Education Innovation
In Kevin Pashuk’s post Why Your School Needs a Sandbox, the CIO argues that creating a sandbox reinforced education innovation and creates a mechanism for executing experiments that people want to try, and that the academic administration thinks might be successful.
The model is a good one. I think what is more important than the sandbox in this article, is the idea that workloads were shifted to permit regular time for professional development and technology training. Rather than, as most schools do, trying to shove professional development into a small window, or scatter it among many open windows. Pashuk and his team did a very smart thing: they created a new window.
Read the entire post in the link above.
Daniel,
Thanks for highlighting the sandbox post. I just noticed it now when I saw a link in my stats.
We’ve gone one step further than creating the sandbox, we’ve actually created a full time position where the individual has a strong understanding of the process of learning, and works with both the technology team and the faculty to work on ways to improve adoption and utilization of educational technology.
My ponderings on this are captured in this blog post: http://turningtechinvisible.blogspot.com/2011/11/missing-link-in-educational-technology.html
The results have been significant.
We have captured some of the results in a whitepaper posted on both my blog and under the “Hot Topics” section of Microsoft’s Partners in Learning site: http://turningtechinvisible.blogspot.com/2013/02/peering-inside-black-box-of-learning.html
Kevin