Mal Lee
The cover article in this month’s Educational Technology Solutions is one by me that contends all schools have to go digital to remain viable.
A copy of that article is attached or can be got from the Educational Technology Solutions website.
Interestingly in presenting to three groups of school leaders in the past two weeks no one has questioned the suggestion.
Rather the immediate focus has been what does our school have to do.
Roger Broadie, Martin Levins and Mal Lee have created a new a new forum – using Google groups – for those globally interested in advancing, researching and analysing the digital evolution and transformation of schooling.
We are looking at
It is appreciated there are many excellent forums that examine the use of digital technologies in schooling. There is no desire to replicate them.
The focus of most is however the micro usage of the digital technology within existing school structures and operational parameters.
Few, if any, address the digital evolution or transformation of schooling or its parallels with the evolution and transformation of other digital organisations.
Indeed there is in 2015 remarkably few forums supporting individual schools and their leaders undergo the desired digital evolution and transformation.
This new group will focus on the macro impact of the digital on the changing nature of schooling, on schools as complex adaptive systems, ever evolving, ever transforming, creating increasingly integrated and networked digital ecosystems that address the 24/7/365 holistic education of each child.
The desire is to use the collective wisdom of the forum get a better appreciation of the on-going impact of the digital revolution on schooling.
The desire is also to use a global platform like Google groups that allows for the in-depth discussion of an increasing complex scenario where our understanding of the new is limited.
The group is open to all interested, anywhere in the networked world that are playing a lead role – at any level – in the digital evolution and transformation of school ecosystems.
If you or a colleague would like to receive an invitation to join email Mal Lee – mallee@icloud.com or Martin Levins – mlevins@as.edu.au or Roger Broadie – roger@broadieassociates.co.uk.
Alternatively you can post to this group, send email to digital-evolution-of-schooling@googlegroups.com
The MIT Sloan Management Review in – its 2015 research report – on ‘Strategy not Technology Drives Digital Transformation’ is well worth downloading and analysing.
Go to – http://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/strategy-drives-digital-transformation/
While drawing on the developments within industry it is highly applicable to the digital evolution and transformation of schools.
Mal Lee
Broulee Public School (Australia), one of those as yet rare cadre of pathfinder schools that have normalised the whole school use of the digital and created a 24/7/365 digital school ecosystem, is playing a central role in a new model of system wide school development that is being implemented by New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education and Communities.
The Department in conjunction with Broulee Public School is implementing a ‘hub and spoke networking model’ to foster the movement of the state schools in the Far South Coast Network of NSW to a digital operational base.
Supported by funding through the Department’s Rural and Remote Blueprint the model recognises the very different position of schools on the digital evolutionary continuum, the importance of each school, primary and secondary, taking charge of its own growth and the amount schools can learn in a very practical way from the experiences of their colleagues in pathfinder schools.
In the same way that teachers network with and learn from their colleagues globally so the idea is that the Network’s schools can learn from the school at the centre of the hub and like the spokes of the bike the ideas will radiate out to others. While the initial moves are being made in the Far South Coast Network the thinking is very much that the model could be used elsewhere in the State, and in particular within the regional areas.
The impetus is being provided by the hub school, Broulee PS conducting an initial conference for departmental schools on Building Digital Schools on August 13/14 2015. The aim is to have the school, its leadership, teachers and community share with their colleagues, primary and secondary, the factors that they have addressed in the school’s digital evolution and what they are now able to do within an ever evolving, constantly transforming digital ecosystem.
The hub school is not saying it has any magic solution, but rather it will share the many lessons learned in the school’s 15 years plus digital evolution journey.
If you are NSW Department of Education and Communities school and would like to attend I’d suggest getting in early as there is only limited places.
Significantly this school – system initiative has emerged out of the NSW Minister of Education’s policy of ‘Local Schools, Local Decisions’ that gives NSW public schools – like others globally – the facility take control of their own future. It is a very good example of how the policy enables school initiatives to be coupled those of the education authority to create greater synergy.
One of the things largely absent from the digital evolution of schooling literature is how best to get all the other schools in an education authority to normalise the use of the digital in the educative process. The traditional top down, one size fits all has no place in a world where schools have the autonomy and indeed responsibility to shape their own growth and where the differences between schools on the digital evolution continuum is widening daily.
The hub and spoke networking model appears to tick all the right boxes and thus it will be interesting to watch how this New South Wales’ approach impacts.
Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) is critical in the digital evolution of schools, when normalising whole school use of the digital, and when shaping digitally-based school ecosystems.
Ideally, young people should be trusted in the classroom to use the digital technologies they are already using in the ‘real world’ to enhance their learning.
While the young, parents and, invariably teachers have normalised the use of the digital outside the school walls and have expectations of the digital, few schools globally have normalised its use and are yet to reap the myriad opportunities and benefits.
The reason is simple: it is very hard to do so. It requires each school to move from its traditional paper based operational mode, culture and mindset to a mode that is digitally based, where the mindset is digital and the school culture actively supports change, risk taking and on-going organisational evolution and transformation.
The move to BYOT is fundamental to creating the ecosystem that enables that to happen.
It is reality few as yet appreciate.
To read the full article go to – http://teacher.acer.edu.au/article/the-importance-of-byot
The 2015 edition of the Taxonomy of School Evolutionary Stages is now available for free download from the Taxonomy sub-section of this site
This edition updates the attributes displayed by schools operating at the Digital Normalisation evolutionary stage.
While the digital evolution and transformation of all manner of businesses is literally discussed daily in both the media and the management literature (http://www.scoop.it/t/digitalevolutionofschooling) the fact that schooling globally is undergoing the same kind of organisational evolution and transformation remains largely unseen by most schools and educational administrators, as too are the profound implications that flow from the phenomenon.
So too is the understanding that once schools, like all organisations begin their movement to a digital operational base the schools will evolve in a remarkably common manner globally, demonstrating at each evolutionary stage numerous similar attributes.
It is as if schools are unique organisations somehow immune to the impact of the digital revolution and will forever remain ensconced in their paper based world.
Nothing could be further from today’s reality.
Schools globally are at different points on the school evolutionary stages continuum, with the pathfinder schools that have normalised the use of the digital evolving and transforming their operations at an accelerating rate.
Using the 2015 edition of the Taxonomy you can quickly identify your school’s evolutionary stage and the likely path ahead.
Feel free to download the latest version, and suggest other colleagues make use of this simple international measure.
Mal Lee has written for ACER’s online Teacher magazine in a series of brief research papers on the digital evolution of schooling. They include:
Mal Lee
The role, purpose and importance of the school website is changing at pace in those schools globally that have moved to a digital operational base, are on track to normalise the use of the digital throughout and which are rapidly creating their own, unique, tightly integrated digital ecosystem.
The digital evolution that is transforming every facet of these schools is profoundly impacting those school’s websites, moving the website from its traditional peripheral position to being core and critical to the school’s everyday operations, its teaching, growth, evolution and enhanced performance and productivity.
The time has come when all schools and education authorities need to recognise that change, and the profound implications that flow at both the school and education authority level.
Moreover they would be as well to grasp the critical reality that with society normalising the everyday use of the digital, digital transformation and the movement of the digital schools away from the loosely coupled, segmented, almost silo like, organisation to a form that is evermore tightly integrated the part played by the school website fundamentally changes, both in nature and standing.
In the traditional highly segmented, insular paper based school the website has been viewed as but one of the many largely discrete parts of the school, largely peripheral to the everyday teaching. In many instances it has been window dressing, sometimes very high quality window dressing but in the main it has done little to enhance the pedagogy or student learning.
Crucially the online experience has been viewed as separate from and lesser than the physical.
In marked contrast within digitally based schools an apposite, dynamic, ever evolving, working website is central to virtually every operation, including the school’s 24/7/365 teaching.
Indeed without that website schools cannot create their desired digital ecosystem and successfully realise their shaping educational and digital vision.
Try and imagine how organisations like Apple, Amazon, News Ltd or the Tax Office could operate without their websites and you’ll begin to appreciate how critical they are to the workings and growth of digitally based schools.
That fundamental difference needs to be understood and the discussions begun at the school and system level on what is required to move forward.
As Westerman and his colleagues observe (Westerman et al, 2014) societies that have normalised the use of the digital no longer differentiate between the online and physical experience.
If, as some appear to be doing, the school wants to remain as a traditional paper based, silo like organisation focussed on readying its students for paper based external examinations those discussions on the website are not needed.
If however your school’s desire is normalise the use of the digital and create an ever evolving digital school ecosystem that will educate each child for today you do need to have the conversation and decide what is to be done.
Interestingly ask any school leader or educational administrator why an apposite website is critical to the successful whole school embrace of BYOT or the evolution of the school’s ecosystem and it is likely only a handful could tell you why.
Moreover ask a software house to create a website for a digital school and it is likely even the best and more prescient will still prepare a polished offering for the traditional mode of schooling.
The desire with this article is begin remedying those shortcomings and to highlight the core, multifaceted role of the school website – and its associated digital communications suite – in the digital transformation and evolution of schooling.
The Traditional Website
For the last 15-20 years the school website has been largely peripheral to the school’s everyday workings and in particular its teaching. It has been primarily a static source of information, a marketing tool and possibly a gateway to the inner, seemingly secret teaching of the school that necessitated password entry. The closed classroom door was retained when the school went online. In many education authorities globally the websites have been ‘cookie’ cut’ with their operations tightly controlled by the central office bureaucrats and the external ICT experts. The schools were invariably given little say in their form even at a time when schools were being given greater decision making and obliged to shape their own growth. Even today at least one Australian education authority still prohibits schools having their own website, while other authorities and their ICT controllers continue to micro manage the nature and workings of the ‘school’s’ site.
Invariably within the school an individual has had responsibility for maintaining the school site, ensuring it was not ‘spoilt’ by other staff, although that said one will find schools where the different operational units, like the library or student support services, also operate their own website, separate to that of the school.
In many schools, particularly the independent the site is maintained by the school’s public relations/marketing unit, ensuring the desired image, with the apposite Pepsodent smiles is always to the fore.
Do a quick scan of a cross section of school websites, primary and secondary, state and independent – including the award winners – and you’ll likely find most are still primarily sources of information, some very polished, some very dated. Undertake a Google search of the ‘purpose’ or ‘importance’ of school websites and you’ll find even the more reasoned such that by University of Florida – http://fcit.usf.edu/websites/chap1/chap1.htm– still underscore the largely peripheral, information providing role.
The choice of the award winning sites appears to have far more to do with looks, design finesse and interactivity than functionality and how the facility contributes to the realisation of the school’s shaping educational and digital vision.
Significantly most will also be closely ‘guarded’ sites with community access to any teaching materials invariably restricted by password.
Emergence of the ‘working’ website
From the mid 2000’s as the first of the schools globally moved to a digital operational base and began their digital evolution one has seen in all those schools the on-going transformation and evolution of the school’s website, that as indicated by Lee (2013) mirrored the school’s evolutionary path, and which saw its shift from a peripheral to a core role.
The website, like those in all other digitally based organisations, plays a central, multi-faceted role, assisting enhance the school’s culture and ecosystem, furthering the school’s growth and evolution, enabling the school to interface with the networked world, being used integrally in every facet of the schools’ 24/7/365 teaching, the integration of all school operations, educational and administrative and the on-going enhancement of the school’s efficiency, effectiveness and productivity.
The website increasingly became the interface for the school’s community and a medium that facilitated the integration of all the school’s operations in and outside the school walls.
In contrast to the largely constant peripheral offerings these are dynamic working sites that are being updated and added to virtually every minute of the day by all within the school’s community, be they the children, the teachers, the parents or community members.
The focus is very much on the work to be done, educational and administrative and using the site – and the associated digital services – to do that work as expeditiously, simply, effectively and productively as possible, and where apposite to have the technology simultaneously perform multiple roles and to automate the tasks at hand.
While rightly concerned to project a professional image these are 24/7 /365 worksites where sections might at any times appear as messy as the physical classroom. If that is so, so be it.
Look for example at the websites of The Gulf Harbour School (NZ) – http://www.gulfharbour.school.nz – or that of Broulee Public School at – http://www.brouleepublicschool.nsw.edu.au – and you’ll soon appreciate what is meant by ‘working’ websites. These sites, like those in the other schools that have normalised the use of the digital, employ a template service that makes it easy for all the teachers and students and indeed interested parents and community members to publish to the site. Long gone is the sole publisher controlling all uploads, but not a quality controller astutely ensuring unnecessary mess is removed.
They are moreover multi-purpose entities where the website provides seamless access to a plethora of online facilities and services, removing the divide between the school’s physical and online offerings. While reference has been made to the ‘website’ that is partly a misnomer because as apparent in both the above mentioned sites there are links to an ever evolving digital communications suite that includes such diverse services as an emailed school communiqué, an online survey facility, advice on new teaching programs or resources, the online advisement of student absence, Twitter, Facebook and the facility to instantly inform parents of a critical incident, like a death. Indeed as a colleague has suggested it might be opportune to find another term to describe the role played by the website in a digital school.
The sites are modular in nature with the schools using a mix of free and leased online services, able to quickly discard superseded ‘modules’ and replace them with a new more apposite ‘module’.
Critically both these sites are open for anyone to view. The parents, grandparents miles away, interested educators, education authorities or prospective parents all have open access to the day’s teaching, being able to readily view and if they wish comment upon the work. Yes the schools have had to do their homework and have permission to reveal the children and the work but that is just part of operating within a digital and networked world, collaborating with one’s community.
The closed doors are opened and the teachers and children can with pride reveal the work done.
Simultaneously, and without any extra effort by the teachers or students the school are using the website – through the medium of the likes of blogs and wikis – to enhance the teaching and learning, to daily enhance the school’s ecology, to collaborate with and inform the student’s homes, to account for the school’s work, to receive instant and continual feedback and vitally to automatically promote the school.
Of note is the number of parents globally who now make their choice of school after scrutinising the open working websites of the digital pathfinders; Net Generation parents who can explore the natural workings of the school without the PR spin and experience first hand the unique digital ecosystem the school has created. Going is the need for the specialist Web/PR unit.
They very much appreciate the school website provides an invaluable actual the insight into the school’s thinking, aspirations and daily workings that can not be replicated by even the best marketers.
The website affirms by virtue of its intimate ties with the school’s total operations, that the school and its teachers are working within a higher order tightly integrated digital ecology that is simultaneously addresses the many variables that enhance student learning.
Conclusion
This type of school ecology and culture, and the use of a website that will further its growth takes, as the many previous articles underscore, years of astute concerted effort to create.
That said if you want your school to create that unique, ever evolving, digitally based ever higher order ecosystem your school too will need to build into your planning from the outset the creation of the apposite website and complementary digital communications suite.
The Changing Role and Purpose of the School Website
Bibliography
Mal Lee
The difference between schools continues to grow as evermore schools build on their digital operational base and evolve at an accelerating pace. In adopting an increasingly integrated, evermore complex and higher order ecosystem and organisational culture and by positioning themselves for sustained evolution these schools are increasingly providing a fundamentally different schooling to their relatively simple lower order paper based counterparts.
As yet largely unseen and unheralded by the education community these early adopter schools are experiencing the same kind of whole digital organisational transformation as all other ‘industries’. However where industry is daily receiving major scrutiny globally with the implications well understood the evolution in schooling receives scant mention. Rather most governments, educators and the education media focus on tinkering with a dated paper based mode of schooling from which the pathfinder schools have long moved, doing little to assist or encourage to schools ready themselves for the digital world.
In researching the revised edition of Bring Your Own Technology (Lee and Levins, 2012) and examining the evolutionary journeys of the original case study schools over the last three years what impressed was the rapid and indeed accelerating evolution and transformation that had occurred in those years in the well led schools, the whole of school community nature, the total school transformation and the maturing in all of a digitally based ecosystem that facilitates those schools sustained evolution and transformation.
The contrast with the traditional paper based, loosely coupled mode of schooling ensconced in their traditional ways was profound and on track to become more so.
Where in 2012 Martin and I anticipated an accelerating rate of evolution we had not anticipated the speed of the evolution, the schools and in particular the teachers’ embracement of rapid change or how well the schools had positioned themselves for on-going rapid transformation and enhancement.
The case study schools had smashed the long held belief that teachers won’t embrace change.
One of the principals interviewed observed on the accelerating rate of transformation and the increasing difference between schools that even I did not grasp the extent. That is likely to be a fair call on an observer undertaking but a three year snap shot.
That acknowledged, what can safely be said it is now clear is that the new norm with schooling globally will be the accelerating differences between schools, and the mode of schooling each provides.
The implications of this development for all associated with schooling, be it government, parents, students, educators, educational administrators, the media commentators or educational researchers are profound, and oblige all to view schools with a different mindset.
Usually unwittingly schools have long been perceived to be basically the same and to be largely immutable and constant in form. ‘One size fits all’ solutions are still common and research done in the one school is purported to be applicable in every other.
With digital transformation the sameness, constancy and the continuity of the paper based school disappears.
Lee and Broadie (2014) document the differences in their Taxonomy of School Evolutionary Stages, but the evidence exists everywhere for all to see.
Look nearby and you’ll likely observe schools that range on the evolutionary continuum from the traditional paper based operations that still specify what kind of pencil to buy and exercise books to cover, to those which make extensive use of the digital, but don’t trust the students to choose the ‘right’, believing only the ‘ICT experts’ know best through to those that not only trust the children from the early childhood years to use the suite of digital technologies they use 24/7/365 but are desirous of distributing the control of the teaching and learning, of genuinely collaborating with their parents and building upon the children’s out of school learning and everyday use of their digital technologies.
Where one saw in the pathfinder schools teachers who were empowered professionals, encouraged to lead and to take risks and who as a staff had seized that opportunity and were flying, in schools nearby the teachers were still micro managed, discouraged from taking any risks and obliged to continue doing what they had for the past 30-40 years one could but conclude the school differences would grow.
The cultures, the ecosystems of the above schools are fundamentally different.
Contrast the distinguishing attributes in the table below of the traditional school and those digitally based schools providing a 24/7/365 mode of schooling and you’ll note they are already antithetical in many ways.
The same kind of organizational difference can be found in the corporate world – although perhaps not to the same extent – between the ecosystems of the digital masters and those of the companies slower to transform digitally.
Indeed schooling can benefit – as indicated in the previous post – from the growing body of research (Westerman, et al, 2014) (Solis, et al, 2014) undertaken on the digital transformation of industry, understanding that the attributes that distinguish the ‘digital masters’ in the corporate world are evident – albeit on a much smaller scale – within the digital masters in schooling and go a long why to explaining why the pathfinder schools are evolving at such pace.
Most of those attributes have been examined in depth in earlier posts and thus most don’t need to be elaborated upon, but several do warrant particular comment.
Critical to the creation of ever evolving school ecosystems was
It has been long understood that when one creates an organizational culture that encourages all the staff ‘to fly’ and to fly high, and actively supports and recognises the flight the organisation will evolve at pace (Deal and Kennedy, 1982).
That is what is happening in well led, digitally based schools.
It is a development that will see those schools evolve even faster and adopt an ever higher form, further differentiating them from those still working in their paper based operational mode and mindset.
Mal Lee and Roger Broadie
Schools increasingly will need to work, nay thrive with the seeming paradox of accommodating seeming operational chaos at the same time as the on-going quest for order.
Tom Peter’s famously wrote Thriving on Chaos for the business world in 1987.
25 plus years on much of that advice is now apt for schools operating on a digital base and evolving at pace.
Couple that advice with the understanding provided by complexity science on the nature of organisational evolution and you’ll appreciate why in time all schools and their staff will work in what seems at first glance a paradoxical situation.
The pathfinder schools are unwittingly learning the art of thriving on chaos where daily they are contending with what to do with inadequate old practises, the promise of the new, the messiness, uncertainty and at times the seeming chaos associated with the substituting the old for the new and the order that comes with astute adoption and normalised use of more apposite approaches. What we found in all the pathfinder schools, in all four nations was a palpable excitement, student pleasure, and the very noticeable professional satisfaction of the staff.
On-going change and evolution that was orchestrated from within the school was increasingly accepted as the norm. Staff, the students and the parents appeared remarkably accepting of the on-going evolution. It was quite remarkable how quickly time honoured practises disappeared and new practises became normalised and accepted.
The new, but very pleasant challenge for the school leaders in the pathfinders was the need at times to apply the brakes on the rate of the school’s evolutionary transformation and to ensure highly committed and excited teachers didn’t over extend themselves and ‘burn out’. As indicated in the evolutionary stage attributes school leaders needed increasingly to monitor the work of highly committed staff, to identify how each expressed stress and to employ appropriate ‘welfare’ measures.
The contrast with the constancy and order in many of the paper based schools where change, internal and external, is frowned upon, many teachers have ‘switched off’ and where a sizeable proportion of the students find the teaching irrelevant and boring is pronounced.
Tellingly while as indicated in the earlier post on complexity science the digital schools constantly seek order in most of what they do they are simultaneously excited about taking advantage of the educational opportunities being opened. They appear to be very willing to move into unchartered territory if they believe it will assist enhance the student learning, knowing full well mistakes might be made and alternatives might have to be pursued. Moreover they seemingly better understand the macro scene, the increasingly interrelatedness of all school operations and the importance of ensuring the ever evolving school ecology provided the desired education.
The key in all the pathfinders was the existence of a culture, a school ecology that supported change and on-going evolution, which valued leadership at multiple levels and teachers taking risks and trying the new, with the concomitant implications.
While highly unlikely to be versed in the workings of complexity science the schools and their staff appear to be very comfortable working with the seeming paradox of chaos and order.
Peters, T (1987) Thriving on Chaos NY Alfred A Knopf