I had the great privilege of talking to this year’s PGCE graduates at Reading University today, sharing my thoughts on education and ICT. I was invited to talk by the head of Education, Leslie Honour, who had read my CV and thought that I had something to offer.
I talked for just over an hour as a keynote speaker, covering a number of different aspects to education and ICT. Central points I touched on included my background as a teacher, and experience with computers (remember that first time with a mouse…?) plus a brief tour of what I am doing these days with Cleveratom. From there I went through the Digital Creativity work where I showed some of the stellar pieces we have had from children over the years, the use of online spaces for learning (lingering over Notschool, somewhat, as well as the power of virtual learning environments), the technology we could use as well as a brief thought about where the future might go.
As ever the focus is on the students and what we are doing/could be doing to provide better opportunities for learning. A common cry from any audience is “That’s all very well, Hal, but how do I do this as well as fit in everything else?” Of course, the answer isn’t to try to cram ever more things into the school day, but to use the technology wisely to replace things you normally do, working smarter with it all. How does this fit with the national initiatives? I think I could reasonably easily show how this kind of clever use of technology incorporates the key skills demanded, and I’m pretty confident that I can offer greater opportunities to students through the use of ICT than without it.
One comment from today went along the lines of the extensive reliance on ICT to provide communities and social groups for learning would inevitably lead to the destruction of social groups as more and more people receed to an online existence. This is a pretty bleak picture, of course, but perfectly valid as a point, and achallenge to all of us to ensure there is an appropriate blend of activities, not all based on ICT.
In fact, it is important to remember that from time to time ICT should NOT be used – particularly when there is no real benefit.
And all of this needs to be in the context of the changes in society, the different needs of the learners coming through the system and the expectations of what they will do when they leave school and take their place in work. Additionally, the global context increasingly shows the shift in emphasis from the UK being the centre of the universe, to a far bigger distribution elsewhere on the planet. Did you know, for example, that China has well over 1 million schools (England and Wales has 24,000), and that by any measure the number of gifted and talented pupils in China exceeds the number of children we have got in schools in total? What are the implications of this for the future, do you think?
And if the average teenager spends around 6.5 hours out of school in media based activities (YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Television) what are we doing to capture the learning that is happening and how would we begin to assess it if we could? Should assessment criteria begin to expect a child to run a group in Facebook, or upload content into YouTube and have it critiqued by an audience?
Or do we do what we have always done, and accept that we will end up with what we have always had… which quite frankly is not going to move us up the world rankings given the shifts happening!
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” – Albert Einstein
It was with great sadness that I learned of the death of Heath Ledger today. I have no remarkable stories to tell of knowing the chap, nor can I say that I was a massive fan of his work. Despite having only ever seen him in a handful of titles I have to say I had utmost respect for his talent. Moreover, my children still watch ‘A Knight’s Tale’ repeatedly, loving the story, the music and the characters, of which Heath Ledger is the lead.