This report has just been released by the Education and Science Committee (NZ Members of Parliament), after some consultation with sector stakeholders. While I see such reports as useful to a certain extent, I do have to wonder what difference it will make.
My concern is that the stakeholders who made submissions are those at the forefront of testing the waters as far as e-learning is concerned. They are educators who happily spend hours posting on Twitter, or posting in a variety of e-learning forums; they are list members of a range of education-focused groups; they trawl the net for new web 2.0 tools/mobile apps, give some of them a go in class, have a number of blogs and/or wikis, and generally spend close to 24/7 attached to a digital device. I count myself among this breed, so I am not dismissing them. However, I also understand that this sort of passion for and curiosity about technology is not ubiquitous in the teaching profession.
Technology scares a lot of people, but more than that, it takes a hell of a lot of time! I spend hours and hours on my laptop - often to the detriment of other things. While I (usually) enjoy this time, I know I am in the minority. I worry that submissions to the committee above are made by the evangelical, by those who may have roles that allow them the extra time for ICT that the average teacher does not have. I worry that they are not representative of a wide enough range of educational practitioners. It would be good to see some independent research undertaken to establish the constraints of technology and e-learning in the average NZ classroom - the classrooms that have not been represented in this report. If we are to make any progress at all, surely it is the voice of the average teacher that needs to be heard. That is where transformational change will really start.
No comments:
Post a Comment