Realising our broadband future – Digital Education
(This session doesn’t report on speakers directly but provides comments, summaries and ideas)
Realising Our Broadband Future
digital education stream
Very large bandwidth to big school, computers for everyone, digital resources are the focus (Moo, CIO, NT)
Watching a terrible Microsoft glossy promo video: does this company not realise how bad these things look? Sure, it’s a ‘vision’ not reality, but what it assumes is a class infrastructure – 100% middleclass. Plus the sort of ‘perfection’ they imagine for devices and software is, to be honest, just a wee bit farfetdched given M’Soft’s record on such things. Oh wait, maybe this is a glimpse into the 23rd century.
Part of the problem here is that technologists assume (as always) that the technology solves the problems. That the technology is what’s missing to make education better. Equally, there is a kind of rationalist determinism here, too, hidden in the technological determinism: computer science sees the problems as ones of knowledge and information and data, that there is always a rational answer to a human need which will appear, in the modern mode, if only it can be addressed.
Equally, some of the Microsoft hyperbole fails to account for the way teachers have already implemented the underlying pedagogic and other ideas which are apparently ‘allowed’ by technology, without that technology. Clearly, some technologies improve and extend and make easier some pedagogic approaches, but the experimentation comes from the teachers and students in action, from which a technology need emerges.
There continue to be significantly outdated ideas about education from many people, especially senior bureaucrats and technologists. These people imagine education is like it used to be. However education has moved on and some of the problems which the technology is meant to solve have already been solved or are simply not there any more. At the same time, some problems remain – systemic problems caused by time, space, age of children, the nature OF the system. These problems might be better seen as problems of the school system itself – they cause technology to ‘fail’ because technology is not designed for such uses. (NSW CIO of Ed talks about hotswappable computers if it breaks, just have another).
Schooling has to include, for many good social reasons, the collocation of people into places at specific times. This should not be forgotten. But the Internet, when fast enough and wide enough, enables those locations to connect to other locations in a manner that allows distributed activities to solve scale and reach problems (Hagen, CIO, Qld Education). “Build the damn thing and get out of the way”.
Certain issues, like health and education, are framed by political debate to demand attention to equity and equality of access and opportunity, especially where they relate to the spatial location of users etc. From some perspectives, innovation almost demands inequality – it has to be leading edge and thus mostly unaccessible, not usable or apparently not relevant to the majority. From the teachers’ perspective – the innovation comes from below and thus the system’s insistence on equity impedes.
I also reflect on the way education is seen as being in a problematic state – falling behind some presumed state of required competence in, learning through and exploitation of digital connectivity. Asking if broadband infrastructure can solve this, or similar, doesn’t really ask the right question. The problems is as much caused by the ‘transitional state’ we all live in – caught between pre-digital and digital worlds; our awareness of this transitional state is as much the cause of ‘the problem’ as problems themselves. This does not mean we need do nothing: but first we need to recognise what the real problems are.
