There’s so much stuff to look at this week that I’m having to do two roundups just to fit it all in! Apologies for normal service being somewhat disrupted this week: as I said, I’ve had Ed.D. work to do, Ofsted in school, and an interview to prepare for! Hopefully things will get back to something like normality fairly sharpish… :s

So in this first of a two-part weekly roundup I’m going to focus on ICT in education. The blog posts I’ll be looking at are:

• Educational Technology (Ray Schroeder) – ICT is ‘at the heart of education reform,’ UK DfES tells JISC
• elearnspace (George Siemens) – Is technology changing our brains?
• Learning is Messy (Brian Crosby) – Can Computers Help Schools?
• The Wales-Wide Web (Graham Attwell) – Educational Technology is NOT Neutral
• EdTechPost (Scott Leslie) – ‘Blog Uses in Education’ Drag and Drop Exercise

The post I want to begin today’s roundup is George Siemens on Is technology changing our brains? in which he discusses the problem of context in the series of disconnected, often fragmentary learning experiences to which students are often subjected. The article on the which is quoted in the Smart Mobs website to which he links is one that I’ve discussed before. I have to say that, despite my obvious bias in favour of educational technology, this is an issue about which I am concerned. It’s part of the reason why Andrew Field and I set up the EffectiveICT.co.uk Forum – so that the pedagogy behind educational technology can be discussed, rather than it simply being rolled out unthinkingly and unquestioningly. The problem is a fairly large one when put in this way:

In just a couple of decades, we have slipped away from a culture based essentially on words to one based essentially on images, or pictures. This is probably one of the great shifts in the story of modern humans but we take it almost for granted.

There can be little doubt that the structures, never mind the surface form, of the English language are changing fast.

The process of traditional book-reading, which involves following an author through a series of interconnected steps in a logical fashion. We read other narratives and compare them, and so “build up a conceptual framework that enables us to evaluate further journeys… One might argue that this is the basis of education … Traditional education, she says, enables us to “turn information into knowledge.”

Put like that, it is obvious where her worries lie. The flickering up and flashing away again of multimedia images do not allow those connections, and therefore the context, to build up.

I suspect the reponse from many educational bloggers would be similar to Brian Crosby’s in his post Can Computers Help Schools? He cites Jay Mathews a reporter for the Washington Post Education Reporter who, he believes, just doesn’t ‘get it’. Mathews questions the widespread embracing of educational technology despite a lack of data showing that it actually has a positive effect on learning. Brian responds:

Hmmm … it seems to me that schools and home schoolers invest a lot of money in many tools to help students access learning. Where is the data that shows that pencils or paper help kids learn? What about data showing textbooks are helping more kids learn? We spend more money on textbooks than technology – where’s the data? Is there data showing chairs and desks help kids learn? Chalkboards? Whiteboards? Crayons? Rulers? Compasses? Paint? Blocks? Playground equipment? Copy Machines? … No data? … Then no important learning happened. (Don’t I remember something about not everything important gets tested?)

He certainly has a point about not everything important thing in life gets tested. In fact, I’d take that one step further and say that there are certain important things in life that cannot be tested! (reliability? thinking around a problem? integrity?) And the fundamental principle of his blog, that ‘Learning is Messy’ is certainly something I’d subscribe to. :D

There’s certainly something important about using educational technology in the classroom. Some would point towards extra engagement, some would point towards 21st-century skills, whilst some – such as the Department for Educationa and Skills (DfES) – would say that ICT is ‘at the heart of education reform’. But is it really about the government and senior managers simply having more data? It would certainly seem so from the following statement by Michael Stevenson, Director of Technology at the DfES:

There’s clearly an opportunity to create a more cohesive system for each learner to travel through, tracked and supported as they go. If you want to do that, then technology and data are going to be powerful levers for making it happen.

You see, the problem is – as hinted at above – that learning is not a linear, straightfoward business. So this ‘cohesive system for each learner to travel through’ whilst they are ‘tracked’ starts to sound a bit sinister. Are we on a production line here churning out standard items? I hope that’s not the vision, yet I fear (on perhaps a subconscious level) it is… :o

I have issues with the using of levels in education (or should I say the way levels are used in education) but that’s a topic for a whole new post (or series of posts) – suffice to say that the discourse needs to be a whole lot more complex than it is currently. Fortunately, there are some educators such as Graham Attwell who realise this. This week I’ve read his post/presentation Educational Technology is NOT Neutral, parts of which are worth quoting at length:

The forms and uses of technologies are shaped by political and social processes. If learning is a social process, then any consideration of the development and impact of e-learning and e-learning technologies needs to examine the wider social, economic and cultural processes and discourses involved in the development and implementation of new technologies in education.

…

Even the development of individual learning portfolios has been inhibited by the desire to control and commodify learning. Rather than learners being encouraged to develop an account of all their learning experiences, many systems constrain the recording and reflection on learning to the learning outcomes prescribed by the curriculum and by the desire to present the results of the portfolio in a standard way.

However, the changing ways in which young people are using computers for learning and the increasing use of ICt for informal learning is leading to new pedagogic possibilities and opportunities for new didactic approaches to education and training. Ubiquitous computing and social software have the potential to support such a new approach to learning and an expanded pedagogical idea of e-portfolios.

What Graham suggests, therefore, is a new approach:

Present formal e-learning is largely context free, is usually subject based, and is sequenced by teachers and trainers. Above all e-learning is driven by the demands of the education process, rather than by the demands of the work process. A new didactical approach requires curricula based on a holistic understanding of work processes, allowing learners to create and make as they learn and to engage in a community of practice through their activities and understanding of those activities. In this way the subject of learning and the process of learning can be brought together developing new and dynamic forms of ‘applied knowledge’ or ‘work process knowledge’ as both the subject and object of learning.

The application of knowledge through blogs, wikis, etc. can tap into this ‘work process knowledge’. Scott Leslie’s post on ‘Blog Uses in Education’ Drag and Drop Exercise brought to my attention a post made by him back in 2003 in which he came up with a matrix showing the possible applications of blogging:

(click to enlarge)

So next time someone asks you what the educational point is in using blogs with students, point them towards this matrix! :D

Well that’s all from me until part 2 tomorrow – I’ll leave you with this Dilbert cartoon: