Nancy Verber retired ed tech researcher pictured here at Crater Lake Oregon
In this installment of the blog series I am focusing on research. A bit of research on women in ed tech leadership and on women as researchers in the field.
Elizabeth Clark’s Gender Diversity among Higher Education CIOs report from EDUCAUSE indicates that women hold the CIO role much more frequently in higher education than in corporate environments; however, it is still pretty low at 21-26 percent. The report outlines many factors at play with the role of gender in the CIO position in higher education. Even though I am looking at leadership in a broader sense than just CIO the report helped to define some of those factors for me including: the impact on family life for women leaders, specific bias that women in technology fields face, and the importance of mentors to women looking to enter a leadership role.
Through this blog series I am hoping to capture some stories from women working in the field of educational technology. This project is, at it’s heart, a digital history project so I am trying to take a snapshot of women’s experiences in the field of ed tech and archive them in a digital format.
For this article I had the honor of speaking with Nancy Verber Ph.D. a retired education policy and research analyst. Nancy did her doctoral work in Higher Education and Public Policy and she shared with me some remembrances from when she was a team leader while working on research that resulted in Model Nets: A National Study of Computer Networking in K-12 Education. Los Alamos, CA: Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the mid 1990’s. I was able to do a face to face interview with Nancy and I have transcribed parts of our interview below. There is not enough room for the whole interview here but I have posted the audio files here if you would like to review.
Nancy: After graduating from Georgia State University I went to work for an organization called SERVE the acronym was South Eastern Regional Vision for Education… After about a year I was promoted to a senior policy research analyst and I became very interested in the issue of policy in regards to how the Internet was being used in public schools… There was a big project out of Los Alamos National Laboratory where they had an education wing and they decided to investigate the use of computers in forward thinking schools – schools that were far ahead of the curve in using the Internet and computers in general. First of all there were several laboratories involved, I was the team leader in our laboratory and there were other people who were who were team leaders in another laboratory… We divided up into teams and visited these school systems for a week at a time. There were three people on my team and one person was the hardware expert and when we went into a system we spent the first day just getting an overview. Then for the rest of the week the hardware man went with the hardware keepers, the curriculum person went with the curriculum specialist for the school district to see how they were integrating curriculum by using computers in the schools. And I was the policy person and it was my job to deal with the school boards and the technology staff in the school to determine what policies, if any, they had written – make records of that and primarily interview people on: what do you wish you had a policy about or what do you wish you had done differently in regards to policy when computers started coming into your school…
In regards to home life while being in a leadership role
Nancy: Leadership roles in education in general and certainly in technology specifically they do have a major impact on home life. It simply depends on what your home life is to begin with. My home life, I had a very supportive spouse who was in a scientific area and I was encouraged at home, and at work by the gentlemen that hired me, to do everything that I could to move up in the organization… …But my colleagues who were supposed to be doing the same thing I was were not always able to spend three nights on the road in Mississippi or Alabama because they had children. They would take the closer assignments in regards to training or education. My husband always supported me as long as I had a cell phone with me but I wouldn’t have come as far as I did in that organization if I did not have the support of my spouse…
Stay tuned to this series for Nancy’s philosophy on technology in education.