Time to Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

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Time to Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

Tuesday, 18 November 2008 05:33

When I worked as a Technology Coordinator, a large part of my job was to encourage teachers in all subjects to make use of educational technology in their lessons and, even better, to build it into their schemes of work. It was something of an uphill struggle sometimes, and occasionally I would lose patience. One conversation I had with the Head of Science, for instance, went like this:

Me: Can we set up a time when we could have a chat about using ed tech in science? I’ve seen some brilliant-looking resources in a magazine, and would be interested in your opinion of them.
Head of Science: It wouldn’t be relevant to us, I’m afraid.
Me: What wouldn’t?
HoS: Using educational technology. We don’t have a need for it.
Me: Wait. Let me just check that I’ve got this right. Technology is being used in every science laboratory in the country, but it’s not relevant in this school?

Now, I have to tell you that that is not an approach I should recommend if you’re out to win friends and influence people, but, it could make you feel better!

The trouble is, there is that Head of Science’s counterpart in every school, more or less. In fact, there are schools in which just about every member of staff, from the principal down, is just like that Head of Science. You sometimes also see it at School District level or, in the United Kingdom, at Local Authority level.

Now, one of the key achievements of the US election campaign, surely, is to enable Technology Directors and Coordinators to challenge the powers-that-be with some quite powerful facts. The internet played the biggest part it has in any election campaign in history. Here are some statistics, some of which were correct, but which have almost certainly been exceeded by now.

First, I did a bit of research of my own. According to Technorati, which measures blog popularity, there were 732,949 results when I searched on “Obama”. That included over 200,000 posts tagged “Obama” and over 5,000 blogs.

In Flickr, the photo-sharing site, I discovered that 202,896 pics tagged “Obama” had been uploaded, whilst in YouTube, 678,000 videos tagged “Obama” have been uploaded.

On Reddit, a site which follows what’s new and popular online, a story entitled “Obama wins the presidency!” has had over 1,900 comments.
Next, I looked in a couple of articles. According to Business Week:

Users have downloaded nearly 900 videos from YouTube
In Digg, an article entitled “Digg This If You Voted for Obama” has attracted 12,170 diggs, with over 1000 comments
The “Obama for President” island in Second Life became so crowded, avatars were being turned away
On the Web poll TwitVote.com, Obama received nearly 21,000 votes, while McCain obtained nearly 3,500
Voters have posted more than 616 videos sharing their Election Day thoughts and experiences to YouTube
There are over 2,300 comments on Obama’s blog
Flickr has 190,141 photos tagged "election"

According to the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph:

Obama’s official website, http://www.barackobama.com, attracted more than 1.5 million members who organized themselves into 35,000 separate activists' groups;
On election day, the website was used to mobilise volunteers, who were asked to make a million phone calls to get people out to vote
150,000 meetings and events were organised through the internet during Obama's campaign
His supporters uploaded videos of Obama's speeches to enhance his online presence
Obama raised $600 million in contributions from more than three million people, many of whom donated online. (In fact, if you go to his website, you will be immediately directed to an online donation page.)
Obama’s supporters sent out viral emails

If these statistics don’t convince some educationalists that in the real world the internet and the Web are facts of life, I really don’t know what will. The web is no longer an add-on to our lives: it’s embedded – something I discuss in an article I wrote recently, in which I said:

“The way things are now, and the way I work, international communication is not just costless; it's not just instant; it's embedded.”

In other words, it’s seamless, it’s effortless, and it’s not even something I think about any more as I go about my business.

The issue facing schools today is not, or should not be, “How do we prevent the youngsters from using this stuff in lessons?” It is, or should be, “How do we enable all of these facilities to be used safely and in a way that enhances learning?”

Terry Freedman is a U.K.-based education technology consultant and publishes the ICT in Education website at www.ictineducation.org, and the electronic newsletter “Computers in Classrooms."