Doug Brown, DFES spoke about the personalisation agenda, where learning is made accessible to all. He spoke about policies in the UK that enable the learner to have access to technologies that motivate and challenge students to achieve their potential in learning. Personalisation is not about lowering standards but empowering people to exceed and go beyond standards. You cannot talk about learning today without talking about technology. However, this is occuring in a world of rapid change and that is the challenge.
How can we change a teaching culture to see that this is an opportunity to embrace innovative uses of technologies. Professionals need to be able to work and learn together and focus on what the learner is doing, amplify and extend their experiences. Great teachers inspire students to go beyond their own expectations.
Leigh Blackall, spoke about teaching is dead, long live learning. His argument that given the technology changes so quickly, how can teachers keep up when many are only just entering the technology age? So really, teaching is only dead in its current form. His analogy is that photography has disrupted the tradition of painting and has propelled painting into a modern era.
He criticised policies which ‘ban’ technologies such as YouTube and mobile phones as policies that avoid real issues, rather than tackle them. Leigh’s view is a grassroots view from someone who can see the great potential of the internet as a learning tool and knowing that systems can install roadblocks as a knee jerk reaction to old problems that arise in a new and rich technology environment. This is happening right now in many school systems.
A recurring theme in these two presentations is that we see pockets of excellence in the use of technologies to excite, motivate and challenge learning, but the transfer of this knowledge across education is not happening quickly enough…. and yet the new forms of social networking technology can make this possible.
Garry
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Hey Gary,
I don’t know if you spend anytime lurking down at edna groups, but would consider this idea. You’ve said, like so many others, that “the transfer of this knowledge across education is not happening quickly enough…”
I’ve been suggesting for sometime that the problem is, at its root, a problem in how we classify stuff on the web - first stick up a domain, then start classifying, which leads to a community having its stuff scattered around domains, like, in our community’s case, this one, edna, flexible learning, etc. So the duplications are endless. The other problem is that everyone’s so focussed on the Info (web) stuff that the communication things like VoIP and accessgrid are a tecked on afterthought, even though it’s all IP based.
I’m trying to get together a little crew, which would include aarnet and the National library to consider if, by using the (first six numbers if the) Dewey Decimal Code (DDC) to put together info and comms hubs for communities (or groups as edna calls them), we might have a way to put some shape into the edu.au domain’s remote conversations - by offering a new kind of directory to I AND C neworks. That’s XXX.XXX.edu.au.
Now DCITA are offering pennies under the Clever Networks programme, which has a cut off on the 27th Nov. It’s outside the education view of things i know, but it has to be if institutions want to encourage lifelong learning. At least it would offer them ways to get programmes in place, which made the communities feel that they didin’t have to go back to their institutions after the project was over, and i wouldn’t have to dig into so many remote domains, to find out what i’d missed. I’d just go to a librarian.
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