edna.edu.au

It is all about the software stupid!

I am disappointed that the education sector does not get this.

When discussing the enormous potential of netbooks and mobile devices to promote and facilitate social constructivism my wife informed me that while this was fine in theory she still had a duty as a teacher to assess individual progress. Collaborative work made this hard enough without the opaqueness introduced into the equation when people are tapping away at their computers and it isn't clear who is doing what.

I find this a little disappointing. In software development we solved the who did what problem some time ago. We have version control systems which track individual changes.

Perhaps good collaborative skills are innate in students before being systematically trained out of them by a formal education system focused on individual progress.

So why isn't technology causing radical change here? Is it just teacher resistance to change? I don't think it is. I think the tools just do not provide what teachers need.

As a society we expect teachers to assess the progress of individuals. I am not an advocate of testing and standards applied senselessly. But surely assessment is a necessary part of the feedback loop for customising education for individual learners. This is just one aspect of software use in education where mainstream software is often deficient.

When most adults use social networking websites, mobile phones, email there is not someone standing over them assessing their contributions. Work performance is judged on meeting goals and other higher level assessments. Most adult learning is not assessed at all. It exists to satisfy the learner. If the learner is satisfied they have achieved.

Schools are different. So they could benefit from different software.

I do not understand why more people do not see this.

Most businesses use a variety of customised software. Custom application development occurs on a much larger scale than shrink wrapped software production. Whether the software is designed for niche industry use or specifically for a particular organisations needs, most companies do not run core parts of their business with software off the shelves of Officeworks.

Reusing found objects in education is the orthodoxy. Whether it is web2.0 sites or mainstream business desktop applications. Schools seem to be incapable of taking the next step of adapting and evolving application code to suit their needs. I am not sure they even realise this is possible.

Software which is developed for the education market by outsiders is not always ideal. Business is about profit not educational outcomes. If you went to a multi million dollar LMS provider and convinced them their system was all wrong educationally does anyone think they would apologise and withdraw from the market and risk losing all that income? No, they would just make their powerpoint presentations prettier and take people out to better resaurants for lunch.

But software development is expensive and projects fail and eat up too much money you say? Absolutely true. That is why you don't do this sort of work top down. One specification mistake and your top down project is doomed. You have contributors seeded into schools throughout the country with no specific goals in mind and let them organise and collaborate with teachers at the coalface and see what emerges. Start small and local and let the ideas get proven as schools dogfood their own innovations and let the small pieces of the puzzle that emerge grow collaboratively through cooperation.

I think open source, open content and open standards provide a stable tripod on which we could potentially build a new type of inhouse education software. I think that would be more of an education revolution than buying yet more hardware from China without any real concept of how to exploit its potential.

Posted at 09:20AM Apr 02, 2009 by Paul Shirren  |  Comments[3]