Jings, I wish I had come up with this one. "Digital Holidaymakers".
AB reports on Maggie Irving's addition to Prensky's rather tired and simplistic notion of "digital immigrants" and "digital natives", the 'them and us' that has offered the lazy, the ignorant and the technophobe a way out of just past the technology (I have some sympathy for the latter, a good website for the second and no time for the former).
Digital Holidaymakers are that third group we all know:
What does she mean by digital holidaymakers? Quite simply, they aren’t trying to emigrate anywhere. They are quite happy where they are. Worse still, when on digital holiday, they’ll try the new customs, quite happily go through the process and then at the end of their time in ‘digital land’, go back home to their own comfortable customs - they way they do things quite satisfactorily already.
How do we turn Holidaymakers into Emigrants?
To get them out of this never-ending circle of trying, shelving and carrying on regardless Andrew's suggestions are spot on. Yes, we need permission to experiment (and fail) and yes we need to raise expectations that there is more to life than text (try a well-crafted podcast or a short video to get your point across quicker).
But I would also argue that we need to start looking at every national project, initiative, curriculum design project and learning experiment having its own new technologies specialist on the team, right from the start. Formative assessment without technology is good, but with a learning blog or online portfolio gains so much more educational traction. A cross-curricular project as part of Curriculum for Excellence work is great, but with technology actually stands a chance of becoming more than yet another short-term project.
Just as the photo of the holidaymakers' idyll would suggest, the ideal holiday of deserted palm beaches seems OK now, but it gets boring after a couple of weeks, so we shelf it, and get back to doing things the way we always did. The change we experience for two weeks on holiday is something we enjoy - we go back every year and do it again - but we still don't work out that we could change the way we live our 'real lives' to reflect what we enjoyed on the holiday.
While Learning and Teaching Scotland has an admirable new technologies staff, there are only a very small number of us. New Zealand has a smaller population than Scotland, but a team of 36 dedicated to new technologies and curriculum alone. Glow, the national intranet, has attracted a wide range of interested groups across the country, groups with expertise and a desire to see the most effective use of technology in the classroom. They could provide an incredibly powerful momentum for change in curriculum, but it would be a mistake to think this will happen naturally.
Somewhere along the line, there needs to be more alignment, perhaps, between the new technologies people (we tend to be met with "teachers won't use that, it's too new, it's too complicated", before the tool tips a year or two down the road), the mainstream technologies people (I would count Glow in this) and the curriculum development people. Maybe it's not just alignment, but integration. If we don't then we can expect some things to happen:
- the snappy eight-word curriculum everyone can remember will just get overdefined and take us back to where we started our journey.
- the effort of keeping 30 kids' learning logs up-to-date on paper will destroy any hope of keeping formative assessment alive in any other way.
- waiting time for thinking will eventually get squeezed to a minimum instead of lengthened to the days and weeks that online thinking allows.
- Glow, the intranet, might move on technologically, but having offered a simple toolset with which people are comfortable, even the new tools will be optional 'add-ons' instead of systemic replacements.
I don't think we're necessarily the "digital travel agents" that Maggie and AB think we are, but maybe we need to join forces in our own Star Alliance. In the airline industry I wouldn't like one group of the aeroplane to come to the party last of all: the designers make my trip enjoyable, the engineers make it feasible, the pilots make it possible and the hospitality people make it bearable. If any one of these groups is not involved in the making and continued running of the craft, in equal order, then the aircraft is no longer attractive. The Star Alliance group together these talents every day to make sure that everyone has the most comfortable, enjoyable, up-to-date, modern, technologically advanced, safe and on-time journey possible.
I'd like see more of a Star Alliance in Scottish education, why not global education, to make sure that everyone has the most comfortable, enjoyable,
up-to-date, modern, technologically advanced, safe and on-time educational journey
possible.
Pic: Star Alliance











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