Last Monday I was invited to Sanctuary House to contribute to two face to face meeting relating to the Data and Infrastructure strand identified by the Education Technology Action Group (ETAG) as one of its three key workstreams. ETAG, as outlined on Group Chair Stephen Heppell’s website, is an independent group set up at the behest Michael Gove (Secretary of State for Education), Matthew Hancock (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for further education, skills and lifelong learning) and David Willetts (Minister of State for Universities and Science). The purpose of the group is to make recommendations that will “aim to best support the agile evolution of the FE, HE and schools sectors in anticipation of disruptive technology for the benefit of learners, employers & the UK economy", identifying “any barriers to the growth of innovative learning technology that have been put in place (inadvertently or otherwise) by the Governments, as well as thinking about ways that these barriers can be broken down.”
In relation to central government, I’d identify current barriers as 1. the current gap between educational policy and the social, political and economic impact of technologies, and 2. within the schools sector, a seeming reluctance to engage with or countenance these changes as mainstream, and 3. an apparent reticence to recognise the curriculum wide relevance of the use of technology to support learners and be used by learners – the current focus being on students learning about technology, which confines discussions relating to staff development needs and practice to computing. The common theme here is that at the level of policy relating to schools, the use of technology for education is being perceived as a separate, specialist area, rather than an effective and integral range of approaches and tools to support learners and learning communities.
This isn’t, of course, to say that there is any shortage of schools and school staff making effective and creative use of innovative approaches that are supported, or made possible, by the use of technologies. If you believe, as I do, that school staff are best placed to effectively develop practices that make best use of technologies, the job of those supporting their work should be to ensure they have the ability to do so. While many schools and school staff are confident and well equipped in terms of continuing development, the picture isn’t consistent. Recent DigiLit Leicester research (from 2013, and the soon to be released 2014 findings) indicate that while the majority of secondary school staff are highly confident in their use of technology, over 20% of staff working with learners are not confident about employing technologies to support key areas of practice. Staff confidence is critical to the ongoing use, development and adoption of technologies.
The public consultation on the three strands, Connected Institutions, Data and Infrastructure, and Understanding and Accrediting Learning, and an additional Wild Card cluster, is open until 23 June - comments, proposals, suggestions or observations have been invited from anywhere in the world, by reply form, by email or Twitter (#etag), or for the Data and Infrastructure strand, via this Google doc. The Action Group will spend the summer developing recommendations in relation to the consultation for short-term and long-term actions, which will be presented to ministers for consideration.
The call has expressed a preference for ‘short and terse’ responses, which the Action Group will review, and fashion into tempting recommendations. I’m focusing my bullet recommendations here on the use of technology within the schools sector, both ‘technology to support learning’ and ‘technology to support the running of the organisation’, since without accounting for infrastructure, connectivity and systems, we can’t really expect mainstream development of technologies to support learning and communities. My recommendations here are for areas that need to be addressed at national level, rather than left to luck, so should be supported through central government policy or activity, or partnership/endorsement.
Cluster 2 Data and Infrastructure – Led by Bob Harrison and Maren Deepwell.
(2a) Students with sight and control of their own complex learning “big” data. What prevents institutions from making best use of student data, both for teachers and by students themselves?
‘Big’ seems like an unnecessary descriptor/constraint in relation to ‘student’s own’ data. In terms of country wide data collection and management, we need to learn lessons from the recent outcry surrounding the NHS England Cara.data, and parallel protests against student data mining and access in the US – particularly in terms of ensuring clarity about data use or potential data use, and engaging with communities about the collection and use of their data at all stages.
The text from the website suggests that learners will be incentivised by access to data relating to their achievement in relation to others data: “They will understand their own data, be able to act on it directly, have a sense of "where I am" relative to others now, to preceding learners, to international competitors, to the younger learners behind them, and so on.” This seems to be predicated on a future where all learners are motivated by high level ranked progression and achievement data, which is a highly problematic assumption. It also seems to eschew the validity of an educational experience of children and young people not in a position to make use of this data to improve their outcomes, for example, some children and young people with learning disabilities.
Recommendations:
- Support Digital Citizenship education: Ensure UK citizens, particularly young people, have access to information relating to data collection, use, access, permissions and privacy. If we are interested in enabling people to make decisions and take responsibility for their own lives and communities, and if we acknowledge that digital tools and environments play a critical role in how our lives are lived, in how communities engagement takes place, in legal and political processes, then we need to support citizenship education which embeds digital citizenship issues. We have significant, pressing problems now around rights and laws relating to privacy, identity, reputation, surveillance, consent and ownership in digital environments. Also supports strand 3a and 3b.
- Digital literacy education relating to online presence for 14-16 year olds: Ongoing barriers to data portability between and across institutions, and relating to activities which take place outside of formal education, mean that equipping learners to collect and curate their own achievements. Rather than wasting money and time on central platforms, government should focus on ensuring all young people (particularly those aged over 14) have access to skills and advice about managing their online presence and identity, and making use of public and private digital spaces to manage information and data relating to their own achievements. Also supports Strand 1a, 1b, 1c and 3c.
- Increase opportunities for young people to engage with data: Enabling young people to make use of data is one way of supporting a broader digital citizenship agenda – and we are fortunate to have examples of great work in this area – for example, civic hacks events and approaches like Apps for Good, Code the City, Social Innovation Camp, Young Rewired State. How can we extend and make ‘data for good’ opportunities accessible to more young people? Also supports strand 3a and 3b.
- Support school staff development and innovation relating to assessment and feedback: The DigiLit Leicester research indicates there are high levels of secondary school staff confidence across a wide range of approaches to using technology for assessment and feedback, including self and peer evaluation for learners. Investment should be made in surfacing and sharing the range of existing effective approaches, and in the development of new approaches, and supporting school staff, leaders and governors in data collection and use methods and approaches. It’s important that we don’t limit work in this area by only focusing on quantitative data and summative assessment. Also supports strand 3a and 3b.
- Invest in validation outside of traditional routes: validation for a range of skills and achievements, as well as more nuanced validation within existing qualification, is a potentially high impact area for development. Open badges represent an important approach to this – however, just focusing on employers concerns and needs in relation to the usefulness of open accreditation models risks missing important benefits, particularly in relation to young people – badges don’t just demonstrate achievement, they also positively reinforce achievements and can support young people in articulating their abilities. Also supports strand 3a and 3b.
- Investment and development in Green ICT initiatives at school level: As well as the cost to the environment, energy costs account for a substantial portion of school budgets. Further work in this area should address how school communities access and understand building data, how data can be used to support the curriculum, and how schools can be supported in reducing energy costs. Also supports Strand 1b.
Notes from my groups discussion, which included Allison Littlejohn, Susan Easton, and Ewa Luger, and focused on the question How can learners make choices in relation to the use of their data? How can learners understand the implications of the use of their personal data? were captured by Allison and added to the Strand 2 consultation Google doc.
The 2b strand discussion of the Data and Infrastructure cluster focused on the safe and effective use of learner owned technologies inside and outside of the classroom, particularly in relation to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approaches. I won’t go into drivers and benefits of BYOD, the various approaches schools are taking, or the key implementation areas (community engagement, staff development, financing models, digital divide issues, acceptable use policies, network security, infrastructure, device management).
I’ll cut to my recommendations in this area:
- Support a national network of school Student Digital Leaders: School student digital champion programmes are an extremely important route. These initiatives represent a creative and effective approach to supporting learners who are enthusiastic about technologies in playing an active role in school ICT development and use, give responsibility to learners and are a non-confrontational method of embedding enhanced technology use across the whole school. They can play a critical role in BYOD implementation, and support the cultural change this approach represents. Student Digital Leader approaches should be supported nationally, either as stand alone student initiatives and/or as an integral function of student councils.
- Support staff Digital Literacy: Staff development is critically linked to the successful implementation and sustainability of any BYOD approach, to the productive adoption of learner owned technologies, and to the development of technology use to support learners in general. Extrapolating from the DigiLit Leicester research (which collected self evaluation data from 942 secondary and SEN school staff), around 20% of secondary school staff are not confident in making basic use of technologies to support key areas of their practice. The approach we have taken in Leicester – situating digital literacy in professional practice, providing some central support and and providing opportunities and encouragement for staff directed development, has been effective in increasing secondary school staff confidence. Also supports Strand 1a, 1b and 3c.
- Promote and support Open Education approaches and policy: the use, creation and sharing of Open Education Resources is a key way in which finite resources can be made the most of, knowledge and resources shared, educators connected. The European Commission is investing significantly in this area. Scotland and Wales are both supporting Open Education initiatives at country-wide level. In England, we have some great examples of regional initiatives supporting Open Education, including the North-West OER Network and the DigiLit Leicester project. Central government has been active in terms of Open Data and Open Government, but has yet to show the same level of appreciation or support for the benefits of Open Education. Also supports Strand 1a, 1c and 3c.
- Ring fence dedicated ICT funding within school buildings budgets: Funding and criteria for school building works needs to support rather than stymie school use of technologies, particularly in relation to passive infrastructure, WAN relocation costs, server design, power and data, wifi and ventilation design. This recommendation also supports Strand 1a and 1b.
- Provide e-safety and cyberbullying advice and guidance to schools: Increasingly schools are making use of social technologies, for learning and teaching, as well as for communications. Schools also have a duty of care towards their learners and staff in terms of cyberbulling and e-safety issues. Inspection requirements relating to e-safety are not currently matched by the provision of official, or officially endorsed, advice and support in these areas. Schools who are not confident in relation to understanding and managing issues are unlikely to make use of the positive opportunities afforded by social technologies. As a minimum, central government should issue guidance on addressing cyberbullying (focusing on both learners and school employees), and on using social media for community engagement. Guidance delivered by Childnet International on behalf of central government was issued in 2007 (guidance for schools relating to learners) and in 2009 (guidance for school employees), but has not been updated. This recommendation also supports Strand 1a, 1b and 3c.
- Ensure the long term viability of e-safety and cyberbullying advice services: The UK Safer Internet Center currently provides an important and critical service to schools and school staff with it’s Helpline service, which is part funded by the European Commission. This recommendation also supports Strand 1a, 1b and 3c.
Cluster 1: connected institutions – Led by James Penny with Dawn Hallybone
(1a) Learning will be significantly more global. How do we enable institutions to collaborate and learn from the best in the world – including their neighbours?
I’d suggest that within institutions, the issue is frequently about a lack of good collaboration and communications internally, let alone with neighbours. Focusing on schools – schools and individual staff members are increasingly aware of the wider agenda around ‘connected learning’ and the benefits of being connected educators. School have for a very long time made use of video conferencing and blogging to connect their classrooms, and the use of social media, and in particular social networking sites, to support educators engagement in professional networks and continuing professional development continues to increase. In terms of professional school communications, school now routinely make use of text messaging and email to communicate with parents. Use of social media and networking channels to provide information to parents and promote the work of the school (as opposed to individual staff members) is increasing.
- Invest in Technology Supported Professional Development skills and approaches, focusing on introductory level activities and resources: The Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education runs the Connected Educators initiative to “help educators thrive in a connected world.” The DigiLit Leicester project has similar aspirations, and focuses on supporting staff not only to use technology in their practice, but to connect to and share their practice with other educators. Our research indicates a wealth of confidence and practice, but also a significant minority of staff that do not currently make use of the opportunities for self-directed professional development. Also supports Strand 3c.
These are less wide card and more actons which will support all of the areas above:
- Provide educational technology training for school inspectors and governing bodies: Support school inspectors and empower governors to understand how technology can support learning, teaching and community development (by which I mean, the use of technology which includes learning, teaching and communications, but also extends to engagement, consultation, learner voice and governance). Equip inspectors and governors to be able to identify effective and transformative uses of technologies, as opposed to uses of technology to substitute functions and activities.
- Coordinated support for use of technology across the curriculum for subject associations: support for subject specialist boards to ensure their members have access to information, research and activity relating to uses of technology.
- Prioritise inclusivity and access to technology education: actively address inclusivity and promote diversity in relation to technology related activities and careers, in relation to gender, race, socio-economic status, disability (and outside of the compulsory education sector, age). There are some great organisations already working in this space – for example the UK Online Centres, and CAS Include.
Hi Josie,
I agree with you that the focus has been on teaching technology (as a specialist subject: Computing) rather than using technology to assist learning across the curriculum (ed-tech / technology-enhance learning). But I believe that the two categories are distinct in a more radical sense than you suggest. It is not just about “embedding” technology across the curriculum: it is that “technology enhanced learning” is not a curriculum issue at all. It is a pedagogical issue. You can use technology to enhance learning without teaching anything to anyone (except, perhaps, how to press the “on” button).
This is why I disagree with your basic premise that “school staff are best placed to effectively develop practices that make best use of technologies”.
The reason why I am against this is:
1. that pedagogical expertise is not confined to school staff – academic researchers and neurologists might have some useful insights too;
2. that effective education-specific technology (which so far, we have failed to develop) will embed pedagogy into the software, just as a Sage Accounting software embeds accounting practices into its software – and to do this, you need a combination of pedagogical and technical expertise, which is not available to the front-line teacher.
As someone else who routinely ignores the ETAG requirement to be “short and terse” (and I make no apology for addressing the rationale that must necessarily underpin any ETAG recommendations to government) I won’t respond with a long analysis of your recommendations. Suffice it to say that they all depend on this being led by front-line teachers – which is the general approach that was tried under Becta and it didn’t work.
Imagine we went on a kite-surfing course. I imagine that the first lesson would be to introduce us to the kite-surfs that we would be learning to use: here are the foot-straps, this is how you rig the lines etc etc. But in ed-tech, we don’t have the kit – just the ingredients. Here is some nylon webbing, here is some fibreglass, and here are some examples of what previous students have bodged together etc. No wonder we are still splashing around in the shallows, with no serious evidence that the billions of pounds spent under Becta led to any significant learning gains.
So in my view, the first priority for ETAG should be to stimulate the market for ed-tech by stimulating competition and teacher-led demand. Developing the skills required for implementation will follow.
Thanks, Crispin.
Hi Crispin, thanks for taking the time to comment.
A quick reply to your comment that “I disagree with your basic premise that “school staff are best placed to effectively develop practices that make best use of technologies”.”
I agree that pedagogical expertise is not the exclusive domain of school staff. Of course I am keen to see staff supported in connecting to external expertise and research, as well as to the expertise and experience of other educators. To be explicit: I am not suggesting that the best way to support school staff is to encourage them never to talk to anyone outside of their profession, or read anything not written by a school employee, or use any technology not developed by a teacher. Educators and schools of course connect to and work in the context of a wider range of practitioners, organisations, experts, research and practices. This is not an easy thing to do, and more difficult without the confidence and skill to use technologies to develop professional networks and collaborate at distance.
I have confidence that school employees are best placed to do their own jobs and develop their own practice (which includes using technologies), and I don’t see how it is possible to meaningfully work with school leaders, educators and support staff without having this confidence.
Your point is of course that in relation to the consultation scope, we don’t have to work with education communities, or at least that shouldn’t be a priority – that the market should be supported to lead, and if effective technologies are developed, schools or the government will buy them and staff will learn to use them. Personally, I’m significantly skeptical about this claim. I also think that there are technologies that can be used effectively to support learning, teaching and school communities, but for a wide range of reasons, aren’t being made use of by all staff or all schools. My priority would be to invest in the development of school communities, and increase staff confidence, in making use of the wide range of technologies that can effectively support learning and teaching practices.
Hi Josie,
Thanks for the reply.
Of course, none of these things comes down to either/or – and we have to find the synergies between different elements. But also the priorities – which piece you move first in what is a complex puzzle.
I agree that teachers are best placed to do their own jobs – almost by definition because as soon as someone else does their job, that person becomes a teacher. I am also a passionate believer in the importance of the teacher – I have publicly opposed MOOCs on this basis. But there are many parallels with situations in which new technology changes the best way to do any particular job. It may be galling for an experienced handloom weaver to be told that technical advances have changed the skills that are required to do the job – but if that happened to teachers, they would not be the first group have workers to be affected by technology in this way. And that may be a reason why teachers who have developed their skills in non-digital classrooms may not be best placed to develop the ed-tech that will supersede that environment. It might be a bit like asking a committee of horse-drawn carriage drivers to design the first steam engine.
But I am not advocating that ed-tech should be specified by non-teachers and given to teachers to use whether they like it or not. This is what has tended to happen in the past, with the result that truck-loads of useless kit were unloaded on schools. In my view, teachers must drive the market, holding the upper hand in telling their SMTs what to buy because it works in the classroom. Only then will we get the right sort of industry: one that holds a mirror up to the wishes of the classroom teacher and not to the wishes of the bureaucracy (or the capitalists or the politicians – choose your favorite conspiracy theory).
You have every right to be sceptical of my belief that the right industry, operating in the right market, can develop technology that will make the difference. We can discuss at length what that kit would look like and how plausible it is that it would work – but in the end there can’t be any empirical evidence to back my position because none of it has happened yet.
But I cite two facts which I think support my position.
1. By analogy with other sectors. If you look at business or transport or war or science or sport, they are stuffed with the sort of application-specific technologies that we lack in education – and (unlike in education) it makes a huge difference to the efficiency with which they operate. I think the onus is on your side of the argument to explain why education is so different to everybody else.
2. While I can’t produce empirical evidence because my proposed strategy hasn’t been tried yet, yours has. Under the last government, there was lots of money pumped into generic technologies (e.g. file-sharing, multimedia, social networking) in the expectation that teachers would develop tech-enabled pedagogies using OER, Teachmeets to share ideas etc. But even in the 20% of schools which Becta always claimed were making good use of this stuff, no-one has been able to produce the quantitative evidence to show that this has improved learning outcomes. Before you say to government “we need to replicate the excellent practice found in a minority of schools to the majority”, you need to produce some solid evidence of the benefits of the practice of the minority. There may be many reasons why that evidence isn’t there – but it certainly isn’t for want of trying to collect it.
So I think the problem with ETAG is that it is led by teachers and teacher-representatives who, almost as a matter of principle, are against involving anyone outside their own circle in moving ed-tech forwards. People like me who challenge the shibboleths of that community are dismissed as trouble-makers and degenerates.
But I think that attitude is not only mistaken but also short-sited. Because (as I said at the top) it is not either-or, it is about building synergistic relations between kit and practice. Teachers, educationalists and visionaries would have much more likelihood of achieving their desire for pedagogical transformation if they moved beyond the metaphor of the boy-scout modelling club and found that they had some industry-strength kit at their elbow. Having the right tools of the trade will not de-skill teachers, it will empower them.
Best, Crispin.
Hi Crispin.
I haven’t previously talked about teachers – I’ve been referring to school staff throughout my response here, not just teachers. My experience of working with teachers doesn’t really relate to your characterisation of them.
In relation to quantitative learning outcomes I presume you mean research that can be directly related to improved results. I’m not personally of the mind that the only purpose of the school system is to produce good grades, and that there can be no value in any other use of technology. I think technologies can be used in ways that are very valuable for supporting community development, inclusive governance, and also for just having fun. Some of the schools I work with use technologies to support learners with severe learning difficulties or disabilities which reduce their life spans, and I believe these uses are incredibly valuable, but won’t produce the kind of evidence you refer to here.
I also think there is an existing body of evidence about what works in terms of raising attainment, and what approaches have made a difference to learning outcomes. Many of these factors can be implemented, supported, or extended by the use of technology. Informative feedback is an example of this. Building effective partnerships around the school is an example of this. Improving professional expertise is an example of this. Peer support is an example of this. Given that we do have evidence about what works, I don’t understand the value of dismissing technologies on the grounds that just using them for their own sake doesn’t improve anything, or what the point is of looking for ‘solid evidence’ that just using technology will make things magically better.
In terms of ETAG, I can see one teacher who is a member of the action group, and one organisation which works with schools and industry partners. I don’t know how many teachers and teachers representative organisations responded to the open call, but hopefully it was quite a few. I don’t think that this represents a monopoly on opinion though.
Hi Josie,
I don’t agree with you that the purpose of the education system is to support community development, inclusive governance or having fun – though some of these may be useful *means* of achieving the true ends of education, which are to induce students to achieve the right sorts of learning. And learning can be measured.
Quantitative research evidence is not confined to measuring exam grades. Impressionistic grades can be given to every other aspect of student achievement (motivation, creativity, teamwork) and this data can also be aggregated and analysed. At least in principle. I would agree with you that we have not been good at doing this and the quality of our education research has been very weak, as the Tooley report showed in 1998 and as Ben Goldacre has been underlining more recently (https://twitter.com/bengoldacre/status/479194509495259137).
But we do have exam data. This might not be hugely reliable at the individual level (as the frequency of re-marks shows) or comprehensive in its coverage of all aspects of learning – but in aggregated form, it provides a pretty good measure of the success of the school at addressing at least one important aspect of what schools need to be doing. If education technology cannot influence the one set of data that we do have, which in aggregated form is reliable, and which is responsive to changes in performance, why then should we believe that it is influencing other measures of success?
By this measure, it is by now absolutely clear that education technology has had no significant impact. The assessment of the EEF’s 2012 “Impact of Digital Technologies on Learning” is that:
Taken together, the correlational and experimental evidence does not offer a convincing case for the general impact of digital technology on learning outcomes.
and
Research findings from experimental and quasi-experimental designs – which have been combined in meta-analyses – indicate that technology-based interventions tend to produce just slightly lower levels of improvement when compared with other researched interventions and approaches (such as peer tutoring or those which provide effect feedback to learners).
And if this second passage suggests that current ed-tech solutions have a small impact, one has to take into account that without control groups (which is the case with most educational research) almost *all* interventions show some positive improvement, which can be put down to the Hawthorne effect, the research equivalent of the placebo effect.
The introduction to Rose Luckin’s “Decoding Learning” similarly states that:
“evidence of digital technologies producing real transformation in learning and teaching remains elusive. The education sector has invested heavily in digital technology; but this investment has not yet resulted in the radical improvements to learning experiences and educational attainment”.
So if ETAG is going to state (on the basis of the unsupported beliefs of its members and a few tweets from technology enthusiasts) that “we do have evidence about what works” – all you are going to demonstrate is that the ETAG group has not even reached square one in the intellectual journey that it needs to take.
And that point hasn’t escaped Matt Hancock, who, according to Dominic Norrish, left the recent launch of the Education Foundation’s launch of its “Technology in Education” report,
“commenting on the need for evidence (cutting through all the anecdotes and war stories…)” (see https://twitter.com/domnorrish/status/478980686322601984)
Matt Hancock wants hard evidence and hard evidence does not exist. Of course I agree with you that “improving professional expertise” is almost by definition a good thing, and peer support and partnerships and all that stuff is also good. But that is just aspirational motherhood and apple pie without evidence to show that technology delivers these things, in ways that have a consequential impact on learning.
The FELTAG report went in the bin. Unless ETAG faces up to the facts and starts to do some hard thinking (which it shows no inclination to do), the ETAG report will end up in the same place.
With respect to the “monopoly of opinion”, I don’t say that ETAG is uniquely made up of teachers – but it is predominantly made of people who are committed to (and normally have an interest in) the current model of teacher-led ed-tech. And it has not given any reasoned response to the sorts of criticisms that I and others have been making of its base assumptions.
Hi Crispin,
It’s clear from the length of and passion of your response that you, like me, think this is a very important area.
I am not a member of ETAG – I’m an an individual responding to an open call. I understand that you don’t think my response is a good one, and you are dissatisfied with the consultation process. I’ve elaborated on my position above with regard to your comments, but I’m not sure what you think I can do in relation to the eventual ETAG recommendations, or indeed how or if any of these recommendations get acted on.
Consultations of this nature come without any guarantee – between the consultation and the recommendations and the recommendations and any eventual actions or implementation.
The value of an open consultation is in asking for ideas and opinions from a wide range of people, many of who will hold opposing views, and have differing priorities and agendas. I’ve tried to express mine here, but I don’t expect everyone to agree with everything I have said.
I have not made any heavy responses to #ETAG for a number of reasons, partly because I am of a similar mind to a number of members on the group or to submissions already made.
However, in response to bother Josie’s original article and the subsequent discussions I would like to raise a few things.
Learning through technology is not something new and is not unique to schools and other academic institutes, and this is sometimes lost. Without harking on to days gone by, a collective meeting of stakeholders in the UK assessments systems (back in 2009) showed that the methods for online assessment used in other training sectors were not being looked at by the then boards / agencies. The structure of the curriculum was being quoted as the barrier here, and yet the present changes to the curriculum seem to move even further away from the chances for online assessment or assessment when ready. Josie, your comment about looking at alternative routes hit to the heart of this. I have to admit that I have little trust for boards and publishers when they have such close ties.
I am thankful that Josie is like a number of members of ETAG, and they accept that a number of people within schools and their communities have a significant amount of expertise that can be drawn on to direct the possible changes …
Crispin, there are a number of application-specific technologies already in education, but they are often tied in with curriculum specific content (i.e. apps or technology designed to target a specific section of the curriculum) but the market is surrounded by spin and politics rather than outcomes. The other issue on this is when presenting research on the success of these specific technologies there will always be questions about whether the technology had the largest impact or simply having a strategy for change made the difference.
I am more interested in people understanding change and how they plan change, rather than tying people down to specific technology or content.