Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

David Puttnam in the closing keynote of the Handheld Learning Conference last week made an impassioned plea for education to engage learners rather than become more dis-engaged from the ways and forms in which young people learn. He drew on the fact that pupil dis-engagement meant educational disadvantage and an increasing “emotional truancy”, in which education was disconnected from what young people value and therefore opt-out. With a reference to the banking crisis, he went on to say that it was his belief that the real impact of technology would be seen as nurturing creativity and imagination and not in moving billions of dollars around the world.

He also took a swing at the newly launched Home Access Programme, as an easy target that could be measured and for its lack of imagination in exploring alternative solutions such as handheld technology, and questioned representation on the Task Force group. In an interesting comment he wondered if “anyone” has spoken to the consumer industry about a mobile phone device that would not receive or transmit calls during the school day, so diminishing teachers’ concerns over use of mobiles in the classroom. In many ways I found this a paradox when later he stated that one problem was that fifty year olds made decisions, implemented by forty year olds that affected teenagers, let alone the clear un-commercial sense of a mobile device that was effectively crippled for most of the day.

Despite this his speech is well worth listening to. Catch it below.

Image credit: Virtual Worlds Forum