How to prepare parents, teachers and students for the next wave of technologies? Should you buy a Mac or a PC for your child? Can you block all the nasties from your child’s computer?
This page is dedicated to the fantastic world of technology, the internet and those who explore it. Our life is being profoundly affected by it and the consequences will be equally dramatic.
I spend a big chunk of my week working with teachers, students and parents, as an instructor/consultant trying to bridge the gap between Digital Natives and Digital Migrants. [see Marc Prenski] what I witness every week is sometimes funny and very often borderline scary.
I think that David Bowie once said that he refused to used technologies that he didn’t understand. Of course I am all for controlling the robots before they control us, but technology is forced upon us wether we understand it or not.
The least we could try today is to enquire about the consequences, the benefits, the actual costs and of course the long term changes that today trends are setting for the near future. Think about the next 20 years, will we finally own jetpacks blazing across the sky as 50′s sci-fi promised us? very unlikely, but shall we have schools resembling today’s schools, very doubtful.
The state of ICT in my end of the woods
Who will teach them IT?
Schools in Victoria, the ones that I am fortunate to work with, look like ant colonies. Big schools in particular have fairly orderly systems in place, each staff carrying on with their duties at a frantic pace, there are only so many hours a day and they are usually engaged in 3 tasks at once. Asking them to stop and think about this new paradigm in education is almost impossible, to open a forum for discussion seems useless, because there is no time and at the end of the day there is no more energy left for a debate.
So what sort of choices do we have? How is the planning for the short and medium term being dictated by the long term vision in schools? How closely parents and schools coordinate an unified action plan?
Some schools are taking the first steps into the new world of ICT.
To be continued…
