As it can be seen that innovation in ICT can contribute many advantages to education, the outcome is always very disappointing. Innovators can’t help asking questions, why the dissemination of innovation in ICT is surprisingly slow? From this paper, we are going to reveal the mystery of this dilemma.
The current technology has a huge impact on the development in business. Because it betters the transportation forms, provides easy ways on communication and so on. The same effect is happening in schools as well, which leads to the change from improvement to transformation. Only improving the existing structures is no longer good enough, we need to build new structures in order to fit the higher standards. To catch up with this change comes the call for transformation. But this is just a piece of cliche, what’s more important is how? How to work a disciplined transformation?
The current approach of innovation is a top-down, centralist intervention. This was very effective back to 30 years ago, such as the improvement of literacy and numeracy in schools. But with the growing amount of investment in educational innovation, the recent failure is questioning this approach. On the external perspective, if the local or national institutions fail to learn in a speed catching up with the rate of change, we will fall behind.
On the other hand, the internal point of view falls in four aspects as the needs from the knowledge economy, the limitation of the strategies, the gap between different classes and the limitation of the master-plan.
Thus, the current approach of educational innovation is losing it’s advantages. We need transformation to fit the growing need in educational development.
So the next part of the paper is talking about how to evaluate the quality of a school so that we can find out whether the new approaches are working or not. There are three concepts of this framework, as intellectual capital, social capital and organizational capital. With this framework, we now have a method to evaluate the effectiveness of a new innovation.
At the very beginning, I just mentioned the importance of transformation, at the same time, we talked a lot about innovation. Thus, what is the relationship between transformation and innovation?
In this part, the author indicates there will be no transformation without innovation. But what kind of innovations can trigger a campaign in schools? The answer is radical innovation, rather than incremental innovation. That means we need innovation in schools to help students prepare for the tomorrow’s knowledge economy. Also, we need new kind of curriculum and assessment to focus on developing students’ abilities to match the knowledge society.
So now, we have a clear goal to achieve. The only problem left is how to do it.
In this paper, we have a new approach to trigger transformation in schools, differing from the existing top-down imposition approach. In order to understand this approach clearly, I summarize it as five different stages as: growing, preparing, processing, developing and producing stage.
For the growing stage, referring to creating the right climate, first of all, we have to clarify what is the right climate. Before that, I want to talk about the blame culture first. Blame culture means evaluating the performance of a school based on the student test performance, naming and shaming the weakest or failing schools in order to make a positive improvement. In this kind of blame culture, schools are not allowed to make mistakes. On the contrary, the right climate for fostering transformation is to give failure a new kind of meaning, as turning mistakes into opportunities for learning. Taking the risk of making mistakes and even encouraging to make mistakes so that we can learn from the past experience.
Secondly, turning into the second Transformation. With limited resources, we have to identify which innovation worth trying and which one gets the priority to be implemented first. In order to fullfill this task, we need to discipline innovation properly. But disciplining innovation doesn’t mean to restrict the area for innovation, but to construct an innovation system for schools to choose what to innovate. How to do this? It’s very similar to the economy developing function in China, foster the front-line innovative schools first, and then employ the successful experience of them to trigger a wilder expansion in other weaker schools.
So now we have the right climate and the right strategy for transformation, the next step is to figure out how to transfer innovation from the front-line innovative schools to the other schools. That requires a lateral strategy, aiming to help transferring innovations among schools. First, we have to identify what to transfer, here in this paper refer to the best practices, which are of high leverage and easily transferable. Back to the question how to transfer it, the paper highlights the importance of collaboration through networks among peers. In the paper, the author gives us an example of the successful improvement of Linux system, it’s sorta out of date. The latest example to demonstrate the importance of collaboration for me is the development of Andriod system. As we know, it’s an open-coded system, so that the users of this system can also be the programmers to improve it. With the dramatic collaboration from online users, Android system has developed rapidly and soon become the main system for smart phones. From this case, we can conclude that the users of the innovation can help to improve the innovation itself through peers collaboration.
The fourth step falls as using ICT laterally. In this stage, we are not talking about the magic that ICT can do to change the world. Instead, the author believes using ICT can shorten the linking lines between individuals, which means innovation networks supported by ICT could turn schools into the small world. Thus, betters transformation in return.
Last step is to the producing stage as making a learning system. In order to fullfill this system, the first step is to abandon command-and-control approach. The relationship between the upper agencies and schools shouldn’t be top-down anymore. The officials should play a role as stimulating, monitoring and helping schools to develope a self-constructing learning system.
In conclusion, I want to use a picture as a metaphor to these five components of transformation:
In order to get the positive outcome of innovation, we firstly have to create the right climate for it to grow. And then identify the best practice as preparation. So that we can follow to the next stage to transfer innovation from front-line schools to others. Using ICT can help building a wider innovation network. Last the official agencies should help to make a self-constructing learning system.
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