WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
Continuing the 5W’s of ICT in Education, today we look at the question of where. This presents itself in several aspects, but I shall consider mainly the question of where pupils should spend their time being educated. I shall argue that developments in ICT make attendance at school 9.00-3.30 on weekdays a matter of social rather than educational need.
Society is not a static entity with any kind of objective ontology that can be shared by all of its participants. It is a social creation that exists on shared and overlapping understandings of what constitutes human existence and what Aristotle would call ‘the good life’. Education is obviously central to any society, concerned as it is with the upbringing of those who will shape that society in the future. Tradition and the transmission of culture play a role in this education, culture being defined with Schein
a pattern of basic assumption that the group learned as it solved its problems… that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.
The transmission of such basic assumptions and heuristics to subsequent generations serves as a conservative force on society: it is rare for those within the education system to question its whole structure. But that is precisely what I shall argue for here, although not perhaps in as strong terms as those quoted in my post on The End of Schools.
Let us consider what the school system - at least in England - is predicated upon. We have a school year with holidays dictated by the requests of 19th-century parents who wanted their children to be able to gather in the harvest, a curriculum which has undergone only minor tweaking rather than radical overhaul in the past hundred years and, despite advances in theories regarding learning styles, the construction of information into knowledge by the learner, and talk of individualised learning, very little change in terms of practice. It is no wonder, then, that evangelists of ICTs are easily excited about technology’s ability to reform schools and perhaps change our understanding of what we mean by ’school’ forever.
I mentioned above the fundamentally conservative nature of education. This has led to any new techniques or technologies being grafted on to the established order and ways of doing things in schools and classrooms. The highly bureaucratic nature of schools, with their rigid staff hierarchies, fixed timetables and top-heavy power structures remains. Although a nod towards vocational education has been made over the years, the rejection of the recommendations of the Tomlinson report in 2005 shows a fundamental unwillingness to subject education to any kind of modification for the needs of learners in the 21st century.
As one commentator has stated, trying to fit the promises of ICTs into the existing bureaucratic school structure is akin to trying to fit a combustion engine into a horse. We need to re-evaluate what we mean by an ‘educated person’ in the 21st century and whether the education system, as it stands, produces such people:
The ubiquitous presence and utility of ICT in modern life are having a significant impact on the way we live, and even on the notion of an educated person. It has led to the concept of the knowledge society - sometimes also called the learning society or information society. There is a widespread awareness that these developments have profound implications for education, and that schools must change, but as yet little detailed consideration of the extent of the change needed and the advantages that ICT can bring. The growth of the knowledge society and the pervasiveness of the technology represent a major challenge and a major opportunity for education.
OECD, Learning to Change: ICT in Schools (2001), p.9
As far as I see it, the major advantage of ICTs is their ability to individualize learning. As we are no longer preparing those who attend schools for work in Industrial Revolution-style factories, the skills we engender and the types of learning experiences we offer need to be different. Although some pupils manage to thrive in a school environment, there is a great mass of pupils who would learn better and more efficiently with some kind of personalized learning environment using ICTs. I am not arguing that all education should be undertaken by some kind of ICT-enabled distance learning from home, but I am arguing that the traditional approach of 30+ in a class sitting at desks for each lesson, following a prescriptive syllabus needs to change.
Of course, there is not simply the needs of the learner that we have to consider here. Education is a subject that has massive social and political implications. One of the cornerstones of our culture is the notion that young people between the ages of 4/5 and 16 attend school between approximately the hours of 9 and 3.30. Changing this would have huge knock-on implications for parents’ patterns of work and our current ideas of social cohesion. The short-term problems caused by such a whole-scale changed would also not make the project attractive from a political point of view.
The government has, however, made one step towards if not a revolution, an evolution, towards something like these ends. It is proposed that schools in the near future will be ‘learning hubs’, open from c.8am to 6pm with ‘activities’ provided at school for pupils. I hope that eventually the bull is taken by the horns, so to speak, and a flexible timetable (with set minimum hours) is introduced along with an imaginative curriculum designed for 21st century. One can dream… 
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