Technology leadership

Abstract

“Effective school leaders are key to large-scale, sustainable education reform” (Fullan, 2002, p. 16). There is no reason to doubt that this is true, as much for change related to technology, as for any other educational change. Nevertheless, the scholarly literature about technology leadership is relatively sparse. In preparing this review, the seventeen presentations recorded in the 2005 SITE conference proceedings (Crawford et al., 2005) were taken as a starting point and searches were conducted for publications addressing technology leadership in the period covering 2004 and 2005. The process entailed searching several major indices of scholarly publications (EBSCOHost, 2005; EdITLib, 2005; MCB, 2005; Taylor & Francis, 2005) and Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com), using the phrase “technology leadership” with “education” and scanning the contents pages of approximately 20 relevant print and online journals for articles dealing with related themes. The number of articles found in this way was not large, as can be observed from the list of references below. It is possible that some significant articles were missed, but it seems unlikely that key themes in the current literature will have been missed. Because the brief for this review was a survey of the current state of the field, it was not appropriate to use the identified sources to argue a case for a particular point of view. Instead, an attempt was made to categorize them according to topic. Three broad categories emerged and have been used as the basis for presenting summaries of the selected sources. Some common themes emerged through that presentation and they have been used as the basis for comments related to implications and directions.