Before we proceed in this chapter, we must decide if a specific leadership behavior is needed to effectively lead technology in our schools. More importantly, should we suggest that there is something uniquely different about leadership in the broad sense than leadership for such a specialized teaching and learning component as technology?

There is an abundance of empirical evidence that relates the leadership of the principal to a school’s effectiveness (Fullan 2001; Fullan & Stiegelbaure, 1991; Hallinger & Heck, 1996, 1998; Leithwood & Riehl, 2003; Louis, 1994). The most recent and most exhaustive literature review and empirical study related to school technology leadership is the seminal work of Anderson and Dexter (2005), who conclude all the literature on leadership and technology “acknowledges either explicitly or implicitly that school leaders should provide administrative oversight for educational technology” (p. 51). They admit however, that most of the literature tends to be narrow in identifying specifically what the knowledge and skill sets are that define technology leadership. The obvious skills mentioned include (1) principals should learn how to operate technology and use it; (2) principals should ensure that other staff in the building receive learning opportunities; (3) principals should have a vision for the role of educational technology in school; and (4) principals should assess and evaluate the role of academic and administrative uses of technology and make decisions from those data.

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE, 2002) include the perhaps most recent set of suggestions in the literature about what school principals should do as leaders of technology in schools. The National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS-A, 2009) are integrated into the ISTE standards and are grouped into five specific areas:

The following questions are addressed in this chapter:

Some (including this author) might argue that perhaps technology leadership as practiced by today’s principal is outdated unless it helps faculty and students to address the great challenges presented by technology in our schools. Much of what we see happening in schools (along with the literature just presented) focuses on the management of technology. Our principal preparation programs, mine included, cover technology leadership lightly if at all, and rarely extend beyond the most basic skills (i.e., word processing, spreadsheets, and database use). A theme of this chapter is that effective technology leadership has more to do with teaching pedagogy and human relations and much less to do with technology itself.

A principal’s mission must now include designing and implementing new strategies to help teachers and students recognize, understand, and integrate technology with teaching and learning in the classroom. The mere presence of hardware and software in the classroom does not assure meaningful learning for students. We are beyond the point of deciding whether or not we will accept technology in our schools. The crucial task at hand is to decide how to implement this technology effectively into instruction.

As early as 2000, Avolio discussed the relationship between leadership and technology and suggested that leaders must play a more proactive role in implementing technology, and more specifically, interface the human and information technology components. Many point to the problem of overemphasis of the technological aspect at the exclusion of the human resource function. Avolio warned of the creation of “information junkyards” (p. 4). The essence of technology leadership is to produce a change in attitudes, feelings, thinking, behavior, and performance with individuals.

To carry off this improvement in technology leadership, principals must be willing to alter existing leadership practices evidenced in most schools; and they must also be open to the probability of participating in a transformation of traditional leadership skills, knowledge, and habits of mind.

Today’s rapidly changing environment requires the technology leader to become involved in discovering, evaluating, installing, and operating new technologies of all kinds, while keeping teaching and student learning as the guide and driving force behind it all. Vaill (1998) issued an accompanying caution: “The technologies the organization employs entail learning time to exploit their productive and economic potential” (p. 45). If schools are constantly “upgrading” their technologies, they may never reach a productive flow of instruction, a flow on which effective teaching and learning are based.

Many schools have state-of-the-art hardware, computer labs, and other technology peripherals, but are using them in ways that will do little to enhance student learning in rigorous and challenging ways. Technology leadership means much more than simply purchasing and implementing programs “stuffed” with fancy hardware and software. To really influence reform in schools, principals as technology leaders must stay focused on the individual needs of teachers and students, rather than race to adopt the “flavor of the month” program. Clearly, schools do not have a very good track record in sustaining significant change. The school technology leader is in the position to make sound instructional decisions regarding technology and program implementation. It is my hope this chapter will help answer the “how” associated with such a daunting task.

The term originates in the business world and can be simply defined as “translating ideas into actions.” More specifically, Gunther and McMillian (2000) help us focus in on the concept: Entrepreneurial leaders pursue only the best opportunities and avoid exhausting themselves and their organizations by chasing after every option. They passionately seek new opportunities always looking for the chance to profit from change and disruption (p. 3).

This new breed of leader seems to always seek original ways of doing things with little concern for how difficult they may be or whether the resources are available. They are willing to “disrupt the status quo” (Grogan & Donaldson, p. 22) and have the ability to hold several opposing thoughts in their minds at once, and then reach a synthesis that contains elements of each but improves on each (Martin, 2007).

In the past 50 years, there have been as many as 65 different classifications developed to define the dimensions of leadership (Northhouse, 2004). Within those classifications, there are several specific theoretical forms of leadership – situational leadership (a different form of leadership for each different situation),transformational leadership (attention paid to the needs and desires of an organization’s members to achieve their highest potential), moral leadership, and others. I agree that leaders of technology have something to learn from the study of leadership but I am reminded of a quote from a world-renowned statistician related to the many theories and models:

As I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, all of the traditional forms of leadership are not especially useful and applicable in today’s turbulent and fast-paced world, especially in the area of technology leadership in our schools. Progressing through this brief historical context, I suggest we have a very current model before us (Martin, 2007) that is a conceptual and viable model that can help us frame entrepreneurial leadership for technology.

In the early 1800s, leadership characteristics or “traits” were studied to determine what made certain people great leaders. For example, if we could identify the traits possessed by Abraham Lincoln, we could perhaps duplicate them in others. The “trait approach” was based on the belief that leaders were born with certain characteristics that made them great leaders and were different than others who were more passive followers. Examples of some of these traits included intelligence, self-confidence, self-determination, integrity, and sociability.

In the middle of the 20^th century, many researchers (e.g., Stogdill, 1948) argued that no identifiable set of traits separated effective leaders from ineffective leaders. Leadership began to emerge as a relationship between people and situations. This was actually the conceptual beginning of the theory we now call situational leadership.

The technology leaders we will discuss in this chapter do not fit into any of the formal leadership theories just presented. One of the purposes in presenting the historical look at leadership over the last half century is to demonstrate that technology leadership is not so much a theory in itself, but rather a product of the progression of leadership theory. School leaders can certainly benefit from the work of Stoghill, Hersey and Blanchard, Fiedler, House, and MacGregor Brown. But the quiet, less visible, non-charismatic education leaders in technology presented in the last section of this chapter really spend more time and effort in an area not discussed by the authors and researchers above.

Karen Symms Gallagher is the Dean of the University of Southern California School of Education. Her recent accomplishments include facilitation of the redesigned and transformed Doctorate in Education and USC. Currently, she is studying the potential learning implications of students’ personal cell phones. The following is taken from her presentation to emeritus faculty at the USC Rossier School of Education on February 15, 2007, entitled Education Schools in a Flat World: Sorting Through the Choices We Face.

Karen has decided on two salient questions about technology and learning and is investigating the following two questions: (1) Does the use of devices that students have for their own personal information gathering or communication needs translated into more interaction with curriculum content? And (2) Are we being seduced by the use of popular technology or being savvy about matching student learning with I.T. capability?

As cellular capacity a technology continues to expand and as ownership of cell phones becomes ubiquitous, Karen asks how can college professors ignore the potential for cellular phones to replace laptops as a teaching tool? In community colleges, for example, where students attend part-time and often have less access to more costly information technology, the availability of cable-television service delivered right to students’ cell phones should be an exciting expansion of the formal classroom to the individual student level.

Right now, such cell phone service is available in many cities in the U.S. This means that professors don’t have to individualize lessons for students. Rather, students have the means to facilitate their own learning. Students who are at remote locations, and going to school or students who are English Language Learners and need additional practice or students who may need special accommodations because of disabilities can use their cell phones to access instructional materials. Because the ownership of cell phones is so widespread among college students at all levels, issues of equity may be less relevant than they have been when ownership of laptops is required.

Karen Simms Gallagher has certainly processed through Martin’s first two components of thinking and deciding. She has decided on what she feels important or salient and she is addressing causality in thinking about ways we can make sense of the technology before us. Likely, she will now expand her integrative thinking to look at architecture, and decide and determine what tasks and in what order will be needed to produce certain outcomes. Rather than choosing one of the current dominant models and accept the limitations of it (e.g., laptop use in the classroom), Simms Gallagher is using her opposable mind to hold several models in her mind at once, consider the strengths and weaknesses of them, and then design a creative resolution of the tension between them.

The state of technology today yields itself to more efficient means of sharing, storing, and organizing information through use of the Internet. The Connexions project, developed in 1999 by C. Sidney Burrus and Richard Baraniuk of Rice University, is one such innovative forum for collecting, organizing, and sharing educational data. The use of textbooks has become an inefficient, outdated means of distributing information due to the long process of publication combined with the constant state of evolution of human knowledge. Though the use of articles and books remains valuable as learning tools, the additional benefit of electronics, computer technology, and Internet allows for a continual updating process for information to be current.

The idea for the Connexions Project was born when Richard Baraniuk approached fellow professor Sidney Burrus to vent frustration over the distinct separation of mathematical ideas, design methods, applications, legal and ethical implications, and business possibilities related to mechanical engineering (Burrus, 2007). Baraniuk expressed frustration about the disconnect resulting from these different courses taught by different professors, and originally proposed writing a new book that would connect all of these engineering ideas. In his response, Burrus challenged Baraniuk to “design a completely new teaching tool using modern computer and informational technology” (p. 20). The result of this discussion yielded the basic ideas needed to create what is now called “Connexions.”

The Connexions philosophy involves the creation of a collaborative, educational environment by developing, sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Internet. Furthermore, Connexions is a place to view, collect, and disseminate educational material in the format of small, knowledge chunks called “modules”, making learning a dynamic process (Creighton, 2008). These educational materials (modules and courses) are housed on the servers at Rice University and funded by the Hewlett Foundation, Rice University, and private donors. The Connexions project is an open source and available at: http://cnx.org

Baraniuk reasoned that content should be modular and non-linear and posits that most textbooks are a mass of information in linear format: one topic follows after another. However, our brains are not linear - we learn by making connections between new concepts and things we already know. Connexions mimics this by breaking down content into smaller chunks, called modules, that can be linked together and arranged in different ways. This lets students see the relationships both within and between topics and helps demonstrate that knowledge is naturally interconnected, not isolated into separate classes or books.

Baranuik and Burros use their opposable minds and integrative thinking to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the of the opposing ideas but is superior to both.

Today, Connexions is one of the most-used open-education resources on the web, employed in traditional college and K-12 settings, in distance learning, and by lifelong learners around the globe. Demand is surging; currently the Connexions servers handle over 16 million hits per month representing over 600,000 visitors from 196 countries. Volunteers are translating modules and courses into a variety of different languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai; many of these are our most popular. Connexions content development is grass-roots organized and inter-institutional. Our most active content development areas at present include education leadership, music, engineering, physics, chemistry, bioinformatics, and history.

In this chapter, I have suggested that because of the infusion of technology in our schools, leadership as we presently know it will experience further transformation. The gap between autocratic and participatory leadership must grow even wider if we are to successfully utilize technology for maximizing teaching and learning. Even in our common participatory technology leadership in schools, one often sees in-groups and out-groups regarding technology use and implementation. Leaders who create (either intentionally or unintentionally) an in-group and out-group “may see the best technology system blocked from effectively creating collaboration resulting in low levels of trust within the organization" (Avolio, 2000, p. 13).

In-groups are usually composed of technology consultants and coordinators partnered with teachers possessing adequate to exemplary skills and interest in using technology. On the other hand, those who either lack technical expertise or interest make up the out-group, and are not so visible, involved, or committed.

Philip Schlechty (1997), in his book entitled Inventing Better Schools, specifically addresses a redefined leadership for implementing technology in our schools and suggests that a new way of thinking is needed:

"Supporting technological change requires much more than instituting workshops; it requires as well the creation of opportunities to practice and observe, and opportunities to be coached and coach others. When the effort to install technological changes fail, it is likely that leaders have simply not appreciated and provided the quality of support and training that is needed. Or the effort may fail because of the fact that in schools, as in other organizations, technological changes often require structural changes, too."

"Systemic change, calls upon leaders to do all things they must do to lead procedural and technological change – and more. It also calls on them to think, to conceptualize, to see relationships between and among events that might escape others, to help others see these relationships and overcome fear, and to assure, cajole, coach, and inspire hope. Most of all, systemic change calls upon leaders to be wise and sometimes demanding but always to be supportive of and reassuring to teachers and students." (pp. 207-208)

International Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation, http://expressacademic.org

National Educational Technology Standards,http://www.iste.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=NETS ISTE's National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) have served as a roadmap since 1998 for improved teaching and learning by educators. ISTE standards for students, teachers, and administrators help to measure proficiency and set goals for the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to succeed in today’s Digital Age. 

Quality Education Data, http://www.qweddata.com/keynumbers.htm Heavy investment in technology suggests that school leaders feel that it shows promise for contributing to schools’ effectiveness and improvement efforts.

Rice University Connexions Project: http://cnx.org/news/BurrusEdTecArticle.pdf Connexions: An Open Educational Resource for the 21^st Century.

ENDNOTES

1. In The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin (2007) goes beyond the question of what great leaders think to the more important and more interesting question of how they think.

2. Roger Martin is the author of The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking published by Harvard Business School Press (2007).