Margaret Allen
30-07-2007, 03:11 PM
This came up in the NAACE Forum recently... I love it![clap]
................>>>>>
Most efforts that I can remember to establish standards in educational ICT have failed. And that is no loss. They hold everything back and make ICT that joke you allude to. The whole world of ICT is so organic and changes so rapidly - one minute my Space is cool, the next it's where your grandad goes. Just as adults get their blackberries finally emailing to each other, so children have stopped emailing altogether ("it's what your dad does.."). And so on. We need agile strategies, not ossified ones.
I remember being told by a national agency in the early 90s that a huge internet learning project I'd developed was wrong for schools because its database generated pages were not what the web standards were about! (noone has apologised since of course! lol) but the children poured into it anyway and we made it into the Guinness Book of Records! - all very 2.0!.
In the early days ICT Advisors did a lot of key development work - on software and even hardware - but their most important role now is to lay down a level of ambition. Systems are never ambitious for children. Children are, so are their teachers, parents and others but without a shared vision of just how good all this can be, it all founders into a generation of coasting kids delivering on unimpressive targets. If you word search the "Higher Standards, Better Schools For All" white paper for example you will find the word creativity is entirely absent, as is ingenuity. the word "standard" appears 144 times and "fail"or "failure" 53 times!
Those of us lucky enough to run projects that are not constrained by the many boxes of systemic factory education (the dismal school architecture, the tiny lesson blocks in the timetable, the rigid subject domains and so on) constantly see, and are delighted by, just how ambitious children can be for their learning - especially where it is mixed age, project based, over a decent length of time and shared. We need to lock that ambition into policy.
Last week I was in a school working with a group of young secondary children who were busy designing a CPD workshop to bring their teachers up to speed with Facebook, with why poking isn't rude any more, with Bebo and myArtSpace and YouTube Comments and so on. They were very sanguine about what their teachers needed to know and were in turn interested as to the ideas their teachers might have about using these new places and spaces in learning. There is a rich irony in imagining that down the corridor their teachers might have been busy parsing a policy document to plan the ICT curriculum for those same children!
As I see it schools are busy inventing and testing, with the help of their students, the namy ingredients that make great learning. Then they are assembling their pick of those ingredients to make great local recipes for learning that work with the context and culture of their schools. And as their students test the recipes they refine them and add new flavours. A simply central role for advisors is to collect and narrate these many ingredients and to pass them on, rather as samples, as they go from school to school. This is nowhere more true than with ICT.
And with ICT we have such fab tools to do all this with. Have a look at www.learnometer.net (http://www.learnometer.net/) or indeed at www.heppell.net/doctoral (http://www.heppell.net/doctoral) if you want to see where I imagine all this will be going. The learnometer project is already under way.
Sorry to witter on... the debate sounded interesting, that was all...
S
Professor Stephen Heppell
www.heppell.net
................>>>>>
Most efforts that I can remember to establish standards in educational ICT have failed. And that is no loss. They hold everything back and make ICT that joke you allude to. The whole world of ICT is so organic and changes so rapidly - one minute my Space is cool, the next it's where your grandad goes. Just as adults get their blackberries finally emailing to each other, so children have stopped emailing altogether ("it's what your dad does.."). And so on. We need agile strategies, not ossified ones.
I remember being told by a national agency in the early 90s that a huge internet learning project I'd developed was wrong for schools because its database generated pages were not what the web standards were about! (noone has apologised since of course! lol) but the children poured into it anyway and we made it into the Guinness Book of Records! - all very 2.0!.
In the early days ICT Advisors did a lot of key development work - on software and even hardware - but their most important role now is to lay down a level of ambition. Systems are never ambitious for children. Children are, so are their teachers, parents and others but without a shared vision of just how good all this can be, it all founders into a generation of coasting kids delivering on unimpressive targets. If you word search the "Higher Standards, Better Schools For All" white paper for example you will find the word creativity is entirely absent, as is ingenuity. the word "standard" appears 144 times and "fail"or "failure" 53 times!
Those of us lucky enough to run projects that are not constrained by the many boxes of systemic factory education (the dismal school architecture, the tiny lesson blocks in the timetable, the rigid subject domains and so on) constantly see, and are delighted by, just how ambitious children can be for their learning - especially where it is mixed age, project based, over a decent length of time and shared. We need to lock that ambition into policy.
Last week I was in a school working with a group of young secondary children who were busy designing a CPD workshop to bring their teachers up to speed with Facebook, with why poking isn't rude any more, with Bebo and myArtSpace and YouTube Comments and so on. They were very sanguine about what their teachers needed to know and were in turn interested as to the ideas their teachers might have about using these new places and spaces in learning. There is a rich irony in imagining that down the corridor their teachers might have been busy parsing a policy document to plan the ICT curriculum for those same children!
As I see it schools are busy inventing and testing, with the help of their students, the namy ingredients that make great learning. Then they are assembling their pick of those ingredients to make great local recipes for learning that work with the context and culture of their schools. And as their students test the recipes they refine them and add new flavours. A simply central role for advisors is to collect and narrate these many ingredients and to pass them on, rather as samples, as they go from school to school. This is nowhere more true than with ICT.
And with ICT we have such fab tools to do all this with. Have a look at www.learnometer.net (http://www.learnometer.net/) or indeed at www.heppell.net/doctoral (http://www.heppell.net/doctoral) if you want to see where I imagine all this will be going. The learnometer project is already under way.
Sorry to witter on... the debate sounded interesting, that was all...
S
Professor Stephen Heppell
www.heppell.net