By Michael Childs
As Lynne Schrum talks about her work researching and teaching the use of technology in education, her eyes twinkle with excitement. Her work focuses on education’s broad new horizon that includes distance learning, online course delivery, uses of groupware for collaborative learning, ethics of electronic research, telecommunications and technological innovations.
“You know, you don’t want to say it too loudly because they might not give you any more raises . . . but it’s almost the best of all worlds,” she says.
 Funny she should mention worlds. When she’s not writing for journals, conducting research or teaching in the College of Education, she is traveling around the globe for speaking engagements, seminars and workshops in her role as president of the International Society for Technology in Education, a network of 40,000 educators.
“This is the only time this year where I have two solid weeks here. And it’s wonderful to be home,” she says. “But my work is marvelous. I’ve gotten to go to some incredible places, like Turkey and France. I get to go to Egypt in two weeks and then Brazil the month after that. And then I do a lot of traveling inside the country.”
Schrum’s teaching is largely focused on distance learning and telecommunications. Her research has been funded by several different grants, including a current project with Georgia Public Television.
“They’re doing videos for high school students to help them transition from high school to college learning,” she says. “Basically, it’s learning how to learn. My graduate students and I are working on the Web support to enhance it, because video can be so static.”
This all seems a far cry from the first 12 years of her career as an elementary school teacher in the Midwest and resource specialist teacher in California.
“I’ve really done it all in education,” she says. “I was a pre-school teacher for a while with special ed students and a regular fifth-grade teacher. I was a resource specialist in California for children with learning disabilities. And then technology started to make sense. I mean I really began to see how it could change what learners are doing, what they’re able to do and how I teach.”
But it was the modem, she says, that really changed her life.
“I found out there were people to talk to--not very many back in 1985, but when I started having my students write and talk to other kids around the country it was really dramatic,” she says. “They were willing to edit. They were excited about what they were doing so I decided it was time to go back and do my doctorate.”
She took a position as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh in 1992.
“My job at SUNY was general education. At least, at first, I was doing method classes for elementary teachers. Then they let me teach a technology class, sort of an introduction to technology for teachers,” she says. “But I wasn’t in my field and I really had to struggle hard to keep up with writing and research in distance learning and telecommunications.”
Schrum came to UGA in 1994 after finding the job on the Internet.
“I wasn’t looking to move, but I was surfing--I found an ad for this job and it sounded like they were describing me,” she says. “The opportunity to actually teach about what I knew was overwhelming. It was like, ‘Yes! Perfect!’ ”
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