The+Final+Draft

The Bates and Poole (2003, p. 79) SECTIONS model provides a framework for selecting and using technology in educational settings. The framework is presented as a set of criteria to guide the design of teaching with technology. The Bates and Poole model lends itself to a broad application in a variety of settings and explicitly addresses noninstructional, practical issues, such as costs and organizational requirements (p. 76). Program planning in the 21st century must allow for, "strategic decisions [that] may be made by the institution, and tactical decisions made by the individual teacher" (p. 80). To ensure the appropriate technologies are chosen, Bates and Poole insist that some theoretical model or framework be employed with emphasis on the need to make the decisions context specific (p. 105). Bearing this in mind, an analysis of the SECTIONS model as it pertains to current contexts and emerging technology is presented.

**S - students**  In the twentieth century, the dominant approach to education focused on helping students to build stocks of knowledge and cognitive skills that could be deployed later in appropriate situations. This approach to education worked well in a relatively stable, slowly changing world in which careers typically lasted a lifetime. But the twenty-first century is quite different. The world is evolving at an increasing pace. When jobs change, as they are likely to do, we can no longer expect to send someone back to school to be retrained. By the time that happens, the domain of inquiry is likely to have morphed yet again (Brown and Adler, 2008). In spite of changes in the workplace, classrooms throughout the westernized world look largely the same as they did at the turn of the 20th century - rows of desks facing the front of the classroom with the conspicuous placement of the chalkboard and teacher’s desk. While K-12 educators have made concerted efforts to modernize the delivery of curriculum and alter traditional structures, on close observation, the dynamic inside the classroom is relatively unchanged with much learning occurring by way of the transmission method. In spite of the rows of desks being reconfigured into circles or horseshoes; chalkboards being replaced with whiteboards, or even smartboards; and teachers working to create student-centered learning experiences, the model is still reflective of the act of filling empty vessels with information.

At the moment, teachers point to the annoying devices, which compete for students’ attention, as the reason for lack of motivation or disengagement that they contend with while working harder at educating their charges. Technology, by and large, is viewed as an obstacle to learning. Many teachers assume that all high school students are more adept at accessing and manipulating technology and the adults in the mix don’t stand a chance of catching up. Teachers are ill-informed and unfamiliar with the incredible number of digital tools that could be used to harness the ‘annoying devices’ and engage students in interactive, inquiry based learning which will, in all likelihood, lead to greater motivation to learn and require educators to readjust perspectives on the education process. If the context of a learning experience is to be considered, educators must include technology as a necessary and viable option to support learning tasks. Karl Fisch, the Director of Technology at Arapahoe High School in Colorado states, “If a teacher today is not technologically literate - and is unwilling to make the effort to learn more - it's equivalent to a teacher 30 years ago who didn't know how to read and write”(2007). Having accepted that real collaboration and meaningful involvement amongst students may require a different approach, and realizing the requirement to expose students to 21st century technologies, educators can only turn to the read/write web. Will Richardson (2006) sees the read/write web as a, … seamless transfer of information; of collaborative, individualized learning; and of active participation by all members of class. It is marked by the continuous process of creating and sharing content with wide audiences. In many ways, these technologies are demanding that we reexamine the way we think about content and curriculum, and they are nurturing new, important shifts in how to best teach students (p.127). The context of the K-12 system must be clearly understood in order to identify the hurdles that must be acknowledged if a change process is to be undertaken. At the core of this challenge is the irony of the role of educators. While teachers and administrators make a daily commitment to advancing the importance of learning for their students, there is little to no emphasis placed on the importance of the educators’ need to learn. The educators are so busy prepping and planning for the education of others that they do not realize that their own learning has been sidelined. The kind of learning that is transformative, not the acquisition of new strategies for curriculum delivery. The emphasis must be shifted to a deeply collaborative and reflective process. A lack of time and money are often blamed for the scarcity of learning opportunities for teachers. Astute program planning can flesh out this erroneous notion and technology can mediate the transformative learning. Kasworm and Londoner contend that, “this learning must also provide opportunities for the learner to seek out and be more proactive in identifying and pursuing their specific learning needs. The learner needs to create part of the learning design and process” (2000, p. 235).  The question still remains whether 21st learners have different characteristics than 20th century learners. Currently, at our disposal, is the Internet, digital libraries, and collaborative tools, but has this changed the learning process, or characteristics, of a learner? With inventories like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), individuals' personality traits are identified and particular aspects of the cycles of learning presented by Kolb, Mackeracher, and Tyler become apparent. From this we can deduce that learning is a natural process and that each learner will have their personal learning style. However what does the 21st century introduce to this learning process, or change in the learner, that places demands on facilitators, instructors, teachers, and professors? Is it that learners are more apt to challenge since they can find information easily that supports their challenge? In a post-secondary classroom, a student will often search the lecture topic on their workstation as the instructor is speaking and ask a question based on the retrieved information. Could it be simply that learners want instant results - the 'microwave' or video game mentality - and lack patience? A different perspective on the influence of video games may be proposed as Hagel, Brown and Davison (2009) ask, "What happens, for instance, as you add more participants to a carefully-designed environment? The online role-playing game[|World of Warcraft (WoW)]provides an intriguing example. More than 11.5 million people around the world now play World of Warcraft. Performance in the game is measured by experience points, which are awarded to players as they successfully address progressively more difficult challenges. It takes roughly 150 hours of accumulated game play to earn the first 2 million experience points but players on average are able to earn another 8 million experience points in the next 150 hours of accumulated game play. Even though, within the game, experience points become more difficult to acquire as you advance, World of Warcraft players are improving their performance four times faster as they continue to play the game. How? Most improve their performance by leveraging a broad set of discussion forums, wikis, databases, and instructional videos that exist outside the game. Here the players share experiences, tell stories, celebrate (and analyze) prodigious in-game achievements, and explore innovative approaches to addressing the challenges at hand. This "knowledge economy" is impressively wide and deep: in the US alone, the official forums hosted by Blizzard Entertainment contain tens of millions of postings in hundreds of forums. And those are just the forums hosted by Blizzard. Independent forums are proliferating at an even faster rate.Of interest is that the more players participate and interact with WoW's knowledge economy, the more valuable its resources become, and the faster players increase their rate of performance improvement. Said more generally, **the more participants--and interactions between those participants--you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up.** Maybe this is indicative of something broader, and we're seeing the emergence of a new kind of learning curve as we scale connectivity and [|learning through pull], rather than scaling efficiency through push.

These perspectives beg the question of what demands the 21st century learners place on institutions and the workplace:
 * 1) learners today have a vast storage of information and facts at their fingertips but do require guidance in accessing and filtering the information
 * 2) learners today use technology both for the convenience of socializing and for gathering information (preferably simultaneously)
 * 3) learners expect current technology to be used in the learning environment

In the post-secondary context, the instructor is constantly reminded of these learner demands. An example provided by an instructor has students first logging into e-mail, instant messenger, and opening a web browser. If the Internet is not available there are complaints and dissatisfaction. Why would this be? Although they have paid to attend the course, to have a face-to-face instructor, and have high expectations, they are not willing to give up the social connectivity, and entertainment that the Internet provides. As the lecture begins, students 'google' information and ask questions related to the topic. This is useful but there is also a need to filter and direct their searches. If software is demonstrated the students all want the software provided to them - free - and are not satisfied with the idea that software is costly and the institution may not be financially able to run it on all workstations. If the equipment the instructor is using in the lab is not capable of running the latest features in a software package, or if the equipment has some technical issues, student satisfaction is reduced. All of this is supported by the data from student surveys

E - ease of use
Web2.0 has been touted and promoted as the next stage of the Internet. It essentially attempts to create a transparent, collaborative environment that allows users to create, view, discuss, blog, interact at any time, in any place. The general population is tuned to and familiar with these technologies on some level. However, the applications are constantly changing and new versions keep appearing. Any suite of tools will typically include tutorials, and the tools themselves should be easy to use, and readily available. Stephen Downes (2005) contends that, "[e]nter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into "microcontent" units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we're looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways". In a nutshell, what was happening was that the Web was shifting from being a medium, in which information was transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content was created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along. And what people were doing with the Web was not merely reading books, listening to the radio or watching TV, but having a conversation, with a vocabulary consisting not just of words but of images, video, multimedia and whatever they could get their hands on. And this became, and looked like, and behaved like, __[|a network]__. Traditional Learning Management Systems are likely to be used and transformed as Web 2.0 progresses. Most LMS platforms like Blackboard or Moodle already contain interactive quiz and examination tools as well as collaborative features like chat rooms, discussion forums, and email. Assuming that the majority of the new Web 2.0 student demographic is comfortable with using the web as a collaborative, creative and co-authoring tool, educational institutions should incorporate more of the newly emerging tools into the LMS platforms. The concept of Web 2.0 as a transition from passive to active suggests that students would have the opportunity create learning material, similarly to our MALAT LRNT 503 Shared Resource Wiki site. Furthermore, Web 2.0 users' tendency to actively contribute to content is a demonstration of the learner-centred approach, which educational institutions have been promoting for some time now. The idea that "[l]earning is something done //by// the learner rather than something done //to// or //for// the learner" (MacKeracher, 2004, p.5) aligns with the new developments of Web 2.0. What evidence exists that discussion forums, chats, and other Web 2.0 tools are effective as learning tools? It was highly recommended in a post-secondary context that discussion forums be included as a structured piece of any online delivered course. It was also suggested that chats were too time consuming for an instructor to participate in. Web 2.0 tools did not even enter into this particular conversation, perhaps because these initial discussions took place at least 4 years ago before Web 2.0 became mainstream. Usluel, Y.K., and Mazman, S.G. (2009), provide an alternative line of thinking with using Web 2.0 tools in distance education models in that importance should be placed on the interactive tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networks. The interaction between learners is important for knowledge sharing and construction. The enhanced interaction between the learner and instructor is also important for the increased contact (albeit not face to face) that the tools provide. Vonderwell (2003) analyzed asynchronous communication in online courses and concluded that discussion forums were positive tools because students felt somewhat “anonymous” and could create an online persona that they did not feel comfortable with in a F2F environment. Students also liked that they had the time to write down their thoughts into reasoned arguments although it was challenging to put down what they were thinking into something coherent. On the other hand, some students commented that unless it was mandatory, there was hesitation to interact in this way and that there was no obligation to answer questions posed by other students. We are experiencing this right now in LRNT503 with the recent discussions in the optional resource discussion where one student asked “Where are the introverts?” to try to understand why everyone wasn’t participating in that forum. Vonderwall (2003) concluded that the negatives could sufficiently be overcome through adequate instructions and course structure on the part of the instructor and that overall, an asynchronous discussion forum is a positive feature of an online course. Ajjan & Hartshorne (2008), looked into faculty decisions to adopt Web 2.0 technologies and found that while student use of these technologies were widely prevalent, few faculty chose to use them in the classroom. 62% did not use nor did they plan to and only a 18% planned to use them in the near future. A positive finding, however, indicated that most faculty felt that the inclusion of wikis, blogs and other tools could be effective means of increasing course satisfaction and increasing learning through collaborative means.

C - costs
A moral imperative for teachers to engage in learning to use technology must be articulated and the ethical reasons to engage are best explained through Sork’s (2000), Question-Based Approach to Planning. He maintains that, “planners who achieve a more advanced level of ethical responsibility continuously challenge themselves and others they work with to: make explicit the moral questions and issues embedded in planning, [and] confront the conflicting moral positions brought to the planning table by various stakeholders” (p. 178). In the K-12 context, competing interests often make the attempts to support teacher education seem superficial and insincere due primarily to differences in stakeholder values. The employer, or School Board, will have political and financial issues as a priority. This body will support a learning program for teachers if it is cost efficient and guarantees an increase in student achievement reflected in data gathered by way of standardized test results. Teachers and their professional association do not place the same value on this information and are primarily committed to improving student motivation, authentic student engagement and the use of formative assessment. While both parties ultimately seek the same result - success for students - the ethical basis of their goals is seemingly contradictory. Cost pressures compound the problem of these competing viewpoints in that there is a paucity of education dollars. The financial implications are of such importance that the Bates and Poole SECTIONS model specifically identifies “Cost Factors” (p. 92) as a significant consideration in program planning. Two obvious cost factors will entail technical support as well as adequate hardware and software. These cost factors overlap the SECTIONS model segment “E - ease of use” (p. 87) and largely explain why the K-12 system is lagging so far behind in its commitment to Technology-Mediated Learning. On an optimistic note, K-12 educators have the luxury of assessing the success of Technology Mediated Learning in other educational settings (i.e. post-secondary) when making decisions about blending technology with current teaching methodology and pedagogy. Digital platforms like wikis, blogs and collaborative writing tools like Google docs, Etherpad and Writeboard make for cheap and practical alternatives to Moodle or WebCT, for example. Many of the free, digital tools are easily run on even the most outdated computers and require little to no technical support. The hurdle here is awareness of and familiarity with the variety of platforms - if one tool is not ideal, another can be utilized with no additional expense incurred. Software costs may be spiraling but it can be assumed that the software developers and companies are in touch with education and recognize the value of having their software inside the educational institutions. Software giants such as Microsoft do provide significant discounts to the educational sector and software companies will often partner with institutions to provide exposure and continued support. As an example, in a program at BCIT, a yearly subscription is paid to Microsoft as an Education IT Academy. This allows students and instructors in the program to access Microsoft software that would be far too expensive to otherwise consider. It is doubtful that there is a an exact predefined "suite of tools", but a major software package is a Learning Management System (LMS). Other collaborative tools such as Skype, or WebX might become supplemental part of the suite but one tool that has been in place for decades is e-mail and is still a primary method of communication. Many institutions [] have decided that the cost to maintain a private e-mail system is too great and have outsourced this to giants such as Google and Microsoft [] Institutions that opt for outsourcing their e-mail system have the benefit of an additional "suite of tools" which provide low cost, up to date, widely deployed applications for students and faculty.

T - teaching and learning
We develop and invent new technology to progress. Let us consider technologies used for text recording of meeting minutes: shorthand on paper, the typewriter, the electric typewriter, the computer, the portable computer. Each of these technologies made written recording easier. Some would argue that the recorders' skill decreased, since the technology compensated for speed, or errors in spelling, for example. This outlook focuses on the past, and what is likely to be lost through a period of change. Some would argue that by automating skills that are no longer of primary importance, text recording may move forward in new ways. This outlook focuses on the unknown and what could be done better through a period of change. Kasworm and Londoner comment on change triggered by technology by highlighting that "[t]echnology has emerged as a significant organizer of our lives and in the ways we obtain and exchange knowledge, ideas, and even attitudes and values" (Kasworm and Londoner, 2000, p.224). New technology provides us with space to explore something new, by automating tasks that we had to focus on in the past and the change also makes us re-evaluate ideas and attitudes. Has written recording, itself, changed? Isn't the recorder always focused on recording what is being communicated during a meeting in a meaningful and accurate manner, no matter what technology they use? Are there strategies that can help the recorder to achieve his or her goal? Taking this parallel to teaching and learning, our goal is to provide students with the best possible learning and understanding of a subject, so that they can succeed in their vocations and lives. What George Siemens emphasizes in his connectivism writings is that sometimes we focus on new technology alone, and associate this new technology with discomfort that we may feel about the changing environment that this new technology triggered. We should shift our focus to concepts which the new technology opens and allows. Or, we could focus on the concepts that we may be losing with the advent of a new technology - both are very valid points, and the necessary contrasting sides of change and of understanding change. The technology itself, however, is only an inanimate object, a tool. As accurate and meaningful meeting minutes are the desired outcome for a recorder, student success is an objective of pedagogical approaches in teaching and learning. Accommodating a variety of learning styles, or using tools that students are accustomed to and are comfortable using are only a couple of factors that must be considered. Knowing learning preferences of different age demographics is also important, because it changes the ways that educators need to explain concepts to achieve student learning and understanding; our world is not static. The societal change that is triggered by new technology needs to reflect in pedagogical approaches, else our communication of concepts would be outdated. George Siemens references ‘participative pedagogy’ as the term to denote the process of allowing students’ ownership of their learning. He presents connectivism as a theory of learning that can bridge the rift between traditional and new educational approaches to prepare learners for the tomorrow they will inherit. Connectivism provides insight into learning skills and tasks needed for learners to flourish in a digital era. It’s primarily a theory about learning that draws on network theory, social networking, and social constructivism. A great deal of consideration is given to evaluating context in Connectivist learning theory. In his University of Manitoba wiki, Siemens (2007) contends that, Evaluating context requires consideration of numerous elements and environments, which influence both design, and delivery of a particular learning task, activity, or program… [e]ssentially, in instructional design, we need to make two substantial changes: 1. Stop seeing learning design as a task that occurs in advance of the intended learning, and begin to see it as a part of the learning process itself 2. Begin to focus more on the context of learning (designing environments of learning) and less so on the intended content of the learning activities (course, workshop, or program) Richardson (2006) has found that, “… by their very structure, blogs facilitate what I think is a new form of genre that could be called ‘connective writing,’ a form that forces those who do it to read carefully and critically, that demands clarity and cogency in its construction, that is done for a wide audience…” (p. 29). Secondly, and most importantly, a blog enables an organized and shareable space that is also searchable, it provides an efficient and accessible platform.

I - Interactivity
If much of our learning is, “based on the premise that our //understanding //  of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions", Brown and Adler contend that, “[t]he focus is not so much on //what //  we are learning but on //how //  we are learning” ( //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">p. 2). // To this end, Brown and Adler have found that there is a second, perhaps more significant, aspect of social learning: Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field or acculturating into a community of practice. Historically, apprenticeship programs and supervised graduate research have provided students with opportunities to observe and then to emulate how experts function. Apprentices traditionally begin learning by taking on simple tasks, under the watchful eye of a master, through a process that has been described as “legitimate peripheral participation”; they then progress to more demanding tasks as their skills improve (p. 3). Educators have an obligation to engender citizenry of the 21st century. First and foremost in this quest must be a method of accessing, filtering and synthesizing vast amounts of information made available in a growing number of digital formats. James, Dewey, Wittgenstein and Heidegger aspired to construct a new view of learning and knowing, one that properly located it in the world of everyday affairs (Stahl 2006, p. 9). It is of utmost importance to identify what students are familiar with and to leverage that knowledge to support further learning. According to Stahl, Koschmann and Suthers (2006), “…collaborative learning involves individuals as group members, but also involves phenomena like the negotiation and sharing of meanings—including the construction and maintenance of shared conceptions of tasks—that are accomplished interactively in group processes. Collaborative learning involves individual learning, but is not reducible to it” (p.3). The task for any teacher should be to address the need for learning activities in which the, “participants do not go off to do things individually, but remain engaged with a shared task that is constructed and maintained by and for the group…” (p.3).Devising a method to allow for the students to construct and maintain the task would appear to be an insurmountable, and even foolhardy, challenge to any conscientious teacher. As crazy as seems, could there ultimately be value in allowing students to be the architects of their own learning experiences? Stahl, Koschmann, Suthers (2006) acknowledge: … a particularly important kind of social activity, the collaborative construction of new problem solving knowledge. Collaboration is a process by which individuals negotiate and share meanings relevant to the problem-solving task at hand… [c]ollaboration is a coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem (p. 3). Technology allows this collaboration process to occur asynchronously, as well as providing a record of the interaction. The value placed on interactivity can heighten the meaning of a learning opportunity and technology can readily mediate such interaction. Class blogging can be used as an example to demonstrate how writing for an authentic audience was the single most motivational push amongst a group of K-12 students to write thoughtfully and persuasively. In a National Council of Teachers of English (2008) publication, teacher Dawn Hogue found that by employing Web 2.0, “students write frequently in class, they often don’t see it as writing, because it’s not the typical paper printed out and handed in to the teacher. Yet, they are more personally invested in the writing because of the wider audience” (p.3).

O - organizational issues
<span style="color: #3e3533; font-family: verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">Organizations are forced to consider collaboration tools and the affect that it is having on how we learn and work in today's environment. However, there is always change and organization must keep their purpose and goals in mind when adopting new collaborative tools

First you begin with the organizational goals. Once that is underway a quality assurance process can help support those goals as new and innovative technologies come on the market, external factors like what the other stake holders are using and what the expectations are within a culture around who has what kind of technology resources and how they are using it. Inglis describes bench marking "involves understanding the organizations own processes,comparing a set of products or services against the best that can be found with the relevant industry sector (p.2) Inglis goes on to describe the steps included :anaylizing the process of others, comparing your performance with others, implementing procedures to close the gap (inglis, O'reagain and Keegan 2000) Good business practices are not put on hold no matter how quickly new technology comes onto the market.

BCIT for exampl have a Learning Resource Unit (LRU) that is mandated to do exactly this along with other functions. As an example BCIT has moved from Moodle to Desire2Learn as an on-line management system. To be truly successful the LRU needs to collaborate with the entire BCIT community and if someone such as myself wants to deploy a new application such as Google Wave into my teaching environment the framework and process should allow some form of experimentation. This leads to further evaluation and adoption by other instructors. Note that institutions such as BCIT in general have an open policy about computer and software usage as restrictions quench creativity. This does not mean there are no restrictions as all participants in the Internet have policies that need adherence: software piracy, creating and distribution of spam or viruses are examples. I do not believe controlling and mandating information and communication technologies is productive but must also state that certain restrictions will inherently exist due to costs and security.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> What's needed is a process for reviewing and incorporating collaborative technologies. Flexibility,Bates and Pool(2003) offer a frame work that would include questions like these when choosing to implement technology. How does the new technology inteegrate with the current technology? what kind training is needed - internal staff, committee members, others? What kind of technical support is available and needed? what kind of resources need to be in place both externally and internally? How will the technology be used? How will it meet our goals? How many departments within the organization can utilize the technology? What's working now? What's not working? What will happen if we adopt the new technology? What will happen if we don't? Do we need external consultants to help us decide. What are the possible consequences of both adopting the new technology or not? What kind of security issues do we have to deal with? Access and privacy are a priority within any interchange of confidential information.

As collaborations shift how we communicate and learn, organizations must have strategy to assess and possibly apply those tools within their business goals in today's market.

N & S - novelty and speed
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Ultimately the answer to the question of the need to "keep up" and the level of technological currency should be left up to each individual institution to decide. The decision to upgrade or implement new technology will be up to the stakeholders within that institution and the organizational culture, vision, values, and strategic directions that guide the institution. By being inclusive of the stakeholders in the decision-making process the institution will utilize industry best practices. So while it is understandable that what is right for one institution may not be right for another, hopefully, at the end of the day, all of the institutions will be moving in the same direction with respect to learning and technology as they have already done with respect to the basic concepts of learning theory and curriculum development. <span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 17px;">Caffarella and Sork support a program planning model that includes all of the stakeholders in the needs analysis and decision making process including administration, faculty, staff, and learners as well. Including all stakeholders in the planning process will provide a better assessment of the type of technology needed. <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"> Lewis and Starsia, (2009) describe the steps typically taken to introduce new technology as follows: 1. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> Consultants are hired to outline technology needs by analyzing the current technology being used in the institution. 2. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> List of options are provided 3. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> The purchase is made.

One issue with keeping up is the financial burden and finding the manpower to research the technology. Institutions may not be able to cost justify consultants. An example of a government initiation to help schools to purchase and use TML is BC Campus [] which has a mission to connect institutions and educators with learners in BC, enabling them to receive an education no matter where, when or how they wish to study. Another more limited initiative is the Special Education Technology BC (SETBC) [] Technology Inclusion Project (TIP) which, in partnership with Provincial Integration Support Program (PISP) [], has a goal to provide assistive technology equipment, training, and a set of related resources to 30 intermediate or secondary schools. With initiatives such as these, it becomes much more plausible that schools can purchase TML software that is affordable, well tested, current, and sustainable. Via initiatives such as these, institutions will be able to "keep up" and not fall behind.

The importance of technological change to the program planning process infers that when decisions have to be made about whether to use technology, which technology to use, and how best to integrate the technology, the planning process must evaluate the importance of using newer perhaps more novel technologies. If a newer software application is available is it paramount to use this newer application rather than existing software? Here the planners need to evaluate factors such as costs (including training), educational value (is the new software able to improve the learning in comparison to the older software), novelty (is the software truly innovative), sustainability (is the old software due for retirement which is forcing adoption of the new software), and infrastructure (will the new software run on existing machines and network infrastructure). I'm sure there are other factors as well such as competition between institutions and programs which will influence the planning process.

Technology change should also be differentiated between adopting new technologies such as Web 2.0 and upgrading to a new version of software already in use. The speed of implementation of an upgrade would be much quicker due to previous familiarity with using the application. The issue of site licensing, for example, could be worked out much more quickly. Faculty and staff would likely be more supportive of an upgrade to something familiar than a completely new and unfamiliar tool. The issue of when to upgrade or introduce something new is likely the most difficult to determine. There are many factors that go into such a decision including need, cost of implementation and on-going support.

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