Transformation not Integration

Susan Patrick speaking at Intel's Educational Visionaries Conference said, "The ed-tech community loves the term 'integration.' But our schools need transformation, not integration."

This is an important distinction. I think we suffered from a bit of a delusion that by integrating technology into schools we would achieve transformative results. Successful integration is a matter of money, staffing, planning, and implementation. We've done this well. Working towards educational transformation is much more of a challenge requiring extensive personal investment by all stakeholders. I think most teachers work every day to 'transform' their students, their classes, and their teaching. The desire to improve one's practice is implicit. The need I see is to do this on an institutional level rather than the isolated individual level.

Integration vs. transformation is the same idea that Alan November discussed in 1998 as "automating vs. infomating." An automated school puts technology systems in place that automates information collection and dissemination. An infomated school transforms the way it approaches the collection, organization, analysis, presentation, and sharing of information. As an example, think about teacher web sites. A technology-integrated (automated) school gives every teacher a simple way to post homework in electronic format. Unfortunately the students have to check into six or seven teacher sites to locate fairly static information. A paper system has been replaced by an electronic one. There are some efficiencies (parents appreciate it greatly), but their is little fundamental improvement to the students' learning process. Now consider a technology-transformed (infomated) school with a website system in which teachers are actively engaged in collecting, organizing, improving, and posting interactive learning resources which support their curricula. Each student can check a single site that displays her homework, test dates, and announcements from all of her different classes and activities. Students can access their files and lesson content, submit homework, use targeted multimedia resources, and study together online. On one hand we have automation and integration, on the other we have infomation and transformation. I think we've been using the term 'integration' when we're really after transformation.