8.+Interview+with+a+Change+Agent

=The Interview= Interviewer: Craig McDonald Interviewee pseudonym: MS Date: 6 October 2009 Location: Online, using Webex conferencing software. Interview in Papamoa, NZ; interviewee in Sydney Duration: 30mins

My Questions
These were my intended questions. Not all of them were asked and some were answered by the change agent in the course of answering another question.

1. Please describe Cisco's role in leading the consortium for the Demonstration Project and any involvement you personally have had? 2. What efforts are made by the consortium to use existing/indigenous knowledge? Is there an overt policy that aims to develop a school or region's own internal capacity to manage the process of change? (is Consortium involvement just scaffolding?) 3. To what extent is lack of situational awareness or 'outsider status' of consortium members a problem for implementation? 4. Does the Cisco led consortium use any particular model to support the adoption of technology in schools and lead teachers to independent usage, such as CBAM or CREATER? 5. Does each government's timetable for development of infrastructure fit in with NEPAD's goals? 6. Does the consortium train administrators and policy makers, as well as teachers, about best-practice? How? 7. How are local goals determined and taken into account, if a school or region is working to an imposed timeline? Is their a place for 'bottom up' innovation/diffusion? 8. To what extent does the E-schools Initiative aim to bring about a change in pedagogy alongside the introduction of technology? Do teachers concerns tend to be with the technology itself before attention is given to pedagogy? To what extent are consortium members involved in Teachers Colleges? 9. How has Cisco changed its approach to the e-School's initiative based on the results of the Demonstration Project? 10. In public-private partnerships of this kind, what are the greatest barriers to the diffusion of technology? Recession? 11. Have the schools that the Cisco-led consortium worked with during the Demo Project maintained their adoption of technology and pedagogical practices?

Analysis
The change agent I interviewed for this presentation was nominated to me by our course lecturer, Professor Davis. I will refer to her as MS for the purposes of this investigation. MS works for Cisco, which according to[| their website] is 'the worldwide leader in networking for the internet'. MS is currently the director of education practice for Asia-Pacific in the Internet Business Solutions Group as well as an adviser for ICT in education across the company. According to her Mirandanet profile she works "with a number of governments through Cisco’s social investment programmes in education and leads visioning workshops on the future of technology-enabled education with senior officials. (She is) interested in how ICT can be used most effectively to help developing countries to improve the quality of and access to education as well as how more advanced technologies can make a difference in the developed world."

MS stated at the outset of the interview that her involvement with the NEPAD E-schools Demonstration Project was an advisory one, and that she is now no longer involved directly in that project, although she was involved in a similar kind of initiative in Jordan from 2003-2007. In this respect she certainly brings a wealth of experience as a change agent to this investigation.

In analysing our 30 minute conversation with Davis' (2008) Arena of Change model in mind, a number of things stood out to me. In particular was how hard it was to speak of one of Davis' axes without reference to another. She was part of private sector consortium, working under the direction of a continental bureaucratic body (e-Africa Commission) with the intention of demonstrating to governments the potential of technology to enable learning, as the following quote demonstrates:

"The NEPAD E-School Demos was very much around what can you do with technology in schools to really improve the quality of learning and if we could get consortiums to demonstrate this, and then you would bring all these nations together who were working together on this project ..."

MS goes on to explain that the 16 countries involved would then be able to work together to bring about economies of scale, and achieve much more than an individual country working alone might:

"... and you'd bring the might of sixteen or seventeen countries to bear in purchasing power, so we'd come up with solutions and then they would be able to negotiate down costs because they're buying in volume, this was the idea."

This is a key idea which was discussed on the Future Prospects page.

All the while it is important to keep in mind that the classroom is at the centre of Davis' (2008) Arena model, and yet clearly the technology that becomes available is there as a result of commercial actors working in partnership with both other commercial actors, bureaucratic bodies and governments. This cooperation between commercial actors is a significant feature of the Demonstration Project. In this project they come not as competitors, influencing the classroom through aggressive marketing campaigns, but rather as partners:

"Each Consortium had two schools in each country and they would set them up as demos to show what you could do with technology... and what we did, with Microsoft for example, we partnered with them and they would use Cisco and we would use Microsoft so we actually had four schools, because we actually worked very closely together, so Microsoft would lead the consortium on their two schools and we'd lead the other..."

Also, "So Bill Souders, who ran it, he brought in the other partners, he brought in the solar panel partners... the computer partners, he brought in content providers. We worked with a company called Learn Things, a South African company that made African resources with African teachers, so as well as bringing in some of the content providers, and I helped to get some of the content providers from the UK involved in this as well."

Davis' (2008) article begins by stating that the aim was to "...inform educational change and renewal with IT for the twenty-first century societies in which technology is prevalent" (p.506). This would suggest that it was not written primarily with developing countries in mind. It also "emphasizes the importance of teachers as leaders of renewal of educational systems with IT interpreted through multiple ecological layers." (p.506). My interview with MS indicated that this was very much a challenge due to the fact that in some contexts schools were relying on teachers that had barely finished secondary school themselves, and where war had had a severe effect on teacher numbers. For schools in this kind of situation, the focus was very much on training the teachers in pedagogy primarily, as the introduction of technology without this would have little effect. "I believe in technology, but you need pedagogy, you can't have technology without pedagogy. So ... we trained those teachers as best we could to be able to use the technology and that meant a new form of pedagogy and new way of thinking about learning."

For these teachers both the technology and the pedagogy became 'invasive species', entering the impoverished ecology of the classroom. This differs from what we might find in a developed country where there may already be a pedagogy of sorts inhabiting the ecosystem. In this context, with very few trained teachers, there would be little existing pedagogy to displace, potentially presenting an opportunity for a new way of thinking about teaching and learning, both with or without technology.

This lack of experience and qualified human resources was not restricted to the classroom. MS also referred to similar problems at the next level of these nested ecosystems: "The administrators were probably less well trained than the teachers. Each country was meant to have a country co-ordinator who would work with them."

Infrastructure, as discussed previously in this investigation, is a dominating issue in adoption and diffusion of technology, and MS confirmed that this was so. In some cases the consortium had to take responsibility for the most basic of facilities in order to implement the Demo Project: "So for example the school in Rwanda ... they had to put a road into the school because there was no road and they couldn't get the stuff in because they had no road, so we had to put in everything from solar power for powering the computers, we had to put in everything. They were basically huts and we had to put everything in." And again: "The consortium was responsible for everything... providing the power to put into the schools, getting the internet connectivity, working with satellite providers.... It was meant to be done with a country liason officer who was a representative of the government and they were made to watch what we were doing and learn from that so that they could see what was available and usable." This also indicates an intersection with the political axis, on this case on an observational basis. This calls to mind one of Rogers' (2000) attributes of innovation - observability. This indeed is the whole basis of the Demo Project, as outlined on the ' About the e-Schools Initiative ' page.

MS provided further evidence of the various axes overlapping in the following statement: "Every country has a willingness to see an improvement in education in their country, I think the Millennium Development Goals, trying to improve public sector education and the pressure they get from UNESCO to do this would be among the contributing factors in getting involved., and I think being part of NEPAD was seen as kudos anyway." This shows Davis' (2008) bureaucratic axis (UNESCO) exerting pressure on the political axis (the individual country/government) to implement changes in education policy, directly affecting the classroom micro-ecosystem. It also shows a degree of status associated with participation in the e-School Initiative. This is acknowledged by Rogers (2003) as being a contributing factor to the adoption and diffusion of innovation.

MS emphasised the importance of sustainability in any public-private partnership, especially if the goal is long term diffusion of innovation. In this respect commitment is required at every level of Davis' (2008) arena, and across every axis in order to foster evolution in the classroom ecosystem.

"The biggest thing with public-private partnerships is avoiding rusty tractor syndrome, where you put a tractor in then you leave but you don't leave anybody trained to use the tractor and when it breaks down there's no-one trained to repair it and there's no spare parts. It's the same with e-learning, no IT technician, nobody who understands the pedagogy involved, nobody who understands what you can do with the technology. And also you have these separate initiatives, when the funding runs out there's no sustainability built in. For us there are three things when we got involved in any project in the developing world: is it replicable, is it scalable, and is it sustainable, and if it didn't meet those criteria, we didn't do it."