Daily Archives: July 15, 2006

Sometimes, the phrase "Couldn't have said it better myself" is appropriate when reading the posts and comments across my Learning Network. Here are a few that have caused my meager brain to click up a gear.....
Bill Kerr is in fine form again, really looking at the "education big picture" here in Australia in a deep, probing way that provides a shallower thinker like myself with plenty to ponder about. He words things beautifully, especially when assessing the chances of web based technology making successful inroads into schools. His take on the current state of play from a recent post:

The Department thinks: "We control". Teachers think: "We shut the classroom door and do our thing" The reality often is that each is thwarting the vision and hopes of the other.

This is the reason why so many teachers went into meltdown/overload over the new Common Reports that aligned reporting on students to their year level and the curriculum expectations prescribed in our frameworks. Like many curriculum frameworks that have come and gone, a lot of teachers figured that if they just battened down the hatches and continued to teach the way they always had, it would all go away. However, if everyone has to stick strictly to a prescribed curriculum, where is the chance for innovation and moving forward. Bill's thoughts really delve into the systemic way of dealing with change and how many of the issues of how education can keep pace (or attempt to, instead of pretending it's not happening) with this brave new world of instant information access.

Over at Artichoke, a spirited discussion emerged in the comments of her recent post "'Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.'" My light bulb moment came after botts had theorised that part of the problem with ICT absorption in schools was the education system's oversupply of "digital immigrant" aged practitioners and that the next wave of techsavvy teachers coming out of uni would be up to the challenge. Artichoke replied in the next comment that...

......I realised that teaching is not a career option for that attracts Prensky’s Digital Immigrants as much as it attracts the Digital Luddites.

Teaching is not what you would recognise as a career pregnant with ICT opportunity.

I hadn't considered that possibility before but.... it's true! Someone with ICT talent in their late teens/early twenties will be snapped up by other professions where their abilities will provide them with opportunities and acknowledgement, not the roadblocks and skepticism of an education system struggling to stay relevant to its students.

Like I said, so often, I find edubloggers summing up a particular viewpoint in a neat quotable paragraph that I "couldn't put it better myself."