If, as Daniel Pink says, the future will reward people who do things
only they can do, then it makes sense that the future will reward
schools who provide experiences that can't happen anywhere else.
As Jim rightly points out, the f2f relationships among school
community members are at the center of that and will remain so.
The tech department will be key in helping their schools figure out
what parts can happen outside school and how they are best made
available. The fun stuff will be figuring out what tech related
experiences can only take place in school and how best to make them
happen.
School IT will also continue to look more like business IT as we
spend more time on cutting operating costs, legal issues, protecting
our user base, and expanding our role in supporting/managing
increasingly sophisticated initiatives in fundraising, communication,
marketing, and administrative data practices and processes.
IT leaders who can leap quickly back and forth between the 5-inch view
and the 50,000 foot view while building interdependence across
constituent group silos will be even more important than they are
already.
Curt Lieneck
Director of Information Technology
University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
RSS Feed, http://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?RSS&L=ISED-L
