TechAccpetancePresentation

The Conative Domain

Teachers teach. What exactly they should teach, what they actually do teach, and the degree of consensus about what they teach and the degree to which they are doing it are very contentious issues today. Most would agree some of the curriculum belongs in the Most educational practitioners are content if students demonstrate new learning Read More

TechAccpetancePresentation

Yeah… All Curriculum… It’s Political

Educators know there is no possibility that education can be politically neutral. Sure, we generally avoid taking an explicit side in any election—in one’s role as a public school educator, they cannot even advocate for passing the local school budget. All knowledge is, however, useful in either supporting or rejecting a conclusion; all decisions can Read More

TechAccpetancePresentation

#edtech for #edleaders: End of Life

Several factors make it impossible for commercial software developers to update operating systems and applications indefinitely. Even open-source operating systems and applications that are developed by communities of programmers rather than businesses are usually retired. When software is retired, the publishers no longer release security updates. At that point, responsible IT professionals will upgrade the Read More

TechAccpetancePresentation

Research. Practice. And the Gap Between the Two.

In education (as in other fields) we hear leaders who proclaim they are “data-driven” and they “use evidence.” Despite this, there tends to be agreement within the education research community and within the practitioner community that research is not a factor that affects decisions I the manner we would all hope. (In New England the Read More

TechAccpetancePresentation

On Collaboration in Decision making

To minimize the threats of incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the work done by others, effective IT decision-making in schools requires the collaboration of individuals who approach them from very different perspectives, and it is unusual to find single individuals who have expertise in more than one of these perspectives. When designing and redesigning IT Read More

TechAccpetancePresentation

Ethics are Active

Stephanie Moore and Heather Tillberg-Webb’s Ethics and Educational Technology: Reflection, Interrogation, and Design as a Framework for Practice by Stephanie L. Moore and Heather K. Tillberg-Webb (9780415895088) continues to deliver on the promise summarized on the cover. Ethics, we have seen, should be approached from a design perspective. As designers, we are encouraged to be Read More

TechAccpetancePresentation

School Users of IT

Compared to IT users in business, school populations are different. They bring different skills to the IT they use, they need more flexibility more often than business users, and their needs change over time (only to return to the original need). These characteristics arise from the facts that students have emerging literacies; it is not Read More

TechAccpetancePresentation

Elevator Pitch: Firewalls

Even before computer viruses and network security became a concern, the idea of a firewall was familiar. We construct them to prevent certain unwanted “things” from passing through. The firewall in your car prevents an engine fire from passing into the passenger compartment. In IT systems, firewalls enhance network security by ensuring only certain types Read More