Mindful Rants of an Academic CIO

As someone who had a truly rotten experience with my personal academic journey, it is somewhat ironic that I am back in education as a career. As I tell people, I know firsthand why it's important to revisit what and how we teach students in order to prepare them for the real world.

I've worked at a post-grad level (medical education), post-secondary level, and now am working at a secondary school. Each reflects a stage of life in the student where unique skills, competencies and knowledge are required.  I may be alone in this opinion, but I don't believe that we (as as society) are providing the best educational experience for our kids to prepare them for the world we are launching them into.

There are shining examples of teachers and schools that are working hard at making a difference and using technology innovatively, but the impact of the change is severely limited in that only a minority of students benefit from this innovation.  In many cases these teachers are islands of innovation, in a school, or school board that is structured to support education the way we've always done it.

If we are going to create an educational system that produce graduates that truly impact the world we live in, then we have to revisit both what is taught, and the way it is delivered.

They way we do things at Appleby College is unique to our sector, and is more like a progressive university than a high school. 

The largest advantage I have that allows the type of results we are seeing is a leadership team that focuses on the desired outcomes (skills, literacies, competencies) of our students on graduation. All the rest of the stuff we do is about achieving these goals.

This is the part that is sadly missing in many institutions... There is not a cohesive understanding of the reason they exist. As a result, there is too much focus on tablets, technology, and general busyness. (Never, ever confuse motion with progress.)  Handing a student a new tablet produces a great photo-op, but 6 months down the line, can you measure how that tablet has improved their learning? 

Much of the busyness that is required to run a school is highly mission critical, but doesn't differentiate the school from others. As such, partnerships with external organizations (Cloud based service, software, management systems and infrastructure providers) are crucial tools in the arsenal of today's academic CIOs. They need to be channeling resources to leverage IT to advance the mission of the school, or open up new opportunities. They have to think much differently than they have in the past.

R. Buckminster Fuller said "Never expect people to do the right thing. What you have to do is make the right thing, the easiest thing to do."

When you apply this to education - secondary and post secondary (and everything that comes with it), you will see why this is a strategy that makes sense. No-one can provide resistance like a tenured professor, or a higher-ed CFO who focuses on cost containment.

There have been oodles of cash flushed down the toilet on technology projects, and frankly, CIOs have lost much credibility, because the promised results are never delivered.

Mandating teachers and administrators to use new systems is another opportunity for failure. Too many IT departments seem to run under the mantra - "If you build it, they will come."  Their mantra should really be - "Find a need, and fill it." When IT systems actually help teachers do their craft better, the teachers will use it.

When we rolled out our Microsoft OneNote class notebooks at our school, we had an over 80% voluntary adoption by faculty in the first month.  Today all faculty (and administrators) are using the tool, and it has fundamentally shifted many of the dynamics in the classroom.

On a side note, this wasn't a generic OneNote shared notebook.  My team built a wrapper around it to do the things you see in this short video. (MS OneNote at Appleby College )