Sliced Bread

After last weekends Federal COAG ICT largesse, its reassuring embattled Premier Rees has wasted no time in calling for new DET NSW technology supply tenders.

As part of the Federal edrev, DET NSW have on their wish list the lure of a sub $500 “compact learning devices (CLD’s)” for all 197,000 Year 9 to 12 students and wireless connectivity for 571 DET schools to be installed by February 2010. Tick, good. Very.

Guess the other 1500 DET sites, mainly primary schools, with students K to 8 don’t yet qualify for CLD’s or wireless connectivity and will fall further behind other systems, for a while longer. Cross, very. Maybe DET Primary Schools should just apply for an XO ala OLPC. Seems about how valued they are by DET NSW, currently.

The $1245 per student increase is also welcome news and may indicate Rudd is genuine in his bid for transparency in his new style of federalism. Lets hope so because Australians were promised a new approach to the passe blame game during the last election campaign.

Hopefully this rapid tender announcement reflects a state government committed to delivering the long promised technology improvements for Public Education students in NSW. But as Simon Job said, lets hope Netbook specs don’t fill the tender, we’d be better off with these, or similiar. 

Celebratory restraint me thinks, until we see the actual laptop specs and roll out begin, the wireless functionality and most importantly the vital TPL to support teachers. Will teachers as learners receive one? I wonder?

Almost makes me want to celebrate and yell “Yippee-kay-yea”, almost. But Hans has still not left the building. John McClane has work to do yet.

picture credit: DoctorWho’s at flickr

ZDNet reports Oracle says at least one Federal government minister gets it, web2.0 that is.

Lindsay Tanner yesterday admitted that government agencies lagged the rest of the world when it came to the use of information technology. He also flagged the government’s intention to trial web 2.0 technologies next year (my edit ahem? THAT’S 2009 and it’s only a trial?) — such as allowing staff to post blogs — to adapt policy-making to today’s technologies.

The Australian Government could and should be leading the way in adapting our old processes of consultation, engagement, policymaking and regulation to the connected world. Yet we lag behind other nations in both the scale and pace of reform,” he said.

Is stating the bleeding obvious reassuring or alarming? At least one government minister is publically talking about catching up. Wow.

Maybe, just maybe, if governments on all levels “got it”, like Lindsay is suggesting, then we would see government bureaucracies adopt 21st century read write (web2.0) designs and layouts.

The NSW DET portal is last century in both design and function. It is hard to navigate, search and access, let alone the NSW government recognising that all staff need access to fully networked laptops first. Selective IRM is vital, but to adopt a blanket policy on portals, especially DET’s where participants want to collaborate across systems, is learning folly.

Queensland, Victoria and WA DET, although not yet fully read/write, all have far more user friendly interfaces that at least look 21st century and are far easier to find eresources, share information and navigate.

I’m glad our regional Learning Systems recently launched a user friendly read/write page. Alas, I can’t share with all learners because its locked behind DET NSW’s walled garden, but that’s another pet peeve about sharing openly.

image photogamer on flickr

All students reflect as part of our college Reflection, Organisation And Reading programs. ROAR not only involves using a learning log (diary) to plan, record homework and organise assessments, it also encourages students to consciously record how they best learn. With fine tuning and more realistic goals, I think ROAR, a 4 year old program, will improve further in 2009.

My question however is, how do staff reflect on their profession? I assume they do, I’m just not sure how. Maybe we could introduce a staff learning log and model this reflective practice?                                                           

Jeff Cobb’s thought provoking question What have I learned at work? on Mission to Learn keeps resonating. I especially like these questions

Does what I am doing right now (i.e., having a conversation, participating in a meeting, completing a routine task, etc.) increase my knowledge or skill level in any significant way? How?

What might turn this activity into more of a learning experience? What do I need to do to make that happen? What could my employer do?

What could I add into my activities for today that would provide for a learning experience?

What could I take out of my activities that does not contribute to learning and would not really be missed?

An interesting set of questions which I have answered sporadically since April. Some answers alarmed me. Talk about “stuck on the wheel” and in the massive “same old same old rut.” I needed to change, hence the toe dipping web2.0 experiment before me.

I see future positives, but still question the change rate of the massive edubureaucracy I sometimes feel stuck in. It is responsive, but at a glacial pace. DET NSW really needs a dose of Usain’s speed, to gain  momentum for the hurdles ahead. 

In“Leading A Digital School” , Mal Lee, said,

Only when the vast majority of Australia’s teachers are using the appropriate digital tools as a normal part of their everyday teaching, and are provided all the requisite development and support from the school and system leaders can Australian education begin to assist enhanced national productivity

The key words, in red, need to have bipartisan, enequivical political support across all tiers of government if Australia as a nation is to be fair dinkum about advancing 21st century learning in schools.

In amongst the questionable tangents of the blogeratti there is a growing alignment of dedicated learning professionals striving to  deblinker administrators, policy makers and governments. Those that do not listen, change and innovate do so at their systems, and learners, peril and decline. 

I’ll leave the last word for Jeff as he says it so well;

I’d go so far as to suggest that:

1. Individuals who become conscious of their learning at work and take charge of their learning at work will be by far the most successful in today’s economy.
2. The primary focus of learning professionals should be helping individuals become conscious of their learning and take charge of it.

…if you undertake the exercise above and discover that you really are not learning much on the job, it may be time to look for a better job. The second is that, if you are counting on your employer to understand the new dynamics of workplace learning and help you out, you may be waiting quite a while.

Today’s talk fest hosted by AIIA and attended by some of DET NSW head honchos might have been fascinating. I wouldn’t know, I was busy learning elsewhere.

But according to ZDNet who did attend, Stephen Wilson DET’s chief info guru, said all NSW public school students will not only get gmail accounts this month BUT

the department (DETNSW) plans to equip students with web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs, and beyond the six gigabytes of storage that comes with Gmail, a further four gigabytes of storage hosted by the department.

This is hopefully the ebackpack, tools and cloud computing update that Tim Anderson hinted at back in April. As Big Kev used to say,”I’m Excited”.

This may mean NSW public school students can enter the read/write world in some sort of controlled DET acceptable filtered safe house.

I sincerely hope these announcments really are an example of progress with genuine 21st century ‘connected learning’ for students. 

It won’t be beneficial to genuine advances in learning if all this announcement means is a portal/walled garden version where students can only communicate with other password protected DET NSW student’s. We shall see.

This presentation, simply entitled Pay Attention, was created by Darren Draper in an effort to motivate teachers to think about 21st Century Digital learning and its implications in their classrooms for their students.

SMH 20th August 2008
Have a read of this interesting assessment development in an Australian School, read the 71 comments as well, they tell us a lot about how far out of touch some people are. Look for the Betchblog link in my blogroll because Chris teaches at this school and gives another insight into mlearning.