Technology+Leadership+Book+Summary

According to Gladwell, outliers are, “…men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary” (2008, p. 17). These outliers, for various reasons have become very successful at what they do, and Gladwell provides a thorough explanation of how. Gladwell (2008) states, People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot (p. 19). You may wonder how these kinds of stories are relevant to educational technology. We as teachers cannot control our student’s parentage. However, we can control the type of patronage, or opportunities, that they receive in our classrooms. Because of technology, the opportunities we can offer are almost limitless. By offering many different types of opportunities, we very well may be teaching the next Bill Gates, Bill Joy, or Steve Jobs. We as educators cannot see into the future, but if we can assist our students with diverse types of educational technology, we can afford opportunities to help them reach their future more successfully. Let’s take Bill Joy for example. “As the Yale computer scientist David Gelertner says, ‘Bill joy is one of the most influential people in the modern history of computing’”, (Galdwell, 2008, p. 37). His accolades include; rewriting UNIX for AT&T, co-founding Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley, and rewriting Java, as well as many others. Joy learned about computer programming in the 1970’s when computers were still housed in huge rooms. Programming time was costly and very tedious. The University of Michigan where Joy went to college, however, just happened to have one of the most advanced time-share programming computer labs. He had access to 24/7 programming practice for free. Now let’s look at Bill Gates. When he was in eighth grade at a private school in Seattle, the Mothers Club held a rummage sale and “..they put three thousand dollars into a computer terminal down in this funny little room that we [Gates and his computer club buddies] subsequently took control of” (Gladwell, 2008, p. 51). This was in 1968. Most colleges at this time did not even have computer clubs. This computer terminal was a time-sharing computer that connected to a mainframe in downtown Seattle (Gladwell, 2008, p. 51). Where Joy had to wait till he was in college to have this access, Bill Gates had it in eighth grade. Steve Jobs’ story is a little different, but still has the same critical element, an instrumental opportunity. “..Jobs wasn’t from a rich family and he didn’t go to Michigan”.. but he grew up, ..“just south of San Francisco, which is the absolute epicenter of Silicon Valley” (Gladwell, 2008, p. 66). Jobs would go to flea markets where he would pick up computer spare parts to tinker with because he wanted to build his own. As stated in the biography //Accidental Millionaire// he would “’attend evening talks by Hewlett-Packard scientists….Once he even called Bill Hewlett ..to request parts. Jobs not only received the parts he asked for, he managed to wrangle a summer job” (Gladwell, 2008, p. 66). As a teenager, Steve Jobs the cofounder of Apple Computer, was working on the assembly line at Hewlett-Packard.

All of these men became very successful because of the opportunities they were given at a fairly young age. As educators we may not be able to supply programming time or a summer job, but what we can do is let our students know about the opportunities that are out there waiting for them. We can do this with the assistance of technology.

Reference: Gladwell, M. (2008). //Outliers: The Story of Success//. New York, NY: Little, Brown & Company.