Dick Sblog

Back in the late ’90s I worked on a fabulous project called ‘Web for Schools’. We trained 700 teachers from across Europe to create web resources (the hard, html way) and they trained their students; then they linked up to collaborate. For many of them, the results were astonishing – the kid’s knowledge and skills soon outstripped their teachers’ and the level of motivation was fantastic. Activity sprang up across geographic and subject boundaries and we talked at length about changing educational paradigms.

Then the funding stopped and most folk went back to teaching their national curriculums: knowledge in silos.

I moved on to work in business support. In that arena, more and more firms are using remote working and online collaboration. blogs and wikis are mainstream in corporations, organisations and supply chains are integrated. Companies (and societies) increasingly need people with skills of negotiation, project & team working, initiative, innovation, communication in all media.

Recently I’ve been looking at what is going on in the use of technology in education. If I said that most of it is pretty mundane, it would be a compliment. I can see some great advances in the use of VLEs (but is this a shift of paradigm or just the same stuff in new formats?) and information management systems; I can see some wonderful projects developing immersive environments to engage pupils (or are these software houses looking for a big new market?), I see great projects in which schools produce ’stuff’ and publish it for others to comment on and use (but is this real, full-blooded collaboration?).

I also see schools paranoid about exposing their pupils to unsafe content and therefore restricting their access to online services and sites. But this is what happens when they step outside the safe wall of their establishment, so how do we prepare them for the web in its bloated, wonderful, sometimes awful reality?

I have 5 kids, they all use computers but none of them show that spark that the kids in WfS had that resulted from being able to create and share their own ’stuff’ with other kids in other cultures.

Outside of school I see a torrent of activity – collaboration through multi-user games, the growth of social networking, blogs, chat. It’s mainstream, they just do it, they learn as they go.

What I don’t see (much of) are projects that engage kids in working as teams made of individuals from different localities. Particularly projects using simple software facilities rather than bespoke solutions. Activities like this would mirror the reality of life – after all, we work in collaboration with others all the time, and increasingly that collaboration is with people in other locations, maybe other timezones. Where are the educational initiatives that are preparing kids to work in this way? Surely this is where we have the chance to change the educational paradigm.

If you’ve got any examples, please disabuse me of my negative perspective. Point me in the right direction… Drown me in a flood of adventurous, exciting, good practice. Please