For some time now
we have been discussing the advent of the second education paradigm,
brought about by the transition from a world where information and communication
systems were rare, expensive but reliable to a world where the information
and communication landscape has dramatically altered and where both
come in a wide range of formats/genre and both are now overwhelming
in number, depth and quality (with an equivalent variability in all
these aspects) and as well as being cheap, they require a new raft of
skills in order to be used and managed effectively. This transition
has birthed the potential for many of our lifelong dreams about education
to become realisable, both practically and economically.
The
Professional Development Dilemma
Student
Management Systems:
In order to
record assessment data, manage absences, record health and social details,
provide timetabling support and management, provide tools for graphing
and interpretation of the assessed data, demonstrate "coverage"
of curriculum and as well as possibly including a library cataloguing
and borrowing system. . . . . Schools will require a comprehensive software
package to manage all these issues.
Assessment
software:
A software
based solution will form at least part of the process of effectively
assessing student understanding of prescribed competencies. These programs
are getting increasingly sophisticated and far more capable of making
accurate assessments of not just explicit knowledge but also implicit
applications of understanding.
Knowledge
NET's ©:
Schools began with simple in-house intranets available only to those
people within the school environment and these then evolved to becoming
intranets that were available from outside the classroom environment
and now we have web based intranet environments which can publish web
pages/sites very easily using WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
editing tools that are embedded in the web browser. These then matured
into web based environments which allowed groups of schools to work
cooperatively together as an extranet. The final incarnation on this
continuum is the Knowledge NET© [http://www.knowledge-networks.co.nz].
The Knowledge NET© is a resource rich personal intranet for every
student and every staff member as well as an integrated Internet web
site fed content directly from material placed online by the users.
Digital
learning Objects
As well as the software tools described above there are other resources
that are quietly being built around the world that will allow teachers
to make use of digital content built specifically for use in Knowledge
NET© 's/intranets. These web based resources are known as Digital
Learning Objects. Increasingly Digital Learning Objects are being created
in a web format and stored on databases that are being made available
to schools throughout the world. At the extreme end of this continuum
better DLO's being created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
entire courses! The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was one of
the first of the major institutions to provide completely free online
courses. MIT has available on a web site [http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html]
hundreds of online courses that are free to access for anyone, anywhere,
anytime. There are 600 courses available online and there are more to
come. The potential this offers "students" around the world
is enormous. In the United Kingdom the Open Knowledge Initiative; a
collaboration amongst the leading universities, is putting online an
"open source extensible architecture" that specifies how components
and educational software environments communicate with each other. Other
"object repository management systems" are being offered such
as Fedora [http://www.fedora.info]
which can be used to create interoperable web based digital libraries,
institutional repositories and information management systems.
Teachers
and students will increasingly place all their work in an online environment
rather than saving files in numerous formats.
There will still
be books and this statement only applies to that work that teachers
and students create using digital technology. These totally web based
environments are beginning to replace traditional "office software"
as the standard software/service for publishing. Compiling rich multimedia
content is now a very straightforward process allowing teachers to spend
more time on the process of the conceptual scaffolding that underpins
the unit of work.
The
Necessity for Lifelong Learning:
The approach described
above cannot be successfully established without the students learning
similar teaching and learning techniques to those that their teachers
are employing. There are several reasons for this line of thinking:
1.
If students acquire the capability for asking clever and well constructed
questions then they will be able to interrogate information creatively
and build understanding on their own when and where the process is required;
this is truly "lifelong learning". These skills will flow
through into their work and social lives, resulting in them and their
work associates, friends and family acquiring a far better understanding
of changes within all spheres of their world whether it be their work
place, politics, new technologies, building relationships . . .
2.
In order to construct meaning, students need to think about their own
thinking in an extrinsic manner, (metacognition), using a form of self-directed
questioning that will interrogate their own understanding. By encouraging
this we can help them to better understand, refine and present concepts
as well as "create" new understandings.
3.
Effective questioning strategies need to be strategically thought through
so they build on present knowledge and understanding and allow the extension
of present understanding. What this means is that asking questions that
assume some already developed conceptual understanding, may well limit
the possible learning response if that presumed preliminary conceptual
understanding is not established and processed sufficiently to be applied
in a (possibly) different context. The challenge to teachers then is
to begin to build concept scaffolding plans that facilitate the "incremental
development of increasingly sophisticated conceptual frameworks".
[http://www.teachers.work.co.nz/archive_Sept_2004.htm#Scaffolding].
The use of Digital Learning Object's allows teachers to focus more on
scaffolding the conceptual framework and require less time on developing
content.
