Welcome to Sustainability & Insitutionalization
david@hawaii.edu
Mon, 17 Mar 1997 16:35:25 -1000
Aloha to you all!
Ellen Miyasato and I have agreed to moderate this forum and look forward to a
lively interchange with you over the next several weeks. And who knows, maybe
even longer! Our mission, should we decide to accept it, is to consider
issues such as:
Technology planning
Administrative use of technology
Bringing all players to the table
Interacting with the bureaucracy
Overcoming inertia
The tension between politics and educational reform
Harnessing existing funds for educational reform
Of course, there are no grownups in the room so we can ignore these
suggestions and take off in direction you would like.
One of the benefits of being 5 hrs behind the East Coast is that this is one
of the last "welcome" messages to go online and I got to check out the others
before posting this. There's a lot of text and content on-line already and no
interaction yet. I'd say if we can get just a couple of lively discussions
going with *real* interchange among us that we can consider this a success.
So let me throw out a few provocative (I think) statements and see if any of
you agree/disagree. As this develops it may be useful to try to focus our
discussion, but for now, let's just see if we have anything to talk about.
Any technology plan with user involvement and buy-in will be obsolete by the
time it's completed.
The only way to fund educational networks is to integrate them completely with
administrative networks.
Unless we "fix" colleges of education then everything we do in the field is a band-aid.
There weill never be adequate technical support for schools, so teachers must
learn to support themselves with the help of their students.
You can't change anything unless the teachers are all on-board.
Teachers will never change, so reform begins at the top.
The Universal Service Fund will solve all the technology problems in our schools.
Reactions / comments / corrections???