Why are we really doing this stuff?

The other day I was talking with a teacher with a leadership role in a large school to implement '21st Century Learning' with the aid of ICT and she is wrestling with the complexity of the issues involved. Learning beliefs, staff training, infrastructure building, student take home policies, parent information, student supervision and safety and a dozen other significant issues. It is easy to be overwhelmed by this elaborate set of interlocking issues. 

My instinct is to identify a few fundamental purposes of the planned change and focus on these, pushing all the topics listed above to a second level of importance. These core issues for me, and my conversational partner, are some variation on this short list: student independence in learning, high level learning, creativity, problem solving and collaborative skills. 

If we identify purposes like this for our school and recognise that ICT plays a big role in achieving these, then all the myriad of issues related to ICT development can be judged in relation to these. The leaders' task is much clearer. If, for example, we are discussing whether students should have admin rights to manage their take-home laptops or iPads, then it is very clear to me that Independence, Creativity and Problem Solving at the very least will be strongly enhanced by students having as much control (and responsibility) as possible. Seems to me, high level goals can make decision making much easier because they can clear away distracting detail by saying, 'This is really why we are doing this stuff.'

ICT planning: real goals from a cloudy vision

Everyone agrees that school implementation of ICT into the curriculum is very complicated. And every one talks about goals and strategic planning. But there are dangerous distractions for school leaders taking their attention off what really matters. I think what matters is kids learning, and that we should focus most of our attention on this. But look at what gets in the way.
Here are the four strands that the Digital Education Revolution (DER) set out as the basis for school strategic planning.
Schools are reporting to DEEWR on their achievement of these four strands. However, there are many such lists of goals. Most ar similar, but they approach the task from different perspectives.
Here is another set of national goals for integration of ICT, alongside the DER four strands.

I have drawn lines to connect elements that seem to match. Clearly, the Making Change Happen set of goals is broader, and is focused more on student learning and outcomes.

But lists can be quite deceptive and cloud our vision because they imply that listed items are of similar importance. They rarely are. A more precise list of the elements would look like this:
But this is my judgment of their relative position. The original document does not tell the reader this information. But there is only a limited indication in this list of the relative importance of the 3 main items.

Pity the poor school administrator who is looking for a quick overview of what to focus on when planning school ICT development. No one needs to tell school principals that ICT infrastructure is costly, complex and urgent. Unless one has a clear view of direction, the urgent will tend to displace the important.