Understanding What Administrators See as Barriers to the Adoption of Technology for Learning and Intervention Measures to Overcome the Barriers by David S. Bail [This article has been divided into a number of separate web pages for browser-loading ease. You may view (and select) the contents by section title from the Contents, or click on the "Next" button at the bottom of each page.]   Demand for Educational Reform to Prepare Graduates for a Changed World Some of this anger toward government and indeed schools as part of government may be seen in a recent Business Week article, which voiced the current concerns of many Americans for their schools in its April 17, 1995 cover story "Will Schools Ever Get Better?", when Mandel, Melcher, Yang and McNamee write: "Americans are fed up with their public schools. Businesses complain that too many job applicants can't read, write, or do simple arithmetic. Parents fear that the schools have become violent cesspools where gangs run amok and that teachers are more concerned with their pensions than their classrooms. Economists fret that a weak school system is hurting the ability of the U.S. to compete in the global economy. And despite modest improvements in test scores, U.S. students still rank far behind most of their international peers in science and math. And the woes of public schools may be about to get even deeper. Over the rest of the decade, the nation's schools will face a financial crunch that will be far worse than almost anyone had projected. Tight budgets will mean overcrowded classrooms, less individual attention, deferred maintenance, and elimination of such 'frills' as music, art, and sports. And schools will have difficulty paying for the computers and other information technology needed to prepare young Americans for the new workplace (pp. 64-68)." Despite these criticisms of education and educational reforms, the differences and diversities between states and between populations must be taken into account when assessing performance and advocating change because of apparent performance gaps. For instance, the quality or proficiency of states' educational programs should not be compared or ranked using the results of tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), according to a recent study, because variation in test scores such as on the 1992 mathematics test can be explained by the combined effects of four demographic factors over which schools have no control--number of parents living at home, parent(s)'s education, community type, and state poverty rates (Robinson and Brandon, 1994). Yet despite these demographic, cultural, and economic changes--or perhaps because of them--the business community, facing global competition, also has sounded the clarion call for educational improvement: "Today -- not some time in the future -- our nation must educate all of its children to be critical thinkers. This nation can no longer afford to 'throw away' the 25 percent of our children who drop out of school each year, nor can it afford to write off two-thirds of those who graduate, but with such low skills that they are unable to function fully as citizens or workers, much less compete with students from other countries....We no longer have any choice. We must end this crisis if we are to remain a first class nation and compete in a world economy....This failure is the result of a web of educational theories, philosophies, policies, and organizational structures that inhibit change. It is not that the schools are doing a worse job than in the past. It is that the whole world has changed, while our schools have stayed largely the same (Business Roundtable, 1991)." Life-long learning was seen as the "new educational imperative" in an article by Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration professor John P. Kotter (in The Futurist, December 1995), who wrote that "past success often makes it more difficult to succeed in the future. And this fundamental truth applies equally to educational institutions, corporations, and individuals (p. 29)," while Davis and Botkin write that learning in agricultural economies was church led, learning in industrial economies is government led, but that "business, more than government, is instituting the changes in education that are required for the emerging knowledge-based economy" (Harvard Business Review, 1994 September-October, p. 170). "After more than a decade of marginally effective reform, diverse stakeholders are coming to the same conclusion: Demanding more from our schools is not enough--the system itself (at local, district, and state levels) must be fundamentally changed.... Much of the push for systemic reform stems from a recognition that the nation's social and economic structure has changed," says an ERIC digest on Systemic Education Reform. Systemic reform is in direct opposition to previous efforts at "tinkering and add-on programs." Rather it is 'a philosophy advocating reflecting, rethinking, and restructuring," calling for education to be "reconceptualized from the ground up, beginning with the nature of teaching and learning..." (Thompson, 1994, May.) Information production and dissemination can be thought of as economic activities producing a good which is valuable dependent upon its "degree of accuracy, timeliness, completeness, reliability, and relevance to issues under consideration. Information possessing these qualities is expected to improve decision-making by both the consumers and suppliers of education (Farid, 1984)." Since inhabitants of the "information society" are barraged by information daily, survival and success are "dependent on the ability to locate, analyze, and use information skillfully and appropriately...including the ability to evaluate information or to plan a search strategy (Hubbard, 1987)." These skills are necessary also for participation in the political debate also, as citizens are confronted by the volume and complexity of information on current affairs, requiring them to have the skill to access the information, determine which is the best information for the task at hand, and make sense of the information transforming it into knowledge capable of being the basis for sound decision making (White, 1991). This is consistent with the findings of the report of the Secretary of Labor's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, (SCANS), for workplace skill levels for youth for entry- level jobs, which are in the areas of information skills, systems skills, and technology utilization skills (Whetzel, 1992). Forecasts of increases in knowledge and its availability are boundless in number, but common to all views of this bounty by educators is a belief that means of assessing the validity and value of that information will become a necessary skill: "Youths can study only the tiniest bit of the knowledge base that society now has at its disposal. Deciding wisely what they should learn thus becomes absolutely essential for students' long-term success. Society must make hard choices about what children must know and what is merely useful or interesting to know. Youngsters who fail to acquire critically needed knowledge and skills risk becoming lifelong failures (Cornish, 1996, p. 5)." Yet it is difficult to build new minds with old tools. We must examine what and how we teach so that students may learn in this new environment. In the view of Jamieson McKenzie, EdD, Director of Instructional Technology for Bellingham, Washington schools, "Even though nearly everyone concedes that the next century will be characterized by startling change, shifting rules and persistent uncertainty, many continue to educate children as if this were the 1950's, as if they could look forward to a life of tranquillity and predictability (From Now On, 1991, May, p. 1)." Thornburg (1991) writes that "the problem we encounter in education is simply this: our children operate with a completely different world-view than that of many adults. As educators, we have a sacred duty to support and enhance the development of our youth, not to try to convert them to our outmoded ways of thinking. This, then, is the pivotal change of our time ( p. 56)." Acceleration in knowledge is as old as the transition from oral traditions to the written word at the time of Plato, which changed the education of men from the "tribal encyclopedia," or memorization of the oral works of the poets, to written data devised by Plato and based on his Ideas: "Education by classified data has been the Western program ever since. Now, however, in the electronic age, data classification yields to pattern recognition... When data move instantly, classification is too fragmentary. In order to cope with data at electric speed in typical situations of 'information overload,' men resort to the study of configurations... The drop-out situation in our schools at present has only begun to develop. The young student today grows up in an electrically configured world. It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns. The student today lives mythically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educational scene relates to the 'mythic' world of electronically processed data and experience that he takes for granted. As one IBM executive puts it, 'My children had lived several lifetimes compared to their grandparents when they began grade one.' (McLuhan, 1964, pp. viii-ix)" From all perspectives, the most critical task for school must be to prepare children for the world they will face upon graduation. Changes in competition, careers, technology, and governmental funding are all a part of that changed landscape. In California we cannot expect a return to the economic conditions that existed before the recent recession, "when major increases in funding were available and the public favored heavy investment in schools and the higher education system. California must shift to a system of achievement-based schools with statewide content and performance standards, statewide assessment, and statewide accountability for results, says a study by the Education Commission of the States, commissioned by Governor Pete Wilson. This system should see the state change its focus from "controlling schools and districts to supporting them," and base its new achievement system on the areas of focus on student achievement, reconnect schools and communities, and build a new framework of support for the new system of schools. That new framework of support would include adequate pre-service preparation and inservice staff development, strengthening partnership support networks, "expanding the technological capacity of schools and districts," restoring the strength of urban schools, and providing an adequately and equitably funded system (Rising to the Challenge, 1995, pp. 1-3). In a previous period, when social and economic change was at the forefront of the public mind, as America weathered its Great Depression and as rural populations left their First Wave agricultural society for Second Wave industrial jobs, schools were then in the eye of the storm of debate for whether their instructional methods and theory were adequately preparing students for society. From Bagley: "The extreme wing of the Progressive school not only rejects the idea of discipline; it would abandon prearranged programs, assigned tasks, and learning activities of all kinds that are imposed from without. `How can you tell where the mind of the child will lead you?' was the reply of the headmistress of a left- wing school to a new teacher who revealed her ignorance of up-to-the-minute education by asking for a copy of the course of study. In a conference that interrupted the writing of this Preface I heard a group of teachers gravely deliberating as to how certain lessons which their pupils ought to learn could be taught without `imposing' them. In spite of the fact that no less widely recognized an authority than John Dewey has both disclaimed and denounced so absurd and perilous a limitation of the teacher's function, the notion that all learning activities must take their cue from the spontaneous purposes of the learner is accepted as both law and gospel by thousands of American teachers, and is reflected in such popular slogans as the `play way,' the `creative impulse,' the `free school,' the `child-centered school,' and the like (op cit., pp. ix-x)." Once again that debate over instructional methods is in the public agenda. In Assignment Incomplete: The Unfinished Business of Education Reform, the Institute for Education Leadership presents survey results indicating once more the public's desire for a return to the "basics," with the difference today being that the basics now include computer proficiency as a foundation skill: "Although a majority of Americans is not fully satisfied with the public schools, most do not favor solutions that have received widespread media attention, such as privatization of public school districts or vouchers...The public recognizes that students need an education that extends beyond the basics to prepare them for the challenges of the 21st century and favors a 'basics first,' not a 'basics only' approach," as 92 percent said that teaching the basics is absolutely essential as a foundation for higher standards, in a national telephone survey of 1200 Americans. "Eighty percent of Americans feel teaching computer skills is "absolutely essential", while they see the "3 R's' as fundamentals setting the foundation for learning including the ability to work hard and apply oneself, proficiency in computers, along with reading, writing and arithmetic (Institute for Education Leadership, 1995, Summary of Findings)." The Business Roundtable proposes the following program to address those needs for reform of school systems in The Business Roundtable Participation Guide. Essential Components of a Successful Education System: 1. The new system is committed to four operating assumptions: All students can learn at significantly higher levels. We know how to teach all students successfully. Curriculum content must reflect high expectations for all students, but instructional time and strategies may vary to insure success. Every child must have an advocate. 2. The new system is performance or outcome based. 3. Assessment strategies must be as strong and rich as the outcomes. 4. School success is rewarded and school failure penalized. 5. School-based staff have a major role in making instructional decisions. 6. Major emphasis is placed on staff development. 7. A high-quality pre-kindergarten program is established, at least for all disadvantaged students. 8. Health and other social services are sufficient to reduce significant barriers to learning. 9. Technology is used to raise student and teacher productivity and to expand access to learning (National Alliance of Business, 1991, p. 97)." Studies Showing the Use of Technology for Educational Reform Dr. David Thornburg presents the long view in his 1991 book Edutrends 2010: Restructuring, Technology, and the Future of Education: "When Horace Mann contributed to the design of public schools in the 1800's, his model was the old industrial system that focused on uniformity of experience rather than on individualization of instruction. The educational system of the 19th (and most of the 20th) century kept time a constant, and allowed learning to be the variable. This is changing now that educators and educational leaders are realizing that our system can--and must--accommodate the needs of different learners (p. 79)....In this age of global transformation, does it make sense to have classrooms without telephones, modems and TV cables with which teachers and students can connect to the outside world (p. 76)?...Is it appropriate to deny technology to any child when there is hardly a single career in his/her lifetime that will not require the effective use of informational tools (p. 77)?" A common concept for the use of technology as a means toward education reform is present in a variety of current, major school reform documents such as Here They Come: Ready or Not, It's Elementary, Caught in the Middle, Second to None, and Goals 2000, according to a synopsis prepared by a regional consortium of the California Association of County Superintendents of Schools. That common concept is that, "powerful teaching and learning through meaning-based and integrated curriculum for critical thinking using technology" leads to "a rich, meaning- centered curriculum...choosing depth over coverage in teaching a subject," emphasizing "active learning strategies which are consistent with the goals of the curriculum and the developmental characteristics of young adolescents," where "teachers are effective coaches, students collaborate as active learners. Instructional materials and technology are better utilized," by "developing a repertoire of learning strategies and study skills which emphasizes reflective thought and systematic progression toward the goal of independent learning," and preparing for changing social and economic conditions by "possessing the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy...demonstrating an advanced ability to think critically, communicate effectively and solve problems (RIMS, 1995)." In "The Role of Technology in the Systemic Reform of Education and Training," Lane and Cassidy (1994, June) reiterate these and other reform documents and their goals, relate constructivism, student empowerment and adragogy as models of learning, and examine the role of technology as "a force for, a partner of, and a tool for systemic reform," advocate equitable access so as to avoid "undereducating a significant proportion of our students which has serious economic consequences," and examine the concepts of systemic reform as the reinvention of education, "not carried out in small steps." However wisdom must be exercised in the employment of technology so that new interactive, experiential learning environments are created rather than putting new tires on an old car. The fallacy of using technology to recreate the traditional classroom is exemplified by two-way video conferencing for education, concluding that "to recreate a situation that is not working through a costly technological solution seems pointless at best (p. J-10)." Equitable access is also a concern exhibited by a chart in Education Vital Signs 1995 that shows the proportion of low income, middle income and high income students having access at school to be 59.8%, 69.1%, and 78.4% respectively, but only 4.0%, 18.8%, and 51.4% at home for each of those groups in 1993 (U.S. Census, October Current Population Surveys, p. A14). Professors William Massey of Stanford and Robert Zemsky of the University of Pennsylvania (1995, June) agree, observing that "IT [information technology] offers great potential but in order to reap the benefits, institutions will have to transform themselves in fundamental ways." Believing that the demand for IT-based teaching and learning programs will "grow substantially, probably exponentially, over the next decade" due to being "an economical means of providing the continuous education the U.S. now requires," they hold that "IT represents a fundamental change in the basic technology of teaching and learning (p. 1)." IT offers economies of scale and mass customization, easing the limits of time and space for educational activities, enabling self-paced learning sensitive to different learning styles, with the ability to focus on continuous individual assessment, making "the teaching and learning enterprise much more outcome-oriented" and in general giving students "greater control over the learning process, with all the benefits associated with active learning and personal responsibility (pp. 2-3)." Unfortunately that very shift in control of the learning process engenders one of the barriers to adoption which the authors refer to as "traditional academic values. Foremost among the barriers to IT's full adoption is a set of established institutional norms relating to teaching methods, faculty autonomy, and notions of productivity. The set of teaching-method-norms include such considerations as teaching loads, student-teacher ratios, and class sizes (p. 4)." Such hesitance will require time, training, belief and leadership to accomplish the change. As part of its role in leadership, training and preparation for change, the National School Boards Association has produced a series of timely annual Technology Leadership Network Special Reports as information guides through its Institute for the Transfer of Technology to Education. One of the earliest, Technology and Transformation of Schools (Perelman, 1987, October), maintains that "technology has an essential, but not independent, role to play in meeting the demand for a vastly more productive education system," which would be more productive by "serving the individual consumer's needs for learning and development." But such a productive school would require change. "Meaningful technological change of schools will depend on a comprehensive sociotechnical systems design process, integrating technical systems, human resources, management, and organization (p. ES-1)." The March 1991 report, Teachers and Technology: Staff Development for Tomorrow's Schools (Goodson, Ed.), contains an article by Gail Marshall, adjunct faculty member at Fontbonne College, St. Louis. Titled, "A Call for Constructivist Training," it emphasizes the difference in educational approach between traditional behavioralist instruction and constructivist learner-centered formation of meaning, such as can occur by use of technology in context and exploration as opposed to "drill, repetition and reward" use in a lab (pp. 120-121). A change to such a constructivist methodology and viewpoint would require such a sociotechnical design integrating technical and human resources, management and organization. In "The Postmodern Paradigm" Brent G. Wilson, associate professor of instructional technology at the University of Colorado at Denver, contrasts the traditional Conditions of Learning methodology of instructional design to a newer postmodern constructivist approach. Viewing constructivism as a paradigm or very general "theory of cognition, suggesting how the mind works and how we know things," he asserts postmodernism as "an underlying philosophy about the world" which has "grown out of the humanities tradition--philosophy, literary criticism, the arts" with a goal "not so much to explain, predict, and control, but create, appreciate and interpret meanings," accounting for some of the misunderstandings which occur between postmodern critics and instructional design, which "evolving from behavioral psychology, systems technology, and management theory, sees the world through the 'scientific' lens (Wilson, 1995, May, pp. 8, 4)." In the conditions of learning model it is held that "a graded hierarchy of learning outcomes exists, and for each desired outcome, a set of conditions exist that leads to learning. Instructional design is a matter of clarifying intended learning outcomes, then matching up appropriate learning strategies. The designer writes behaviorally specific learning objectives, classifies those objectives according to a taxonomy of learning types, then arranges the instructional conditions to fit the instructional prescriptions (p. 5)." By contrast, believing that "people need to have experiences that place them in positions where they'll learn important things (p. 7)," and that the "cumulative danger" is that "CoL [Conditions of Learning] models will result in lowest-common-denominator, mediocre-at-best instruction rather than creative or genuinely good instruction (p. 8)," Wilson sets out the "relationship between constructivism and an underlying postmodern epistemology" as follows. "Postmodernism...philosophy emphasizes contextual construction of meaning and the validity of multiple perspectives. Key ideas include: Knowledge is constructed by people and groups of people; Reality is multiperspectival; Truth is grounded in everyday life and social relations; Life is a text; thinking is an interpretive act; Facts and values are inseparable; Science and all other human activities are value-laden. "Constructivism (Situated Flavor): Mind is real; mental events are worthy of study; Knowledge is dynamic; Meaning is constructed; Learning is a natural consequence of performance; Reflection/abstraction is critical to expert performance and to becoming an expert; Teaching is negotiating construction of meaning; Problem solving is central to cognition; Perception and understanding are also central to cognition (p. 9)." Wilson concludes with recommendations for postmodern instructional design, including incorporating "participatory design techniques, with 'design' moving out of the lab and into the field," attention to educational goals that "strengthen conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills in a domain," designing "rich learning experiences and interactions," allowing for "instruction and learning goals to emerge during instruction." The design of the learning should "consider multiple levels of expertise" since postmodern theorists believe '"that expertise does not follow a linear progression of stages, but takes on different forms in different people. Instruction needs to respond to where a learner 'is,' and support their growth, regardless of their positioning in the expertise 'universe,'' and also to "look for authentic, information- rich methods for representing content and assessing performance (e.g. audio, video). High resolution methods for representing content can be useful...[also] for documenting expertise and assessing student understanding (p. 11)." One information-rich use of technology is multimedia. In its 1994 report, Multimedia and Learning: A School Leader's Guide (Ward, Ed.), the National School Boards Association presents a collection of articles valuable for both theory and use, staff development and facilities planning, for application of multimedia to learning. One such article, "Multiple Technologies for Multiple Intelligences" by Dee Dickinson, president and founder of Seattle-based New Horizons for Learning, takes Howard Gardner's framework of multiple intelligences and suggests a number of software titles for beneficial learning use for each learning style (pp. 42-48). In a review of "The Future of Electronic Education," Robert A Dierker, a multimedia specialist at the U.S. Library of Congress is quoted as saying, "The learning process is in for change in big ways." The column continues, "In highlighting just how much information is out there, Dierker recognizes the need for a very important skill--how to wade through it all. As a result, schools and teachers of the future will act not so much as a resource base for knowledge, but as 'knowledge navigators,' teaching students how to identify what information is important and relevant to their specific needs. 'Educators and students are unquestionably going to have access to quantities and kinds of material not previously available...The skills needed will be those associated with helping students not just to learn, but learning how to learn,' (1995. In E. Boschmann (Ed.), A handbook for education in the electronic environment . Reviewed in The Futurist , 1995, September-October, World Trends and Forecasts: Education, the Electronic Classroom, p. 56)." Learning how to use the technology to learn is the higher order thinking which is called for in numerous studies. Wilkinson (1985) writes that "the potential effectiveness of media is not found in any variables that are inherent in the devices...but in how the devices are used. This implies that technology is a technique for designing instruction rather than the more common perception of technology as machine. This broad definition of technology implies the interaction of individuals, materials, and machines in a variety of instructional settings and employing a variety of instructional strategies--each item of the mix being called upon to do what it does most effectively ("Excellence Through Educational Technology" )." He proposes that enhanced use of learning time could result from using technology for certain integrated and independent uses of media thereby effectively reducing class size and creating time for individualized interaction between teacher and student. He concludes that school will need to be reorganized and teachers' roles redefined to "shift from dispensing knowledge to managing learning," that capital investment will be required to make the application of the tools of educational technology possible, and that the will to make these changes will be a precondition to achieving excellence. Occasionally there are voices of criticism heard that a reliance on technology is somehow in conflict with, or incompatible with educational restructuring. Holding that certain new technologies will be "basic to citizenship and problem-solving in an Age of Information," Jamieson McKenzie writes in "Restructuring and the New Technologies: Conflict or Compatibility?" that we are putting the cart before the horse only if we "purchase technologies to perform smokestack tasks. Only if we buy first and think last. Mastery of new technologies is a fundamental rite of passage for young people who will do their problem-solving, voting, loving and living in the next millennium, especially mastery of information technologies. Any school which fails to blend such mastery throughout the day and the curriculum is failing to achieve its fundamental mission at a very basic level (From Now On, 1992, May)." If communications over distance and across time is one of the values of technology, then ability to use technology will be a living skill for citizens who will live in a global village. According to "Global Literacy in a Gutenberg Culture," an article by educational technology pioneer Al Rogers published on the world wide web's Global SchoolNet: "there are important pedagogical, political, social, cultural, and economic reasons why schools should consider telecommunications technologies as learning tools....Today, growing thousands of children in dozens of countries around the world are living the reality of the global village in personal, hands-on, interactive ways. Through the medium of networking and telecommunications technologies these students are for the first time learning to think of themselves as global citizens, seeing the world, and their place in the world, in ways much different than their parents (1995, p. 1)." In a paper prepared for the World Wide Web Conference Workshop "Teaching & Learning With The Web," professor Daniel Peraya, faculty member of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Geneva wrote that the "the implications for education and training are immense; learning can be independent of time and place, and available at all stages of a person's life....Learners will have access not only to a wide range of media, but also to a wide range of sources of education....WWW [the world wide web] appears as the implementation of the old dream and utopia of the first theoreticians of communication theory. Networking makes available asynchronous or synchronous communication between people wherever they may be and no matter when (1994, April, p. 4)." But the definition of an educated person would have to change. "If in the past the culture of someone could be defined as the capacity to keep , memorize and recall information, today it should be defined as the capacity to wisely loose information; in other words to be able to retrieve the information when it appears necessary (p. 6)." Jamieson (!992, May) foreshadowed a response to the use of technology by citizens when he wrote that "we in schools must raise independent thinkers and info-tects, a citizenry which can ride the waves of information with the skill and style of great surfers, carving into the data to gain power and insight, building new organizations which are collaborative and communicative, rather than hierarchical and rule-oriented (pp. 4-5)." We should clarify our mission; "restructuring, then, should begin with a consideration of philosophy and belief systems. What is it we really believe about children and how they learn (p. 5)?" In the end, values, people and relationships matter most, and we must start with our staffs if change is to occur. "Without investing in adult learning, significant change is unlikely. The MIT Sloan study concluded after reviewing a number of ambitious IT projects that most of them fell far short of expectations because they failed to invest sufficiently in the human resource development and cultural cultivation required to prepare employees to take full advantage of the new systems (p. 6)." Research Questions Given that technology has been shown to be useful for educational reform for learning, and that such educational reform is called for because of social changes for which students must be prepared, the question becomes one of how technology might be successfully adopted for learning in schools. The questions for this research are:   What do administrators see as the variables that serve as barriers to the use of technology for learning in K-12 public school districts; and Of the variables that serve as barriers to the use of technology, which can be controlled by the district and altered to improve the use of technology? Operational Definitions Dependent and Independent Variables The dependent variable is the degree of the adoption of technology for learning in K-12 public school districts, defined as: the quantity of computers accessible for learning expressed as the number of students per computer; the hours per day computers are used for learning; the degree to which the computers are networked; and the relative extent that increased use of technology for learning is planned in the future. The independent variables principally under investigation as reported by the administrator being surveyed are each district's: climate for innovation represented by the typology of the district's lifecycle stage culture; description of its position on learning reforms such as constructivism, expressed as the readiness of the district as a willing marketplace for the adoption of technology for learning; and the extent to which it has adopted a shared vision of the integration of technology into instruction and the extent that it has been communicated. Other independent variables include measures of: the confidence that districts feel in their ability to understand, use, and teach using technology; the amount of training and support that is available for technology in instruction; and the availability and adequacy of funding. Technical and Other Terms "Technology is defined as current and emerging electronic technologies which provide ways to elevate the learning and training opportunities of the RUSD learning community, and which provide ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of school and District operations. These technologies include: telecommunications via computer networks, satellite and broadcast access, and telephone; film and video, CD-ROM and other software, audio tapes; and other emerging technologies" (Technology Plan-Year 2000: 1995-97 Action Plan, 1995). The measures for the degree of adoption of technology are defined as the average number of students per computer in the schools of each district, the degree to which these computers are networked, the hours per day the computers are in use, and the degree of immediacy of willingness to commit further funds to technology in the future. The climate for innovation is defined as the locus of each district on a scale of responses to questions related to curricular, community, and organizational willingness for adoption of innovation after the work Diffusion of Innovations (Rogers, 1962). The typology of each district's lifecycle culture is defined by the locus of the district on scales of indicators of prevailing decision values after the work Corporate Lifecycles: How and Why Corporations Grow and Die and What to Do About It (Adizes, 1988). The typology of each district's orientation towards reform issues is defined by the locus of the district on a scale of indicators of prevailing decision values as represented by responses to questions related to educational renewal, reform, restructuring, reengineering, and constructivism. Educational renewal, reform, and restructuring are defined by Conley (1993) and cited in Lane and Cassidy (1994): "Renewal activities are those that help the organization to do better and/or more efficiently that which it is already doing....Reform-driven activities are those that alter existing procedures, rules and requirements to enable the organization to adapt the way it functions to new circumstances or requirements....Restructuring activities change fundamental assumptions, practices and relationships, both within the organization and the outside world." "Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed" (Reengineering the Corporation, Hammer and Champy, 1993). Constructivism is a learning methodology. "The Constructivist view is based on information gleaned from Piagetian studies of children's intellectual development and on Bruner's discussions of the match between curriculum design and learner readiness" (Marshall, 1991). Viewing constructivism as a paradigm or very general "theory of cognition, suggesting how the mind works and how we know things,...people need to have experiences that place them in positions where they'll learn important things," with attention given to educational goals that "strengthen conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills." In a domain "rich in earning experiences and interactions," allowing for "instruction and learning goals to emerge during instruction," the design of the learning should "consider multiple levels of expertise" since "expertise does not follow a linear progression of stages, but takes on different forms in different people, responding to where a learner 'is'" (Wilson, 1995). The typology of each district's learning organization culture and degree of existence of transformational leadership is defined by the locus of the district on scales of indicators of prevailing decision values after the works: The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice Of The Learning Organization (Senge, 1990/1994). and Change Forces: Probing The Depths Of Educational Reform (Fullan, 1994). Hypotheses and Sample Hypotheses The alternative hypothesis is that variables exist which influence the degree of the adoption of technology for learning in the Riverside Unified School District and in K-12 public school districts, and that those variables could be altered and other intervention measures taken as well to hasten the degree of adoption. The null hypothesis is that no variables would be found to exist which influence the degree of the adoption of technology for learning, and that no intervention measures would be found to exist which could accelerate the rate of adoption. Scope This research has been based upon a survey of assistant superintendents of forty-six K-12 public school districts in California (including the instructional administration of RUSD), and 324 school districts across the United States that are members of the National School Boards Association's Technology and Learning Network, as a sample intended to represent the administrators of the more technologically advanced segment of the 15,360 public school districts across the United States, and a comparison survey of a group of 101 classroom teachers of RUSD. Limitations The primary limitation on this research into what variables exist that influence the degree of adoption of technology for learning in RUSD and in K-12 public school districts, how they could be altered and what other intervention measures could be taken to hasten the adoption, is that by design the surveys have been sent exclusively to administrators rather than classroom teachers (other than those classroom teachers in RUSD who have been surveyed as a comparison group who, by reason of their small sample size, could not be said to be representative of the 2.43 million public school teachers of the United States). To the extent which barriers or intervention measures exist which are not the province of school district administrators, this survey has not attempted to study them; there exist many other sources for those studies. In addition, this sample has been deliberately non-randomly selected because per se it represents districts thought likely to be further along the road toward the adoption of technology for learning and therefore more likely to have identified any barriers that exist and any intervention measures that accelerate adoption. General Procedures Following a review of the literature, the method of data gathering has been a survey asking questions related to those conditions thought either to restrain or promote the degree of use of technology for learning in K-12 public school districts. Summary The degree of adoption of technology for learning in the Riverside Unified School District did not reach the goal set forth in the 1990 Strategic Plan that "Technology shall be adopted in the instructional and operational programs of the district." Changes in RUSD's resources and demographics were reviewed along with the Strategic Plan, which was developed to address the performance gap arising from those changes. The district's Technology Plan and Implementation Plan were discussed, and the district's and the nation's current technology status examined. Similar shortfalls in attainment of the goal of adoption of technology for learning were reported in other districts and in other states. Cultural and economic changes as well as changes in worldview and its relationship to the coming of the Information Age were revealed as underlying the perceived need for educational reform, as were social evolution, "a globe clothing itself with a brain," and the need for meaning to organize a philosophy for our existence. The "global village" requires "global citizens" who will be assisted in learning by teachers in the role of "knowledge navigators." As "electricity has extended our central nervous system globally, instantly relating to every human experience," we have arrived at a point where "learning a living" will be how students are occupied in the new environment. The demand for educational reform to prepare graduates for a changed world was discussed along with studies showing the use of technology for educational reform. Given that technology has been shown to be useful for educational reform for learning, and that such educational reform is called for because of social changes for which students must be prepared, the question becomes one of how technology might be successfully adopted for learning in schools. Technology should not be purchased "to perform smokestack tasks." The teaching of knowledge divided into isolated subject areas is seen to be as much at an end as discrete isolated jobs in the world of work. Past successes were seen to often make it more difficult to succeed in the future. Change was reported to start with an examination of philosophy and belief systems. Complex change was reported to require many committed people working cooperatively and insightfully together for solutions. Collaborative skills and relationships were seen as imperative to be able to learn and to continue to learn what is needed to be a change agent for societal improvement. Significant change was seen as unlikely without investment in adult learning systems. Preparing employees to take advantage of the new systems was the subject of one study advocating investing sufficiently in human resource development and "cultural cultivation." Through the Office of Technology Assessment, teachers were reported as believing that the barriers to technology use consist largely of lack of available time, lack of information on appropriate curricular use of technology, lack of assessment aligned with the new learning, lack of technical support and advice, and lack of upkeep and repair. In order to identify any similarities and differences between teachers' points of view and administrators' points of view, this research has been intended to identify what administrators see as the barriers to that adoption and intervention measures that might be undertaken to overcome the barriers.   Next