Keeping it “simple” for scalability, sustainability and transferability — A reflection of our journey in building and sustaining a future school

This paper takes the form of a combined narrative of the school principal and the dean of development, research and technology on their reflection of the school´s efforts in the integration and pervasive use of technology for teaching and learning. The main intent of this paper is to put in writing the tacit knowledge and insights - the expansive cycles that we have experienced (Engeström, 2001) and gained over the past seven years. This is also our humble attempt to make the implicit (i.e., our tacit knowledge and experiences) explicit (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). This paper describes several educational innovative initiatives taken by the school over the years, especially on how improvements were made over each of the iteration to the efforts made. The issues of scalability, sustainability and transferability were taken into consideration in the design and development of the ubiquitous use of ICT for teaching and learning (Looi, Hung, Bopry & Koh, 2004; Mioduser, Nachmias, Forkosh-Baruch & Tubin, 2004). We further propose the idea of keeping educational innovation simple; keeping innovations simple would facilitate its scalability, sustainability and transferability. We describe how the school has created a sustainable one-to-one computing learning environment in terms of the technological infrastructure, hardware, software and also the teaching approaches and pedagogy. In addition, we also outline how pedagogical practices were enhanced through regular professional development opportunities and practitioner research. This qualitative ethnographic case study records and shares our seven years of experiences in designing, implementing, scaling, sustaining and transferring teaching and learning with technology in a ubiquitous and pervasive manner. We share that innovative educational practices should be kept as simple as possible to enhance their survivability in the already crowded and complex educational eco-system.