How This Book Came to Be

Technology Implementation and Teacher Education, along with Technology Leadership in Teacher Education, was born from professional dialogues among scholars around the world. I love going to international conferences and listening to ideas of experts from different areas. Ideas grow with interaction: sometimes I have coffee or lunch with scholars that I just met at a conference so I can learn more about their practices, teaching philosophies, and important issues in their environments. Such conversation causes me to ponder this question: how can I successfully apply practices in Austria, Netherlands, Japan, or Great Britain, to the context of the United States, the country in which I am teaching? This book aims to mimic the structure of such a process: international authors, who are teacher educators, present their best practices in their environments. They also imply how their cases can be generalized so that the audience can think about how to adapt and implement what worked in the authors' environments into those of the readers. Technology changes rapidly. Since the time span from a book proposal to the publication is about two years, books that focus on pedagogical issues rather than technological how-to tend to attract teacher educators. Also, an editor of an instructional technology book needs to have a keen sense of current and emerging trends. To grasp the trends, I skimmed through over 500 journal articles and conference proceedings covering the most recent three years. I composed the draft for the book proposal after identifying critical issues and trends. Then a group of teacher educators exchanged ideas about the draft and finalized our book proposal. While doing so, we decided to publish books for two different strands. One was for leadership in teacher education and the other was for teacher educators as reflective practitioners. During fall 2008, I sent out emails to scholars who already published in relevant topics. The response was very encouraging. I especially enjoyed the process of reading their ideas via email or listening to them over the telephone. Authors asking for my feedback often motivated me to look for recent publications on their topics. Hence, there was a constant active exchange between authors and myself. Furthermore, reviewers and authors had very productive interaction during the formative evaluation process: first during the chapter proposal stage, then during the chapter drafting stage. The process was double-blind reviewed, so I often acted as a mediator to pass on the …