies always have financial implications. And fortunately, most environmental sustainability initiatives, at lease in the long term, yield financial benefits to the school.
   • It it clear that expertise will be required within schools to help forecast technology expenditures based on the academic and operational needs of the school, ongoing maintenance of critical business systems, and industry best practices. It is also clear that schools must contain technology costs just as they do all other costs. Independent schools, not so independent when it comes to their over-reliance on tuition payments as their major revenue source, cannot continue to increase tuition at a rate that outpaces inflation.
   • A new responsibility for 21st century school tech personnel may very well be that of revenue production, or at the very least, cost recovery. As technology becomes more embedded in the daily lives of children, the need for schools to provide basic technology equipment to students will abate. Students will be expected to provide their own computing devices, much as they provide their own pencils, notebooks, and calculators today. Other items that have been taken for granted as free services to students may also go by the wayside such as consumable supplies for printing or the loan of digital  cameras. Students who want to print may have to pay for the privilege to do so. Need a camera? Use the one in your smart-phone or rent one from the school.
   • It’s not inconceivable that students could enter into contracts with the school for on-site technical support, or choose to provide their own technical support or go to a third-party. Perhaps enterprising students might even set up their own businesses to provide support to one another. Schools may barter with one another for services, trading the expertise they have in web development for advanced networking expertise they lack in-house. Faculty and staff with expertise in certain software or hardware may staff workshops offered by the school both on-campus and over the Internet. Virtual learning centers may become important revenue centers for entrepreneurial schools willing to share their faculty with others, particularly in niche courses where one school may not be able to support a full faculty position with its own enrollment alone. Such distance learning opportunities will require high bandwidth with redundant Internet connections to assure the best experience for remote learners.

These are but a few possible scenarios for the role of the 21st century school technologist. I welcome your comments and wisdom to help us collectively imagine and shape the future.

The Obama administration is encouraging the congress to invest in “shovel ready” infrastructure projects as a means to spur economic recovery and put people to work.

For many environmentalists, the idea of infrastructure makes them nervous when it means more roads, bridges, and airports. When infrastructure means high speed rail or other mass transit, environmentally friendly investment, environmentalists often sing a different tune.

Infrastructure, for most people, is not a very sexy subject to think about or to invest in. It’s something where the expression “out of sight, out of mind” is spot on! And unless you’re a mole, nothing is more out of sight that things underground.

This is why I found the video below, referenced in an email from our local water company and produced by Penn State’s Public Broadcasting group to be both interesting and timely.

Like most Americans, perhaps all Americans including our leaders, I don’t understand the economic mess we’re in or how to get us out of it. But I do understand that all the leading economists are saying the we need to get consumers spending again; that consumption is the key to getting our economy back on track, our workers working, retailers retailing, idled factories factoring, and Detroit producing crummy (sorry, better) cars again.

Our capitalist economy is built on the assumption of constantly expanding markets, creating demand where there was none, tapping into unserved markets (China, anyone?), getting kid version of adult products and adult versions of kid products, ad infinitum.

Does anyone really think this model is infinitely sustainable? Surely the smartest people in the room, including the Oval Office, have read the same research as I that suggests bringing the entire population of the earth to a “Western” standard of living will require several times the amount of resources currently available on our planet.

In the long run, the very basis of our economy may need to shift from consumption as the cornerstone of growth to sustainability. Products with the longest shelf life, the longest mean-time-between-failures, and the longest planned obsolescence cycles will be the ones that win in the market.

Meanwhile, getting us to spend, spend, spend seems a bit like fiddling while Rome burns and the ice melts.

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.