Spreading Educational Technology Innovations: Cultivating Communities

Abstract

This chapter describes an approach to promote the development and spread of educational technology innovations. The approach nurtures a culture of innovation and reflective practice of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use for teaching and learning amongst teachers under Singapore’s 3rd Masterplan for ICT in Education. It discusses system support, processes, and strategies which a centralised agency, like the Ministry of Education Headquarters (MOE HQ), employs to encourage schools and teachers to participate in ground-up experimentations of ICT-mediated innovations, translation, and spreading. This chapter discusses cultivating eduLab communities to facilitate spreading and adopting effective educational technology innovations across schools. The chapter describes processes for translating research ideas into innovations for scaling, by (1) scanning ideas, (2) prototyping innovations through projects, and (3) spreading or scaling up through communities. It elaborates considerations for evaluating innovations and strategies to scale up innovations. The chapter proposes that scaling includes explicit knowledge and tacit dimensions of teachers adapting innovations for contexts. Thus, communities and champions are drivers for spreading. The chapter extends the principle of “structured informality” to describe top-down supports for bottom-up efforts, that is, how system structures leverage informality in communities, where HQ officers and teachers dialogue to build understandings, adapt core principles to contexts and develop champions who further drive diffusion. The chapter proposes design principles for cultivating communities based on literature from communities of practice and discusses this using three case examples. It concludes with how design principles align with the principle of structured informality to use communities as mechanism for scaling.