Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

I can’t help getting a feeling of déjà vu when it comes to Phil Beale’s rants in the Guardian. While John Clare might have retired from the Telegraph, Phil soon took on his mantle and is not only developing his technique but becoming a master of it. In this latest article, Phil manages to get around to writing about his visit to BETT in January (clearly his visit had such a profound affect on him that it has taken almost three months for him to use it as material). Firstly, Phil believes that:

“The ICT evangelists defend the utility on which their careers and burgeoning influence are based with admirable verve. Not only is this multimillion-pound industry their lifeblood, but it is its own marketing tool: ICT has given bloggers a sense of the power of their own voices, and you can bet they are not afraid to step put of the shadows and declare their power.”

… but fails to notice that perhaps blogging also gives learners that power if teachers allow them to.

Secondly, he states:

“ICT is now entirely analogous with creativity. This is stupid. Real creativity is caused by working within constraints. A truly creative teacher is one who can enter a classroom with only a marker pen for company and produce a brilliant lesson using only their professional brilliance and a stern expression.

“I have worked in six schools, and with the exception of one teacher, Kevin Ducker, I have not seen much use of ICT that did anything more than give poor teachers an easy lesson behaviourally.”

Phil’s simple concern with his own ‘creativity’ is astounding, and his inability not to recognise that learning happens outside the ‘brilliant lesson’ delivered with ‘professional brilliance’ by the teacher even more so, when the claim on his website is that, “Other issues in which Phil specialises are … innovative approaches to teaching and learning.”, and uses a variety of quotations from (now colleague) journalists, “His classes are like a laboratory of teaching styles, wherein all possible approaches to teaching and learning are experimented with …” (Will Woodward - Guardian)

Just like Clare, he sees a ‘hidden agenda’ to the use of ICT in schools and can see no further than the old and now clichéd, utilitarian view of 19th century education, “ICT’s hidden agenda - the message of which is that everything nature produces can be better fabricated”, but fails to explain the motive for government and teachers to produce a society in which, “children’s experience of the world, and of life” are not real. His other stated, ‘agenda’ is economic, whether it be the the exploitation of education by ‘capitalists’ (a Clare favourite) or expounding the rather naive view that the “knowledge economy” is all about gaining and reproducing mechanistic ICT skills, rather than information and communication capability.

In the 18th months since he last wrote on the subject, Phil seems not to have investigated further the use of ICT for the benefit of learners, but then I suspect with John Clare gone there’s a vacuum that needs to be filled, and who better to do it than Phil?

Blogged with the Flock Browser