Are we adequately equipping our students to confidently and competently navigate the complex and changing world in which they find themselves now and in which they will find themselves in the future?
It is a question that educators the world over have asked themselves since time immemorial and a question that perhaps has an urgency now as great or greater than ever before.
I teach at Whitefriars College, a secondary college in Melbourne, Australia. 10 years ago, Whitefriars College decided that all students would be equipped with laptop computers. It was envisioned that such tools would give the students and the teachers tha ability to communicate with each other any time and the potential to access a wealth of information anytime, anywhere. It was anticipated that they would have access to a cornucopia of resources from the biggest library in the world – the world-wide web
For most of the last 10 years we have focused on the notion of the internet primarily as an incredibly rich, if somewhat chaotic, source of information that teachers and students alike could mine to enrich their understandings (assuming that they were taught the skills to efficiently search, critically filter and evaluate the wealth of information ‘out there’). Similarly, our own College intranet was seen primarily as a repository of all sorts of useful information – if not a ‘one-stop shop’ then, potentially at least, a ‘first-stop shop’ for the bulk of the information most relevant to our learning programs.
Today, enormous mountains of information about every conceivable topic can be quickly accessed at the touch of a button. It is easy to be buried under a huge avalanche of facts, figures, insights, utterances and opinions about every subject under the sun. Frenetic change, usually riding on the back of new discoveries and ideas (as well as the reworking, evolution and synthesis of older ideas), is the norm in virtually every facet of life. And such change, ubiquitous and pervasive, leads to the creation of new mountains of information.
In such a context, what should we be teaching our children?
Many facts that were deemed, years ago, to be vitally important for us to teach our children are now seen to be of dubious relevance for today’s world. Additionally, the facts that might still have currency can be found quickly by judicious use of an internet search engine.
Increasingly, it is acknowledged that the skills and understandings that we should be teaching are those that have utility across many disciplines, and whose relevance is more likely to be enduring in today’s rapidly changing world. These include the skills and understandings;
- to quickly find, critically sift, check and analyse a wide variety of sources of information,
- to share and critique ideas (and have one’s own ideas critiqued by others, near and far),
- to create and refine, and
- to present ideas clearly, effectively and efficiently, in a variety of ways appropriate for different audiences.
So, if these sorts of skills and understandings are deemed to be of critical importance, how has Whitefriars utilised (and helped students to utilise) ICT to help develop them? Our use of computers and information communications technology at the College has evolved over the years. Yes, we probably have the first ‘dot point’ (efficiently finding and judiciouslly filtering information) covered ‘in spades’. Yes, email communication between teachers and students remains an important method of seeking and obtaining quick feedback. Yes, use of the internet and intranet remains a useful and very efficient way to find information. The rest of the listed skills and understandings we are working on but still have a way to go. Various software applications are utilised which are helpful for filtering, manipulating, creating or demonstrating ideas and products. The sorts of learning resources that we are creating, and providing student and teacher access to, have evolved to include an increasing number of interactive programs and learning activities. Up until recent years, however, the interactivity has generally been between the student and the program rather than simultaneous/synchronous interactions between multiple users.
In the last few years this paradigm has been challenged by the notion of so-called web 2.0 technologies. The internet is no longer viewed merely as a place where we can find (or to which we can upload) static information. Increasingly, it is seen as a platform that individuals can use to communicate or network with others, to share and critique and collegially edit information and ideas. Use of blogs, wikis, and various online social networks are just some examples of the many types of human intra- and inter-group online connections that are becoming increasingly ubiquitous.
The challenge for educators over the last few years has been, and remains, manifold; to keep focused on what they believe to be the highest priority learning outcomes that will best serve our students, to keep abreast of and become skilled users of information and communication technologies, and to continually reflect on and re-appraise the nexus between the technology available and the ways it might be adapted and utilized to foster the skills, insights and understandings deemed to be most valuable.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:15 am and tagged
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