The keynote at EdMedia 2014 by professor Jill Jameson titled “Why we Need Distributed, Transformational e-Leadership and Trust in the Fifth Age of Educational Media and Technology” resonated well with Edukata. Here I explain how Edukata can help schools take leadership over the changing eLearning and educational technology landscape.
Professor Jill Jameson is of the firm opinion that schools need to respond to the explosive growth of technology. She also sees that this cannot happen through only policies, or just grassroots innovation, but needs a distributed effort, where everyone from policy makers to headmasters to teachers to etechnologists takes leadership of their own work and development. To quote from her article in the proceedings (emphasis mine):
“This paper argues that it is time for every educational media technology practitioner and manager to recognise their own role as a leader within this new era, and for distributed, authentic understandings of the expertise, power, authority, vision and purposes of e-leadership in education to be shared between us at all levels of organisations rather than left only to senior management. In the changing future landscape for education, in which unpredictable spontaneous digital innovation is continuing to accelerate, a collaborative distribution of e-leadership tasks and responsibilities to e-leaders at all formal and informal positional levels in institutions is needed. This is a risk and a challenge for leaders, managers, administrators and teachers, requiring transformative innovation and a willingness to trust others.”
While during our research, developmend, and design of Edukata, we have not used the term “eLeadership”, I can certainly recognize that what Jameson is looking for is very similar to what Edukata aims to achieve in schools.
While Edukata can be seen as just a model for teachers to supplement their course planning with design practices, it can be used for much more. For instance, it calls for teacher collaboration, and also collaboration between teachers, students, parents, and other stakeholders, through participatory design practices. With support from headmasters, Edukata is a powerful model for school change management, allowing educators to design practical Learning Activities that respond to visionary future scenarios.
The concluding sentence from Jameson’s paper could very well have been written into the Edukata model:
“[…] technological innovation in advanced ICT systems needs to be guided by authentic e-leaders distributed throughout education with a values-based, barefoot human focus on nurturing high trust, living educational ecosystems through good communication and sustainable, realistic policies.”
Our research group organized a symposium at EdMedia, titled Design for Learning: Enhancing Participation in Learning through Design Thinking, where we presented various design-related projects, including Edukata.
References
Jameson, J. (2014). Why we Need Distributed, Transformational e-Leadership and Trust in the Fifth Age of Educational Media and Technology. Presented at the World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications, 2014.
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