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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge base on the ways in which assistant principals view their roles, and on the potential challenges involved in a distributed leadership model. Design/methodology/approach – The study employed a narrative capture method, in which assistant principals from two large urban school districts were asked to relate and self-interpret two leadership stories through a web-based narrative capture form. A total of 90 stories were collected from 45 assistant principals. Participants rated their stories based on a set of leadership indicators (including method of decision making and type of teacher interaction present in the story, among others); the results were analyzed statistically. Findings – Overall, participants tended to view their roles in terms of instructionally focussed leadership. However, leadership challenges emerged in several areas of leadership practice, including operational management and teacher professional development (PD). Demographic factors were found to influence leadership perceptions and practices. Research limitations/implications – This study begins to fill the empirical gap on assistant principal leadership roles, practices, and perceptions. Further research, using other methods (e.g. observation), is needed to collect evidence of in situ leadership practices of assistant principals, and how those practices impact and relate to school objectives for teaching and learning. Practical implications – The study sheds light on the leadership development needs of assistant principals and on the importance of ongoing, tailored PD, based on factors including where leaders are in their careers and how they envision their roles. Originality/value – This paper contributes to nascent scholarship regarding assistant principal school leadership.

In the current climate of increased accountability in higher education, many colleges and universities are considering ways to improve their collection and analysis of data and information to achieve organizational improvement. While there has been much written about the costs, difficulties, and challenges of implementing new information systems on college campuses, the costs and benefits of maintaining current systems are not well understood. Our research suggests that in a challenging information environment, enterprising individuals-when unable to obtain the data they need from existing information systems-compensate by creating, or participating in, idiosyncratic methods of data collection and management. These informal practicescalled workarounds-can be seen as both inventive solutions to pressing organizational needs and over time, and costly alternative to a robust and flexible information system.

For teachers and learners, the proliferation of Open Educational Resources (OER) in combination with advances in information technologies has meant centralised access to materials and the possibility of creating, using, and reusing OER globally, collaboratively, and across multiple disciplines. Through an examination of a community of author users of the OER portal Connexions, this article explores individual and group authorship, OER use and reuse and the factors contributing to and hindering these practices. As such, the paper sheds light on how OER can be sustained and continuously improved, with an emphasis on the use and reuse of dynamic, relevant, and high quality materials over time.

Although there has been a great deal of recognition in the business world that information and knowledge management can be vital tools in organizations, it is only recently that educational administrators and teachers have begun to look at how they might use information systems to assist in creating effective learning environments. In the business research environment, the evolution from data to information and from information to knowledge plays a leading role in shaping how organizations develop strategies and plans for the future. Using examples from schools, this paper illustrates how knowledge management can enable schools to examine the plethora of data they collect and how an ecological framework can be used to transform these data into meaningful information.