Politics similar to education? Surely Not?
David Cameron’s
speech at the Google Zeitgeist Conference in
San Francisco
offered interesting parallels with education. In it he suggests that the impact
of technology is that politicians need to “... let go of power”, and speaks of a
people taking more responsibility for themselves in a post-bureaucratic age.
Imagine a democratised education system … positive feedback in place of
hierarchical authority and deference. Where learning and ethos are more
important than control and constraint.
This is the Kent Secondary Strategy aspiration, but there remain excessive controls on learning due to inflexible external assessment regimes that insist on leaving
technology at the exam hall door and setting targets on narrow measures. It's well worth a look at my colleagues web pages for secondary transformation on Clusterweb to see how Kent thinking is shaping up!
I often muse that any attempts at measuring the impact of
technology is prejudiced until we collectively figure out what we are trying to
measure. It makes no sense to me to create an exciting learning culture that
embeds ICT just to remove it completely, and send kids back to the dark ages at
the point where they have to show what they know, i.e. the exam hall. Technology
has to be part of the assessment, and that means that assessment has to be
clear that it is not purely aimed at testing knowledge, but focussed on the
critical processes, and ensuring children and young people know HOW to learn in
a digital age. Education technologists (us) need to get our acts together to
work out how we assess the role processes and outcomes effectively in ways that
are meaningful to teachers.
I was interested to see the excellent work at Cramlington on
‘Learning 2 Learn’ highlighted in last weeks TES. It’s good to see that the
move to shorten KS3 has been stepped back, and the time used productively to
teach children how to learn, and how to use technology effectively to control
their own learning.