I’m not knocking the skills or ability of the people who ran TSoF. I have no doubt that they worked hard and demonstrated a professionalism and succeeded in motivating some teachers to invest time into exploring some of their ideas. This is not a personal attack on the management of TSoF, but more a reflection on what TSoF actually provided vs what we teachers (and our students) really needed.

Being a teacher in a country school, we availed ourseves of TsOF twice (iirc) in the 8 years or so it was in existence. Once was part of a robot challenge with only 6 or so students. The cost to do so was substantial and included travel, accomodation and the entry costs. We tried to plan more visits but, even with a preferential booking, were not able to secure a date. I visited TSoF personally for T&D activities 6 times or so, mainly delivering to other teachers.

TSoF, in terms of bang for buck, is a far inferior methodology to providing teachers with the support they require in various areas of technology. Sure it was nice to see an (almost) fully fledged recording studio and run classes through making their own CD, but the number of classes, the number of time slots and the number of schools meant that TSoF was nothing more than a grandiose showcase of what is possible for a select few schools. TSoF just didn’t get out to, in my opinion, the target groups that most needed the facility. The schools that didn’t have the funds to incorporate technology.

A better plan, used across many schools by many participating teachers saw wider success and uptake at a much lower cost. Word of mouth has seen various schools pick up, for example, data logging and computer based science experiments, movie making and multimedia, interactive databases, digital microscopes, CAD, game making programs and the list goes on. These skills were hard won by teachers prepared to do the research, share their knowledge and work with the internet, industry professionals and so on. With the advent of blogging and moodle spaces, that sharing should be reaching a zenith. Rather than storing our knowledge in a multi-million dollar facility with a multi-million dollar operating cost, amongst a few experts who largely were pushing a sponsored view of what is good (sorry, not meant as criticism, but Lego would have been a tad ecsatatic about the opportunity to promote their product no ?) that on my visits to the facility, noticed, were not utilised fully. A few confused ideas in that sentence ! Audacity has found a niche amongst science teachers and IT teachers not because TSoF
heralded its’ use in education, but because a brave soul thought he (or she) would offer their expertise in this area and promote the application. Same with Gamemaker. TSoF have grabbed some of those ideas and run with them, but in terms of cost effectiveness and accessibility, are not in the mainstream.
Recent research into interactive whiteboards does not need a bleeding edge facility to make it happen. Romantically we’d like to look at TSoF and point to the effect it has had in schools, and sure there have been cases where innovation was TSoF led, but realistically, most of the innovation has been school and teacher led.

I think the model for teacher uptake of ideas and successful adoption of useful technologies is the sniff approach. I tend to sniff at something new and see if it has a useful application in education. There are so many things to sniff though, and TSoF provided a very limited range of aromas.
Sure TSoF hosted various conferences (or provided the venue for them), but it was the conference presenters (and attendees) who were providing the broad brush view of emerging technologies. And at a budget price too.
Conferences could be held at one of the more attractive Adelaide schools.
Probably be cheaper too.

After one visit the school brought back a number of innovative educational strategies that saw the school dabble in the technology side. These included imac movie-maker and midi-pads. The school invested a considerable amount of money believing, erroneously, that such technologies would change our teaching strategies and be of imeasurable benefit for the students. The mantra was imac over PC, so a PC school with comparable abilities to the iMac, was swayed by the TSoF experience into spending $35k. The fact was that once the glitz and glamour had worn off the new technologies, they sat idle and the school was unable to find the resources (teachers, time and
money) to pursue them. Teacher moved on, technology ground to a halt. In this regard, TSoF represented the bleeding edge of technology at a scale schools just couldn’t hope to aspire to. A visit to TsOF was a glimpse into what is possible with time, talent and finance but the reality in schools is very different. I would much prefer a group of professionals who are accessible to every school in the state (rather than just the surburban Adelaide schools) be able to guide me with what is achievable in our school, with our resources and what would offer good educational value for money.
Lego technics is not on that list, neither is trying to build a full scale
recording studio. Nice, but not educationally effective without the money.
Someone want to give me a run through the available dataloggers as
replacements for the science lab ? That’d be nice.

Meanwhile, back in schools, it has been a nightmare run of technology advancement. Took schools an age to shake off the well intentioned but cumbersome NEXUS heritage, shared land lines into schools, experiments with subsidised consortium computers, utter lack of staff training and technical support, current internet access (shared 256kbs for 250 students and charging them what, 12c a MB ? through the department system !), internet filtering that defies all sense, failure to block spam from student email, the anti-blog saga, the latest saga with internet downtime and schools, by and large, use 90% of their IT facilities to perform basic word processing and internet cut and pasting. Okay, so the 90% was a guess. Give my school decent internet speeds and capabilities, researched and guided by a competent body of professionals and use the TSoF savings (how many millions ?) to pay for it. Our school, btw, still boasts 7/9 building which date back to the 1950’s, which were transportable and temporary buildings then.
Multi-millions on a showpiece for the government in Adelaide ? We can’t even find a replacement tech or art teacher. TSoF would be nice, sure, but it is a lower priority to my mind that getting the overall SA ICT infrastructure up to standard.

It was nice to see students getting access to the expensive facilities
provided by TSoF, access to stuff they might never see in the classroom, but in equity terms, in value for money terms and in big picture terms, I can’t go past seeing TSoF as a big white elephant that succeeded in promoting bleeding edge education in SA for a limited and sometimes easily impressed audience.

CEGSA has suggested various avenues of action to SA teachers

http://www.cegsa.sa.edu.au/Take_Action/take_action06.asp

To all of you, thanks. I very much doubt that an e-teacher can assist me with network segregation, vlaning and deployment issues over multiple platforms.

http://www.ministers.sa.gov.au/news.php?id=941

I feel sorry for those who work at TSOF, including the technological savvy and creative teachers who now face an uncertain future. Where will they end up?

You write, “The plan to replace it with videoconferencing and online courses only is just ludicrous”. Spot on, it is so ludicrous that we have to ask, what on earth are those in charge thinking about? Do they have a plan or model that involves more than cost cutting? I’m curious about that.

You also raise the issue of who is going to teach the 50yo teachers about new technology. wrt I’m wondering what the future of the technology coaches will be, since I think they have been trained by TSOF (?) As you can see I’m not really up to date on all the local issues.

I’ve never had a great deal to do with TSOF but the things I did like were their twilight seminars (freebies: I show cased GameMaker in this way a few times), they presented some articulate, high powered guest speakers (eg. Prensky), they developed some innovative projects (eg. Jim Edson’s dance mats) and there was some (limited) promotion of open source software (eg. audacity). There would be other good stuff that I’m just not very aware of.
I hope others fill in the gaps. Overall, I felt the emphasis was mainly for primary teachers and there wasn’t a great deal on offer for the development of tech savvy teachers in senior secondary – which is also important in any system.

However, I think the name was not right, it wasn’t really a “school of the future”. It’s a bit of a side issue now but Papert criticised such
terminology and preferred the term “headlight school”, one that casts a light on some aspects of the future. There was never any real philosophical understanding emanating from TSOF about a real vision of “the future” as far as I am aware. How could there be when from the start they were locked into commercialisation as a source of their funding which of course would act as a disincentive for the wide scale adoption of open source software and thinking? And having to put up, like the rest of us, with a censorware system that blocks the future (web apps are blocked by default) is an enormous drag backwards. You would have to have more of an open source developers philosophy and an emphasis on computer programming and other
fundamental issues of computation to qualify as a school of the future.
Certainly, we have a Department that has no right to speak for “the future” (as in school of the future) because their vision of the future is so stunted, commercialised and risk free.

In one sense things have continued to move on and there is a way to build “the future” through blogging etc outside of what increasingly seems to be a frightened little empire.