ICTS – EDTalkNZ

I have always felt that the teacher who thinks they can be replaced by a computer ought to be!

The response to the recent announcement of COOLs drew some superficial, hysterical, and quite astonishing responses. The announcement was characterised variously as a conspiracy to privatise education, to diminish the importance of teachers, to put our education system at risk and to fail many students. Again, the quick default to opposition of an idea showed its ugly side.

It seems to me to be a truth that, in some ways, COOL is already here and that most young people are already deeply immersed in it. Their “communities of online learning” encompass many of the concerns that young people have, the circles of friends that they make, their points of engagement with a world-wide web that takes them to places far more enriching, challenging, and rewarding than a school environment could ever hope to be. The sadness is in the extent to which schooling so often stands to one side of this and offers the conventional as an antidote to what it seems to suspect, might be poisonous.

On the other hand, simply importing a kind of embrace with on-line learning could be dangerous. The post-secondary world of learning internationally has shown through its MOOCs what a sham it could all be. I enrolled in a MOOC at the University of Edinburgh. Never have I been so warmly welcomed instantly, never have I had so many friends in such places as Nigeria, Luxembourg, Belarus and even Greenland in the various chat rooms, never was I more excited about learning. Excited I remained until I got delivered into my computer the first session. A talking head, reading from a script took me through material in a manner that transported me back to my university experience in the 1960s. This was repeated in all seven sessions in the course, the only difference each time was a change of talking head. We had a set text as well. Yes, you guessed it – seven chapters written by seven lecturers and sold on Amazon!

If a school and the teachers in online instruction harnessed the skills they have as teachers and as people and used them to enhance programmes they will be needed in the learning process more than ever. The flipped classroom, the new pedagogy, the 21^st Century learners, each demand an increased quality and variety of interaction between teacher and learner even though the delivery of content and the activities to make learners comfortable with managing the course materials and content will be accessible to anyone, anywhere, on time and on-line.

Those last few words seem familiar. They should be! They are the commitment of NZQA to deliver assessment to anyone, anywhere, on time and on-line.

When teaching programmes are freed from the tyranny of place and students are free to experience the encouragement of assessment arriving at the point at which it is most needed, the world of education will be a very different place. And it is difficult to see how this will not happen. There is inevitability about the power of IT to transform the processes of banking, retailing and the practice of medicine, to simplify access to music, to books and to information, to enhance and ease the interactions between friend, colleagues, customers and, yes, bullies and those at risk – human beings are a lumpy lot!

But there is something more fundamental about change that is at play in those first reactions to the COOL idea. I read an article a long time ago. (I photocopied a couple of pages but have since lost the source.) It was a book review (the book was called “Tinkering Towards Utopia”) and it noted that “reform” and “change” were not synonymous. It referred to an article by Cuban (1992) called “Computers Meet Classroom: Classroom Wins”. It was written at a time when computers were being brought into the classroom and the writer reported that it was noted that “as the level of computers and devices were brought into the classroom, we are beginning to observe changes in the relationship between teachers and students brought about not by a reform, but by the fact that the students have acquired a new kind of sophistication – not only about computers but also about ways to learn and methods of research.”

The article, which I am guessing was written somewhere near the end of the 1980s, concludes that what was happening “exemplified one of the major principles in its presentation of the generic life-cycle of reforms. The reform sets out to change the School but in the end School changes the reform. One may at first blush see a tautology in using this proposition to explain failures of reform. But to say that School changes reform is very different from simply saying that School resist or rejects the reform. It resists the reform in a particular way – by appropriating or assimilating it to its own structures. By doing so, it defuses the reformers and sometimes manages to take in something of what they are proposing.”

Perhaps this process had started some time ago in our schools with the uses made of computers, devices and the technological advances in instructional technologies. The COOL announcement might well be a useful wake-up call. There are enough young people alienated from learning and education without inviting those already comfortable with a community of on-line learning to join them.

NOTE:

I keep useful papers and bits and pieces in a loose collection but have not always been punctilious about noting the sources. Well that is not good enough and quite inexcusable when sitting at a computer! I set about using my skills and discover in a few seconds that the paper referred to above is in fact “Why School Reform Is Impossible” written by Seymour Papert which appeared in The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 6(4), pp. 417-427. Now, finding that out so quickly is very cool!

The Tertiary ICT Conference theme for this year is Bring IT On which focuses on identifying and sharing the key issues and opportunities for ICT in secondary and tertiary education, now and into the future. A must for those in ICT Management, Teaching personnel and Service delivery teams.

For more information and to register, please go to: http://www.tertiaryictconference.co.nz/

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I felt completely naked as I walked into the meeting at an undisclosed building in an undisclosed city. The reception area had stripped me of the electronic gadgets that I usually carry with me. Philosophic about this I thought no more of it confident that as promised they would be returned as I left the building. It didn’t seem to matter, well not until the meeting started.

I had no meeting papers. Usually they are sitting there waiting in a meeting filing system that is fool -proof as indeed they had been when I carefully read them the previous evening. All of my meetings are sitting on a virtual bookshelf in nice order thanks to a piece of software developed at Waikato University called Stellar Library. It is a lifesaver in a life punctuated with meetings.

But, no gadget, no papers. They printed off another set.

Then we reached a part of the meeting where I was asked for some detail about the project. No problem, I have a complete set of project papers with me. No! Wait a minute, they are in the same gadget as the meeting papers – different software but efficient nevertheless. But forget efficiency when you don’t have the gadget. I suggested that I phone the office for a set to be sent through to someone who was allowed a gadget. But of course I didn’t have the phone to send either a voice message or a text message.

They decided that it would be too much bother and take too much time and anyway the question didn’t matter all that much. This could have been a real problem but nothing could be done about it and we simply had to move on to the next topic.

It could be that we could set up another meeting. Well, that was more easily said than done – I didn’t have my phone therefore I didn’t have my diary, therefore I couldn’t ………

There is small amount of exaggeration in a quest to be apocryphal but not much – the basic facts are correct. What it underlined for me was the fact that we have become much more gadget dependent than we might imagine. There I was, by a simple request to hand over my iPad and my iPhone at the reception area, stripped of …………

my meeting notes;
my project files;
my diary;
my phone;
my access to text messaging.

But it doesn’t stop there. Because I didn’t have my phone, my watch no longer notified me of all those things that digital gadgets like to notify us of. All it could do was tell the time and state the date! I often take notes on the iPad which can then be quickly shared with others. A quick snap with the camera on the phone can capture a diagram on the whiteboard or the screen and again save a lot of time. These things are no longer gadgets, they are the tools we use.

You see the convergence of connectivity and our reliance on these things has changed the way we work, despite perhaps trying not to we have become very reliant on them. I remember a staff member saying to me once when we experienced a power cut that closed down the networks (actually it didn’t – just shut off the screens and the CPUs) that “We may as well go home, we can’t do any work!” That was quite wrong because at that time filing was still a physical process and there was plenty of that. There were people to see, and so on.

We live in this changed world in which we are greatly assisted to do our work in ways that we never imagined. We rejoice in this connectivity when it works for us but curse when it doesn’t.

Was the meeting a waste of time as a result of my confiscated gadgets? Not al all. I haven’t gone over to the other side completely. I pulled out my notebook (the old kind, lined pages between covers) and my fountain pen and all was well. Ah yes, belt plus braces.

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Category: ICTS

A generation that loves COOL!

Stripped Naked for the Meeting