03.The+Change

Identify the Change ( Chris, stick to just identifying the CHANGE, as some of your discussion moves into implications etc). If you get what I mean? ( Denise).

At first this is just off the top off my head buyt some ramifications of the change to 1:1 computing.

1. As Callen rightly points out the idea of children being digital natives is a bit of a myth. Some are but not all of them are for various reasons such as cultural (I know a lot of the religious famillies at my old school didn't have the internet at home because of the easy access to sinful content) and economic (not everyone can afford an ipad. In fact, at my old school anyone with an iphone4 was 'cool').

However, Callen is also right to attach this to the Rudd policy document. When Rudd announced the policy of handing out the laptops he said "This is THE learning tool of the 21st Century" (I'm fairly sure that's an accurate quote). We noe now from his education revolution document that he sees the purpose of learning to be to increase 'human capital', and by handing out the laptops he's hoping to stay ahead of the curve by trying to turn the kids of today INTO digital natives. I would argue that Rudd realised that we can't afford to compete with the emerging economies of China and India on manufacturing so we have to do it more on technology - (maybe we could mention something about this being part of a larger plan with the NBN???)

2. The change in schools means a cgange in the role of the teacher. I hate this expression but it sums it up nicely; teachers are no longer the sage on the stage they're the guide on the side. The pedegogical aspects of this mean greater student autonomy with the teacher essentially there to teach them how to sort out the reliable sites from the unrelaible ones. We could bring in some of the concepts from e-learning regarding constructivism and 'it's not what you learn its who you learn from' etc.

3. How this relates to the Rudd revolution document is where this falls down a little. It is common to hear people say that the jobs our students will be doing when the leave school haven't been invented yet. This raises the problem of the purpose of education as Rudd sees it. How can we train kids to do these jobs when we don't know what they are yet? 1:1 computing might look like a targeted program when in fact is seems very scattergun to me.

4. Implementation is another problem. The old school I was at had limited access to technology and they did almost nothing to train us on the laptops. The nre school has projectors hanging from the roof and as a result, there has been limited interest amongst the staff regarding the laptops - despite the fact that together they can be a powerful combination. I think this is not entirely the school's fault. Schools are made up of real people and schools that have a techie in a leadership position are more likely to move ahead with the technology than those who don't. Here are some stats i read in The Week recently: In a survey of 1600 school principals 90% said they had never used twitter and only 8% said they used Facebook on a daily basis. 57% said they had never used blogs.

I think this underlines my point. IF the kids are digital natives and we need to change pedagogy to keep up with them then it is the people in leadership positions that need to be able to lead the change and unfortunately the people in these positions seem to lack the skills - because of adequate training.

5. In summary I guess I'm trying to argue that 1:1 computing isn't necessarily a bad idea but it's goals are unclear (purpose of education) and the implementation is dodgy at best.

Hope this helps.

Chris