Catshanghai

Today I am back in Shanghai trying to come to terms with the ideas that I brought home from the IBO conference in Singapore called ‘Information Literacy Across the Curriculum’. This theme sounds innocuous enough. After all, we were gathered in an elegant Singapore hotel as a motley’ convention of international teachers and librarians. Such meetings are not called conventions for nothing. Underneath the polite small talk and elegant surroundings came a mass realisation that we are all sitting on a time bomb that is destined to blow up in our faces unless we take action now. The IBO should have called the conference “Digital Natives Versus Digital Immigrants”. That would be far more apt.

There was an array of excellent speakers including Ian Jukes and Professor Stephan Heppell. They argued that education is still trapped in the twentieth century mass production model of one size fits all. The world has moved on, but we are still clinging to this old way of doing things. It isn’t a case of being s lightly out of touch with the needs of young learners. It is more serious than that, because we are at risk of depriving the young of a future by hanging on to old ways of teaching and learning.

Technology is changing exponentially. Processing speeds have consistently doubled every 18 to 24 months for the past 50 years while the price keeps falling. Connectivity is becoming faster, cheaper and more pervasive. All of this technological change is having a dramatic impact on all areas of our lives from work to relationships. This has caused a cultural and neurological rupture between the old and the young.

On one side of the divide are the digital immigrants who grew up in an analogue world of paper, books, serial processing and one way transmission from mediated information sources such as a television, teachers and newspapers. We were born before the early 9Os and learnt how to do many things before we had the opportunity to use computers, the Internet and mobile phones.

On the other side of the divide are the digital natives who have grown up immersed in technology and that it is as natural to them as using pen is to us. They are comfortable with screens and have an amazing ability to communicate and access information from multiple channels simultaneously. Today’s teenagers can engage in IM chats while they watch TV, do their homework, listen to music and maybe even read a book. This multisensory onslaught would be exhausting and ineffective for adults but for young people ‘it is a way of life that we need to take on board at all stages of the learning process.

It is going to take a lot of thought, discussion, negotiation and soul searching to figure out where we need to go from here. I don’t pretend to know all the answers, but I was encouraged to get some glimpses from other schools and projects that are further along a path of perpetual revolution. Staying in our comfort zones is not an option.

What are these projects then?

Notschool is a UK Internet learning community of students who have been given a computer, a broadband connection and access to 24/7 online learning to help them reconnect with education on their own terms.. Now they are outperforming the schools that have kicked them out.

The Western Academy of Beijing have given primary classes and students webspace to share their work with peers, teachers, parents and the wider world. Students all have a laptop that they use to prepare, research and communicate learning experiences in a digital portfolio. These portfolios include podcasts. blogs and movies. It is like Myspace for Schools.

Students at NIST school in Thailand are issued with tablet computers that take on the role of text book and exercise book. Students and Staff can work on projects anywhere and then save them to the school’s Sharepoint Server. Students often bring text to life by embedding ‘ft with multimedia. They also use class wikis to share teaching points with students without disrupting learning. Students are empowered to put content on to these wikis, which emphasises the power of peer tutoring.

These are all examples of interim solutions that use technology to assist schools provide more flexible, student centred education. Technology on its is useless unless it is used well and this means there needs to be seismic shifts in perceptions towards assessment, teacher student relationships and process versus content. This is such a big topic to confine to one post and I fear that the conference has opened up a huge Pandora’s box. I will end by quoting Professor Heppell’s optimistic homily that the 21st Century will be the death of education and the birth of learning. For that to happen, we need to get out the way and give students a chance to learn.