Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

At the end of last week, and over the weekend, I attended the ECIS Administrators’ Conference. This year it was held in Barcelona, at the Palau de Congressos de Catalunya. The administrators’ conference does not usually have a heavy ICT thread, but this year there were five sessions that covered a variety of aspects. The one I found of most interest was “Moodle, Virtual Schools and Crisis Preparedness” give by Chad Farley, K-12 IT Coordinator at the American School of Paris. He took the audience through aspects of Moodle which the school uses extensively, but the section on being prepared to continue schooling in a virtual environment, should a crisis such as pandemic avian flu hit Europe, was perhaps the most intriguing. Certainly I have not heard this as a topic for discussion in many of the UK schools I’ve got into recently. For Chad and his colleagues, the recent youth protests in France brought this home. Being right next to a Lycée, staff tried to come in one morning to find Riot Police had cordoned off the area indefinitely. It only lasted a couple of days, but that made them think as to how they might continue schooling in a crisis that might last several weeks. Surely tuition could continue using their virtual learning environment? This threw up all sorts of issues from the robustness of the in-house servers and bandwidth into the school to cope with traffic, to the fact that use of the system by staff was not ubiquitous. While they felt that simply upgrading the system and requiring staff to use the VLE was not necessarily justified by a ‘just in case’ argument, they needed to have plans for improving their preparedness. It certainly made me wonder if many schools in the UK had considered such emergency procedures, and the use of technology to help continue their educational role.

Chad’s presentation will shortly be available here.

That aside, I did manage to get Sunday afternoon in Barcelona only to be swept away with the St George’s day tradition of the city. On St George’s day, the city’s inhabitants walk with their loved one along La Ramblas where men buy a single rose, and women buy a book for the other. Needless to say the tradition was alive and well on this spring day.

It was a little less busy as we wandered up to have a look at Sagranda Familia, a must of course for every visitor to Barcelona.