New Media for Creating, Sharing, and Mastering Knowledge: Implications for Educational Leadership

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New Media forCreating, Sharing, and Mastering
KnowledgeImplications for Educational
Leadership

• Chris Dede
• George Mason University

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Leadership

• Inciting and sustaining continuouslearning and
  progressive effectivenessin individuals and
  organizations -- building the capacity of a
  human community to shape its future
• This involves profound collective changeinner
  shifts in peoples values, aspirations, and
  behaviors coupled with outer shifts in
  organizational processes, strategies, practices,
  and systems

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Leadership as Creative Tension

• Contrasting a vision with current reality
• Just as Socrates felt it was necessary to
  create a tension in the mind, so that individuals
  could rise from the bondage of myths and
  half-truthsso must wecreate the kind of tension
  in society that will help us rise from the depths
  of prejudice and racism. Martin Luther King

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Assumptions about Organizational Evolution

• Organizations are products of the ways their
  participants think, feel, value, and interact
• To evolve an organization, people must have
  opportunities to change their attributes
• Charismatic leaders, increased training, and
  top-down commands are all ineffective
• A cultural process of experimentation and
  reflection is the best method for continuous
  evolution -- individual and collective

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Effective Innovation Initiatives

• connected with real work goals processes
• connected with improving performance
• involve people with power to act
• balance reflection and action
• provide time to think without pressure
• increase peoples individual and collective
  capabilities
• focus on learning about learning, in settings
  that matter

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Leading While Doing

• Promoting processes that reinforce learning
  (individual and collective), innovation, and
  progressive effectiveness
• Undercutting processes that limit learning,
  innovation, and effectiveness
• a collective perspective that is
  ecologicalrather than psychological or
  educational

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Limits to Innovation

• Limited capabilities for buildingshared
  aspirations
• Limited reflective and inquiry skills-- and
  cultural tolerance -- for discussingcomplex
  conflictive issueswithout invoking defensiveness
• Limited systems thinking skills to understand
  interdependenciesand deep causes of problems
• collective learning capabilities

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Incubators for Leadershipand Innovation

• A pilot group of people with complementary
  roles and skills
• repeated opportunities for small interventions
  that participants can design and implement
• learn from successes and failures
• evolve both its vision and its methods

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Learnings Goal is Knowing

• Not repeating and remembering information, but
  being able to find and use it
• framing and asking meaningful questions,
  efficiently determining the answers, acting
  effectively to shape the situation
• knowledge is connected and organized around
  important concepts, conditionalized to applicable
  contexts, and transferable
• broadly competent communities of practice rather
  than complementary, narrow experts

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Cornerstones for Pilot Groups

• New Guiding Ideas (e.g., processes shape
  outcomes more than individuals do)
• Innovations in Infrastructure new policies,
  practices, resources, evaluation methods,
  training strategies
• Theories, Methods, and Tools bodies of knowledge
  that guide effective practice (e.g.,
  collaboration theory and groupware)

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Three Types of Leaders

• Local Decision Makers People with accountability
  and authorityto make things happen at the local
  level
• Community Builders People who move about the
  organization, transmitting ideas, support, and
  lessons learned and forming broad networks of
  alliances
• Executives People with overall accountability
  for total organizational performance

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Unsolved Problems

• The challenge of time to commit
• The challenge of learning as knowing
• The challenge of just-in-time
• The challenge of physical presence
• The challenge of expanding needsfor new types of
  expertise
• The challenge of controlled experimentation
• The challenge of adaptation

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The Impact of New Media

• channels for sending contentanyplace, on demand
• representational containers fornew types of
  messages
• contexts that empower collaboration
• evolving new kinds of meaning aswe sense and act
  and learnacross barriers of distance and time

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Knowledge Networking andEmergent Intelligence

• Knowing involves consensual verificationand the
  ability to predict and shape
• Networking involves sharing and analyzing a rich
  array of data and interpretations
• Emergent intelligence involvescollective memory
  shared, evolving understanding and continual
  acculturationinto alternative perspectives

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Key Technological Capabilities for Distributed
Learning

• Interactivity
• Engagement
• Sophisticated representations
• Remote access
• Tools for collaboration
• Number crunching --gt data processing --gtsymbol
  and information manipulation --gtvirtual
  environments

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Three Central Ideas

• Shifting from information assimilation to
  creating, sharing, and mastering knowledge
• Including all the information necessaryfor
  successful implementationvia systemic change
• Helping practitioners unlearn their current
  beliefs, values, and assumptions about standard
  operating practices
• Adapting, not Adopting

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Conditions for Successin Technological Innovation

• High-quality learning tools and materials
• Extensive professional development
• Strong technical infrastructure
• Organizational shifts to enabledeeper content,
  powerful pedagogies
• Equity in Content and Servicesas well as Access
  and Literacy
• Stakeholder Involvement

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Professional Development

• unlearning traditional expectations about
  educational outcomes, pedagogy, andthe
  organizational structure of universities
• cohort-based programs withvirtual communities to
  support innovation
• SCALING UP

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Skills for Leading-Edge Practicein 21st Century
Workplaces

• Mastering a broader range of knowledge
• Decision making givenincomplete informationand
  uncertain goals
• Teamwork
• Filtering rather than Finding
• in contrast to industrial era education

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Alternative Pedagogical Models

• guided inquiry learning withactive construction
  of new knowledgebased on prior knowledge
• collaborative learningsocial exploration of
  multiple perspectives
• apprenticeship/mentoring relationships
• meta-cognition reflecting on and shaping ones
  own learning
• more motivating, better retention,deeper
  understanding, greater transfer

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Three Emerging Contexts and Representational
Containers

• Knowledge webs
• Shared synthetic environments
• Virtual communities
• new types of messages and meanings
• cognitive, affective, and social

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