Design 4 Learning - Side Tracks

Only a minister would spend 5k plus on a wheezy netbook and software, while in other countries, like the frugle French (a country that has it's own Internet before we had the interent) have almost 80% of public services using open source.

So why would Nathan Rees infect public school children with 5k worth of atom mini laptops and shovelware? Does this stack up? Surely for half this prices we could supply 13" MacBook pros with open source.

I suspect it has a lot do with politics and curriculum is a political instrument. Read write media (currenly hiding in the duty of care convenient road block) represents a death blow to the wheezy curriculum and testing methods.

It is a tragedy that we accept shovelware and digitally illiterate teachers, using outcomes that are pointless in comparison to the needs of todays children.

It boggles the mind how easily we accept this from politicians and DET.

Why do we have to accept second class technology because we won't accept that teaching office automation and todays ICT syllabus is a dead horse.

Buggered if I can work it out.

http://bit.ly/pg2u0

A tale about a mountain with a really great turn of phrase.

But why won't they even give it a go? A common thing people ask when we're talking about EdTech.

The answer may lie in skill, belief, ideoogy, need and apportunty etc., but regardless of where the problem lies, the desire is to move them into a mode of professional operation we want.

This is equally problematic as the rise of the amateur means we are all experts. We are like the railway transit police, marching up and down with an air of authority we don't really have. We used to getting students to do what we want, we use fear of failure and punative threats. That's how our society works, we are conditioned to it from an early age. Education is pollitical and the curriculum is there to determine our success. It is not about learning anything, it's about selection and sociology. It is designed to fmake people fail as much as educate.

So in order to adopt anything you need three stages of realization. know about it, like what is presents and trust that if you use it, that is won't be in some way detrimental and induce some failure or threat of critisism.

If I show you how I can make paricles glow around your head in a virtual world, it would look like magic. And that's the problem. There's nothing magical about curriculum based learning as we've designed it. It is a chore, a test, a potential fail.

Reluctant teachers have many reasons about why they don't want to change and with a little tenacity you can breach the know and like domains ... But trusting magic inside systems that deny it? Even worse we put kids into rooms everyday to suck the magic out of them. The curriculum has to die or at least be reformed. Right now Australian politik sees technology and learning as secular. We see this in the way that we buy hardware and deny the people ware. Turning teachers into magicians is fundematally oppositional to the patriarchal society we live in.

As a parent, this is depressing. Though at the same time I am afforded such luxury. Dissonace besets us all.

http://digitalplay.info/blog/2009/10/narrative-tenses-with-grow-cube/

Narrative play

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=596269&site_id=1#import

http://www.educomics.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23&Itemid=50

Great resource for anyone making comics.

http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?STORY_ID=14350149

http://twitter.com/jzagami/status/4538287731

"#qsite09 why can we track in detail all food from the farm to the plate but not track student learning from one year to the next"
- Jason Zagami (@jzagami)

http://maximos62.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/student-reactions-to-der/