As in many schools of education, the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta has initiated a number of collaborative projects with partnership schools in an attempt to remove the gap between the traditional, university-based component of practicum courses, and the practice of the school-based component. One model, described in this paper, uses telecommunications technology to deliver field-based experiences. Technology-based, inter-institutional collaborative projects contain elements of innovation, that are usually managed with reference to change strategy processes described by Fullan (1982), Havelock (1973), Rogers (1983, 1986)and others. However, these processes take time and planning and may actually mitigate against adoption and implementation of rapidly evolving technologies. In this paper, we argue that telecommunications technology-based, collaboratively developed models of teacher education may be better served by entrepreneurial thinking than by carefully planned change strategies. One such project is described from initiation through implementation, and components of entrepreneurial partnering are suggested.

For more than a decade, the Department of Educational Administration (now Educational Policy Studies) at the University of Alberta, Canada, has been involved in the development and instructional use of computer-based simulations of the school principalship. The success of the simulations as an instructional tool has been attributed to theirability to "invite " students to suspend disbelief and thus to engage in the simulations as though they were real work. Recent developments, taking advantage of advances in technology and informed by experience with the simulations, have focused on further enhancements to this aspect of the simulations.

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