Navigating Our Cloud(y) Future

by Justin Lipscomb

            As MTSO realizes its technological blueprints, the school has a fundamental need to keep abreast of trends in educational technology as they develop. Many of you have been involved in technological discussions in which the comment is made “the findings are unclear” as concerns a wide range of crucial information about student response, educational benefit, and potentially detrimental effects of tech trends. To find our way through this labyrinthine condition and set down some basic guidelines in our own assessment of technology’s role for this school, I have been researching what materials I can find to synthesize at least a basic set of principles by which we may judge future advances.

But before we trek our way through the information, I want to offer explicit guidelines as we begin our approach. Resources for this research must meet two, very basic criteria before consideration:

1) Relevant releases concerning technology cannot be sponsored by tech-related donors. I am reminded of a recent white paper I read about the difficulties of finding adequate storage solutions for classroom projects. Findings showed that cloud-based file sharing was increasingly safe, popular, and convenient in that they offset the needs of IT departments to pay for more storage and security. The study was, of course, sponsored by YouSendIt, an online file sharing company that offered “freemium” services (basic services are free, advanced services come at a cost). There was an obvious vested interest in the results of the study, rendering their determinations suspect beyond the services offered.

2) Sources must be vetted for gadget-crazed enthusiasm. Because a product fulfills a need in certain sectors, it does not prove that product’s ability to foster transformational learning in this setting, and according to our statement of vision and purpose. We have demonstrated an institutional commitment to the use of technology that closes gaps in distance, as opposed to creating or expanding them, and this, I believe, is partially due to our awareness in the ways in which the space where learning occurs has a powerful effect. Therefore, we hold in tension the benefits of technology with the potential harm in disregarding the power of meeting in the flesh. And this warrants considerable prudence in not becoming overexcited with new products without attention to our educational philosophy.