Learning Conversations

Often, when we think about the idea of introducing ICT into the classroom (whether in schools or in the workplace), we are simply thinking about ways to change what is happening inside the classroom.

In these cases the role of the teacher or tutor tends to remain the same as pre-ICT days, as does the way teaching is managed and administered. Good teachers, who were already engaging their students with challenging activities, will continue to do so. Poor teachers, who bore their students rigid with lectures and "read-these-pages-in-the-text-book" activities will also carry on as before - except they'll now perhaps direct students to web-based resources.

Those organisations that have really grasped the potential of ICT are using it to support systemic changes in the way they work.

Some examples:

• A secondary school in Coventry that rewrote teachers' contracts to allow them to work from home via video and text conferencing
• A primary school in Bolton that was fed up with having to close the school on snow days and started using simple blogs for online lessons, now builds blogging into the heart of what they do - with great success
• Companies are changing from knowledge-hoarding to knowledge-sharing cultures simply by allowing employees to use corporate micro-blogging sites
• Companies are making far more use of online meeting software and telephone conferences in order to save on travelling time and the cost of meeting rooms
• Tamil Children are shown to be able to teach themselves English and molecular with no input from a teacher (Limits to self-organising systems of learning - the Kalikuppam experiment - Sugata Mitra) Athens password required - unfortunately!

In the education and training world, these examples seem to be fairly rare though.

Let's think what could happen if we really used ICT to its full potential:

• Teachers & tutors would expect students to submit their work and receive feedback electronically. (Now that's easy - I really don't understand why we don't do it already?)
• We would only use physical classrooms/meeting rooms when we absolutely have to - when it's the only way to achieve something. Getting everyone together in the same room is using valuable resources both in terms of space and also people's time. Much of the time there is no point other than "it's what we've always done".
• We would share expertise across schools. But that would need all state-sector teachers to be paid centrally with no competition between schools. Perhaps that's a change too far? But why?
• We would be able to cope with children entering school when they are ready for it, and moving at the right pace for them - and not have to follow our current "sausage machine" processes that are simply designed to support administration and management rather than learning
• We would assess people when they are ready to be assessed, not at some arbitrary point in the year
• Teachers & tutors would be expected to engage in, and contribute to, professional development networks

These are just a few ideas. What do you think would happen to your training or education organisation if we really allowed ICT to be used to its full potential?