African Education Week 2013 (pt 2)

Thoughts on African education week -day one session two

I felt rather sorry for the panel chair during this session. Leading education technology expert, Kobus Van Wyk must have felt like he'd been transported back twenty years to an education conference in the last century, such was the appalling standard of presentation. I must qualify this first though, because it would be fair to say that the first and last presentations were fantastic, with Fred Baumhardt of Microsoft giving us a futuristic look at what should soon be everyday use of touch projected technology, and Headteacher Ansie Peens giving us her experiences of a 1:1 tablet roll out programme in her state school.

However, these two fascinating talks bookended three appalling sales pitches from vendors set upon using existing technology to do existing jobs. The future of content provision is not photocopying sections of textbooks for kids who forgot to pack their schoolbooks (I'm not even going to validate the presentation from the photocopying salesperson with a discussion), and neither is it in digitising existing or pimped-up copies of existing textbooks with a few hyperlinks and interacties bolted on. These three sales pitches were poor because they were so misplaced. They add to the very real risk that the potential from increased access to devices in schools via tablet provision will be squandered due to use of downloaded and expensive static texts.

As Microsoft's Fred Baumhardt showed us, the future is in user-generated and searched for content, freely available on the web. Open Education Resources are the now and the future, not these expensive digitized textbooks or photocopies of notes and worksheets. If schools are suckered in by the text-book publishers instead of trying to effect *real* transformation of learning by shifting the focus away from prescriptive texts and moving to a looser messier student-centred approach. Text books are a comfort blanket to an approach that can descend into little more than a teaching-by-numbers regime.

Kids today are ‘Screenagers’ and they are completely comfortable with web 3.0 - the creative web. Many of us are still coming to terms with web 2.0…the consumptive web. There is the real tension. They come into school and we expect them to ‘power down ’

We need to be spending education funding much more carefully. Resources should be concentrated on fast reliable Internet access and wifi. This gives every classroom a window to the world. The world is the new classroom, not the tablet, smartphone or other device or the content it contains, and if we don't help our kids to enter this world-wide learning space, we prevent them from not only consuming content, but creating and sharing their own. This is what the speakers in the middle slots failed to grasp and unfortunately, this failure hampers school leaders like Ansie who has made such an incredible leap of faith into the future with her technology provision programme. Using tablets just for purchased digitised content is just doing old things in new ways.

Surely the time has come for us to use technology to do new things.