2.2 Entrepreneurial leadership for technology: an opposable mind  (Page 8/11)

An opposable mind: karen symms gallagher usc rossier sshool of education

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.

An opposable mind: rich baraniuk and the rice university connexions project

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.