The Digital Age and the District Administrator

Recently, I developed a course, entitled The Digital Age and the District Administrator, in order to assist superintendents in acquiring tech-oriented skills. The course is possible because of a unique partnership between Viterbo University and CESA #4.  It's been a remarkable experience, and it has reinforced my strongly held judgement that school district administrators have the full capacity to learn, utilize, and lead with digital-age tools. Below are my somewhat zealous essential questions for the course and the local news coverage that we earned. What is happening in your area to assist school administrators in developing the technology skills and dispositions needed to "lead with the brights on"?


Essential Questions:

1. How does technology help schools and society tap human resources of talent, goodwill, and productivity?

2. How does embracing new media allow us to explore highly engaging but low cost opportunities?

3. In what ways does new media allow society to aggregate talent and effort, producing a dramatically different social, working, and learning environments?

4. To what extent has access to information significantly changed the landscape of learning, working, and socializing? To what extent has the  boundless opportunities to produce information changed the landscape of learning, working, and socializing?

5. What responsibility to we have to students to help them prepare for “workplace 3.0”?

6. How does our limitless capability to communicate change our notions of collaboration, contribution, space and time, and authority?

7. To what extend does the media culture of re-tweeting, re-scripting, re-combining, cut and paste, embedding, sharing, and open source challenge or complement copyright, academic rights, plagiarism, publication credit, and permissions to reproduce materials? 


8. How do we an environment of inquiry that engages the learner and optimizes learning through technology?

Credit: Acknowledgement, recognition, and praise must be given to Scott McLeod (of CASTLE) and Jeff Utecht for inspiring this course and pioneering the way for leaders to teach leaders about digital-age tools.