| |
 |
|
Abstract |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Name: |
Carol Strohecker |
|
|
|
Title: |
Future models of ICT - enabled
learning: What are the Implications for Schools? |
|
|
| Date: |
Monday, 17 May 2004. |
|
|
| Time: |
16.15 –17.15 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Equipping schools with computers and broadband doesn't
guarantee generation of a technologically literate citizenry.
Of course it is essential that we to provide this access
for young people, but we can't stop there. We need to
do more: we need to develop and put into practice new
models of use as well.
This is a difficult challenge. It is difficult because
it requires people who understand at the same time the
technologies, the children, and the educational systems
in which they come together. We are now well into the
Information Age, yet such people are still hard to find.
And when we find them, we tend not to support them in
ways that would sustain their best practices, which they
know and which research has demonstrated over and over
again to be effective.
Why don't we? Because we would have to acknowledge that
the process of changing schools in ways that make best
uses of technologies is deeply transformational. It takes
time and ongoing investment. It requires additional cost
allocations, beyond purchasing and installing equipment,
to investing in teacher development, online services,
redesigns of building architectures, and collaborations
with industry.
And because if we are truly honest, we have to admit that
such change could undermine our assumptions about learning
itself - what it is, how different people do it, what
is important to know, and how knowledge in one domain
can support the growth of knowledge in other domains.
The mere presence of computers does not accomplish the
epistemological reformulations that we need in order to
develop inclusive, economically viable 21st-century societies.
Central to this problem is the reality that while computers
can lead to new, exciting possibilities in education,
they can also be used to perpetuate educational practices
that are considered poor by today's standards: computers
can dress up and even make more efficient transmissive
models such as delivery of instruction and drill-oriented
software based on old and worn out subject areas.
Research and practice during recent decades have demonstrated
that such models are less effective than approaches which
encourage active, constructive, individualised involvement
with materials and ideas - ideas that join knowledge domains
rather than keeping them separate. These approaches can
support prolonged, deep engagement with subject matter
and ultimately more lasting learning. But taken seriously,
these approaches require rethinking familiar structures
for curricula and learning environments.
Places where people can meaningfully construct things
in the world, along with the ideas in their minds, must
allow free movement and open access to materials and other
people. Everyone involved - students and teachers alike
- needs time for immersion in projects rather than shifting
from one externally designated set of ideas to another,
according to externally set periods of time.
So notions of control change - who controls space and
movement, who controls access to materials, who controls
time and who controls the very ideas with which people
are working. Properly used, computers can enable access
to ways of thinking that are truly powerful.
What are these ways of thinking? Not keyboarding skills,
nor mastery of spreadsheets and word processors - but
rather, engagement with the essence of computation itself.
With specially designed but readily available computational
materials even young children can make robotic constructions
- things that move, things that sense aspects of their
environment and feed the information back to the system,
affecting further operations. These children are playing
not just with colourful bits of plastic and not just with
the narrative ideas that frame what their little robots
do, but with generally important ideas such as variability
and feedback.
Such ideas are the building blocks of systems that are
complex because they have large numbers of parts and because
the relations among those parts tend to change from one
moment to the next. Understanding these building-block
ideas is empowering, as the structure of so much of our
world is multivariate and dynamic. We see this complexity
in a wide range of everyday phenomena: weather systems,
traffic flows, economic trends, families and organisations,
to name just a few.
The beauty of an education focused on developing understandings
of dynamic systems through engaging the protean nature
of computational materials is that it enables comprehension
of properties that underlie and govern many aspects of
our lives. Through particular focus on personally meaningful
projects, children and adults can create for themselves
a very generalizable kind of knowledge.
We have an opportunity to frame and support the education
of new generations who understand the bases of their complex
world and who feel empowered to grapple productively with
these rudiments, whatever their manifestations may be.
Let us not miss this opportunity.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
