Andrew Watt on eLearning schools - the greatest challenge of the 21st Century?

Andrew Watt, one colleague who I always seem to meet in rushed conferences, is explaining his views on eLearning to a packed Robert Burns Room (yes, nice choice if seminar room for him ;-) I'm over the moon to be able to get to know him better through his talk.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth (Diogenes Laertius)
What has changed in eLearning since the beginning of time? Costs have lowered and the eskills of our kids have risen. There is an urgent need to radically reform in schools. It's not a superb sign of things to come when a child thinks the reason for learning is to "get a '5' in his tests".

There are four strands which are preventing teachers from taking a leap into this radical future:

• Content
  • Is something taught in schools simply because it's always been? How many times have any of us solved a quadratic equation for real in our adult lives? (Andrew is a maths teacher himself)
  • Does it meet the needs of the 21st century?
  • Can it meet the expectations of our 21st century learners? For example, are we going to simply repackage our Scottish Curriculum with the four labels of A Curriculum for Excellence or are we going to redesign the whole way we work?
• Assessment
  • Why assess only once a year at the nicest time of year to be outside and playing?
  • Why must we wait until a particular age to assess?
  • Why must we look at the sum of student knowledge in a two-hour stressful condition?
    All of these were suitable in the 19th Century, but with handheld devices and more ubiquitous computing assessment can happen in 'messy' ways and show that kids are able to reflect and think, not just regurgitate.
• Pedagogy
  • Are our teaching methods designed for 1970s applicable in the following century?
  • If our majority of teachers were trained in the 1970s-1980s their teacher trainers were trained in the 50s and 60s!
  • How do we change the teacher from "sage on the stage" to the "guide on the side"? Why are we wasting time presenting information when kids can take their time - and go faster - finding the same information on the web.
• Infrastructure
  • Are we using buildings in the right way?
  • Are we using appropriate software tools to supplement teaching, and take the mundane procedures away from the teacher?
  • Have we got powerful enough network capability?
  • Why use handhelds to store info on hard disks when everything can be published online?

But, there's a BUT. Public attitudes and perceptions, educational perceptions even, believe "if it was good enough for me..."

But it's not good enough for them.

Andrew's asked more questions than he's answered, which is a great thing for getting us thinking. What would you say in response to some of those more tricky questions?

Pic credit.

Comments

[David Gilmour]

On curriculum content: this, from the Guardian today, is worth a look - it's generating huge numbers of comments.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1921278,00.html

Britain has at last escaped the illusion that salvation lies in mass science

Making the subject compulsory has been a failure - it is right that it should be a specialism for the interested few

Simon Jenkins
Friday October 13, 2006
The Guardian

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

How about education on demand? Who could build the Education 2.0 platform? Google or a federation of startups? Academic education doesn't work well. It's boring, it's antiquated, it should be fixed. There is a huge market all over the world.

Wikipedia + blogs + Facebook (social networks) + podcasting + videocasting (YouTube) + Flickr + mobile (cell) phones + gaming + IM + VoIP = Education 2.0

"Rather than spending 4 years of your life taking a bunch of courses that may or may not really matter in your life once you graduate, you can choose your education on an 'as needed basis,' based on your unique interests and talents."
http://ben.casnocha.com/2006/09/college_admissi_1.html

Idea of the Day: Education 2.0
http://divedi.blogspot.com/2006/10/idea-of-day-education-20.html

[Chris Davison]

I agree with your post relating to problems associated with a curriculum base dating back decades. The way that this curriculum is delivered does not replicate the way that many students lean today (search and retrieve). Many teachers also lack the skills and awareness to make their lessons relevant to 2006 and beyond. To pick up another of your points, the testing proceedures do not measure each child on their individual strengths, and all learners are bunched together in a 'one size fits all' format. The proliferation of personal media and individual learning platforms will further increase this problem which must be addressed if we are to maximise the benefits and effectiveness of testing. http://taecanet.blogspot.com