One of my frustrations with educational leadership is the behavioral preference to only remediate media which has an obvious chain back through their own career. Not only that, but the type of device and materials believed to be transformative are exactly the things which are observed and engaged with at formulaic educational conferences with known peers and edutainers.
Even a casual eye on Twitter reveals: leaders who issue emotive rhetorical statements (and rarely bother to respond to anyone they don’t already know); would-be-leaders aspiring to be in the actual leaders field of vision and independent operators who canvas the crowd with buzzword-theories in order to meet the leaders (to earn contracts).
This market, which orbits a particular leadership preference and viewpoint doesn’t help move ‘what could be used’ forward at all. It doesn’t take media for what it is and consider how best to use it. Instead, we see and hear subjective terms such as “integrator” and “integration” – into the curriculum. After a couple of decades, this cycle has worn a well trodden path around leadership belief. Leaders like to build hotel-like receptions, buy IWBs, mount big TVs on the wall – and tell everyone how they are going to be BYOD soon. In Russia, leaders have been pumping oxygen into nuclear submarines since the end of the cold war, simply to keep them afloat as the cost of actually decommissioning is economically prohibitive.
Cultural literature, which includes digital-objects cannot ignore the largest segment of media that children use – and honestly say that their strategy for techno-pedagocial-content based learning is using ‘the best’ research or ‘best’ theory – if really they are talking about three things: Blooms; SAMR and TPACK. There are numerous theories that exist beyond this comfortable technological garden being created which simply doesn’t reflect the extent of today’s cultural literature. If they did, they’d be talking about new faculties, not new iFads.
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