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Workshop B
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop B - Session 3 - Questions and Contributions
Stephen McNair: I have written down 8 things that I have taken from those 3 presentations, which I will offer you now. The first thing is, all 3 speakers said 'It works,' which is interesting, because not everybody I meet thinks it does, whatever 'it' is. There is a question about training and time and how the technologies interact with the way people use time, especially time in the workplace, and the way employers use time. There are questions about the technology and learning and Government, and the citizenship questions which are in there. There are questions about the human resource and the development of human capacity to handle the technology, the issue about how far the problem is the technology and how far the problem is how we educate people to cope with the technology. There is the question about new pedagogy, which is as long as a piece of string I think, and a whole vast area of questions about pedagogy. There are questions about copyright knowledge, the ownership of knowledge, who buys and sells in this rather curious and fluid market we are now in. There are questions about accessible technology. As Nicholas Corner-Calder observed on one occasion, the price of a computer is nothing to do with what it costs to produce a computer; the price of a computer is $1000, and the technology continues to develop to maintain the price of the new product in the market. That is why we have such clever systems. We do not need such clever systems for many purposes, and many of us would be much better off if somebody was designing cheaper computers. But that is not how the market works. Certainly the problem of getting accessible and reliable technology is part of that linking with the human resource. Somebody said, fun is power. No, knowledge is power and learning can be fun and if you put those two together of course power can be fun, which seems to me probably to be true. But this may be about shifting power in some ways. Then there are some interesting questions about cultural issues. Here we are once again in an international gathering, all speaking English to the great relief of the English speakers amongst us. Thank you all for your kindness in treating us like this, but I do think there are some interesting issues about the implications of the language and the culture. Q: I think it is an interesting point that all 3 speakers, and really everybody here, has said, 'It works. We can use technology for learning.' Well, not entirely, you know. But the interesting thing is that most of the technologies are not designed for learning in the first place. People still struggle. The first time you send an attachment to an e-mail to somebody that you do not know, the chances are they cannot read your attachment anyway. But we still persevere and as people have said, "It works". I think a lot more work has got to be done to look at technology and how to make it easier to use, and the whole area of interfaces and such like. The problem we have is that we are trying to get people to re-engage with learning. People like us are prepared to waive the struggle to get the technology to work for us. People who are cheesed off with learning in the first place and do not know too much about technology, they cannot think like that. They are up for a second chance, and we are going to give them a double dose of difficulty. I think certainly the IT industry has got a lot to do trying to make these technologies far easier to use and to understand. Robin Hacking: The whole issue of man-machine interfaces is waiting for the ability to speak to computers and things like that. I think that is probably one bit of technology which would help, but I also think that the technology can only improve in terms of its use as a result of the weight of opinion that comes back in from the marketplace. Computers are still used mainly by business; there is still not sufficient global and international pressure in my opinion for common access systems and there is still too much room in our industry for people to develop, to push, a particular technology, a particular software platform, a particular hierarchy, without any focus on the sort of open systems that help access. Individual organisations do still have the opportunity to drive their own particular technological requirements, so I think the pressure from the users is what is required there. My experience in this is that, if you push learning down an adult throat on the basis that if they do not go for it, they will not be skilled for the next job, that is quite a complex situation. It is my experience that when there is a genuine desire and motivation to do something, you learn how to do it. I think some of our experiences at the education on-line network, shows when there is a genuine desire to know how to use the video recorder because you want to use it, then these apparent interface problems disappear relatively rapidly. That is not an excuse for not making it easier, but I think the motivation to take these things up is strikingly different when there is that motivation to do so. Dave Spooner: Our experience in the international study circle project is interesting in this because the vast majority of the participants have never used a computer and they did not need to. The whole idea was that it was in the back room. It did not impinge on what was going on in the classroom. What became very interesting was that as the course developed more and more people in different countries began to say 'How did we do that?' 'How do we get this message from people in Iceland?' or wherever it was. 'Can we actually see this computer that is doing it?' So more and more people started to take an interest in learning about the technology, because they could see its potential and the way that it impacted on the learning. Stephen McNair: I would say the software does not talk English. The software talks American. I have come across pieces of software that I find offensive, that purports to be in English, because they embody assumptions that I find unacceptable in terms of how I want to interact with learning programmes. I have certainly met people from other European countries who find that. So there is a language question. I had this conversation with people from Finland for instance. There are 12 million people who speak Finnish in the world and there are never likely to be more than 12 million people who speak Finnish in the world. They want to talk to other Finnish people in Finnish, but it is not worth anybody's while to write software in Finnish. So in the end the language is likely to dominate. But there are also different, totally different cultural assumptions about what learning is, about how learning works, about how people expect to engage in learning. So it is not just a question of language. It is also a question of what assumptions you make about the relationship between the learner and the knowledge, the learner and the teacher, which are much more complicated questions, and people do feel very sensitive about them. DaveSpooner: It was a major debate - it still is - in our organisation. What is interesting is something which follows from what you were saying Stephen. Some of our affiliates, Finland is a very good example, have given up the argument. Basically, they know that it is going to be run in English, for example. They are fed up with it, they do not like it, they would rather it was not like that, but they accept it. The real arguments come from the French and the Spanish. Thomas Kragh: We had the same debate in Denmark. Only 5 million people speak Danish, so we are a very small language. There is still a discussion about whether ICT is the fourth cultural language that schools and teachers need to learn and to teach about after reading, writing and calculating, and then the debate turns into 'Well, really the fourth language was English.'
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