Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

In a previous post, I mentioned that Peter Ford challenged me to start this blog. Along with this challenge he asked me to give him , “a few tips as to how as an educator I can make a difference in the light of this virtual society”. Which I did.

On scouring my memory (which gets less reliable as time goes by), I seem to recall a much more errudite manifesto written by Steve Heppell in 2000. His Children’s ICT Charter is worth repeating in this context.

1. Children might expect to be offered progression and continuity for the many and diverse ICT activities they have collected on their way through primary and secondary school. This should not be translated into a soul destroying attempt to reduce experiences to the least set of common capabilities (”I’m sure you do have you own website Alison but not everyone in this room is as lucky so we will work at this cut and paste exercise until we are all starting from a level playing field”)
2. Children might expect that the new “cool” things they discover that they can do with computers would be allowed a place in the curriculum, but only when their teachers can show that “new” is “better”. This simple entitlement carries some substantial hand baggage with it: teachers will need to be better valued as action researchers, the sterile search for “learning productivity” (faster or cheaper learning) will need to take second place to a search for creativity and we will need to embrace the uncertainty that will result.
3. Children might expect that computers would be used as a tool to extend their learning opportunities rather than as a machine to test learning achieved away from those computers. Learning tools not testing machines. They might further expect that examinations would allow them to harness and show the skills and techniques that they have developed with computers. After 20 years of word processing it probably isn’t unreasonable to expect that they might be allowed to word process in the examination room, but there is far more to ICT than word processing in the 21st century and the exam boards need urgently to awaken from their slumbers and stop penalising children for being ICT capable.
4. Children might expect a broader definition of literacy that recognises the media rich world they live in, and will work in. They might be supported, where resources allow, in their creative work with new media: sound, video, web pages and more. With governments all around the world (and perhaps especially in the Pacific rim) embracing creativity and the computer’s contribution to it this is also a key economic entitlement that our future national income will depend on.
5. Children might expect that their personal choice of information and communication technology would be respected. The history of education’s relationship with new technologies is littered with imposition, confiscation or standardisation. Many teachers are of a generation that were banned from using a ballpoint pen (”it will ruin your handwriting”). Today’s students find their mobile phones or PDAs banned whilst the policy on personal laptops in school is usually muddled and rarely starts from an entitlement debate. Some universities expect students to abandon the familiar computer that got them through A levels computers and buy something “more suitable”; how arrogant.
6. Children might expect that work they do outside of school would enjoy an audience inside school. This was hard before, but suddenly, as they used to say on TV, we have the technology. The entitlement here is for children’s work outside school to be valued, accredited even, and offered some progression. All teachers will tell the story of the child they taught that unexpectedly turned out to be an expert on something (badgers, bookies odds, brass rubbing). The entitlement here is to reduce the “unexpectedly” bit, now that we can.
7. Children might expect software that is built on an understanding of learning rather than a model of business practice. Businesses need finished documents, learning needs to record processes and an office word processing or administration suite is not ideal for delivering learning outcomes. MEP authored and sponsored the development of some ground breaking software and gave it away to learners; that public investment in public goods is needed again.
8. Children might expect that, now we have the means, their work from previous years might still be on tap somewhere. One great sadness for many children is losing the record they had of their “brilliant Viking Project” and not being able to show it to their new teachers. This is especially galling when the new teacher insists on doing the same work all over again which is neither the teacher nor the students fault. It is a communication problem. We could be braver yet and suggest that children might be able to re-present revised versions of their previous work, building on past successes rather than starting with a clean sheet every year. After all, this is what so many companies do.
9. And finally children might expect a rather less naive view of what equity means. Government rhetoric sees the information have nots as those without computers, or maybe those without internet access but it is more complex that that: an internet access (like ADSL) which “delivers” information to you but offers little return bandwidth for you to “upload” a contribution disenfranchises a student as effectively as refusing to hear their contributions in class. ICT is information COMMUNICATION technology and the entitlement to communicate, rather than just receive, is central to social equity and to learning.

The full text of the article can be found here. Children’s ICT Charter