Course: ICTs in Teaching & Learning
Hong Kong, 23-28 January 2007

I recently taught a week-long intensive course in Hong Kong, focusing on ICTs in teaching and learning. Hong Kong is obviously one of the world leaders in technology: you just have to look at the lightshow on Victoria Harbour every evening at eight, or take a trip in the underground, or use your Octopus card (or watch) to buy drinks from a vending machine … But having technology is not the same as knowing what to do with it pedagogically. Actually, with the advent of web 2.0 technologies, it’s less and less about the technology and more and more about how to use it. Few of the teachers on the course had used technology beyond net searches and email; only a handful had heard of blogs or wikis. Yet by the end of the course most had begun to create their own technological resources – blogs, wikis, folksonomies, Moodle VLEs, podcasts – and, over the past couple of months, they’ve successfully embedded these in their teaching. There’s a really important message here:

A knowledge of pedagogical principles is more important than a knowledge of technology for teachers who want to make use of web 2.0 in their classes.

Tags: technology, pedagogy, web 2.0

Publication: “Brave New Classrooms: Democratic Education and the Internet”
Peter Lang, New York, January 2007

The publication of Brave New Classrooms by Peter Lang in January 2007 brings to a close a project on which I’ve been working since 2003 along with Joe Lockard of Arizona State University. Together we’ve edited this volume, consisting of 16 papers which critique e-learning from a variety of points of view. Contributors include Darin Barney, Tara Brabazon, Charles Ess, Bettina Fabos, Andrew Feenberg, Robin Goodfellow, Edward Hamilton, Tina Kazan, Mills Kelly, Marj Kibby, Kate Kiefer, Kerri-Lee Krause, Martha McCormick, Mary O’Sullivan, Tom Palaskas, and Robert Samuels. The blurb reads as follows:

The early, halcyon days of e-learning are gone. Many who embraced personal computers and the Internet, and who devoted their work to creating new forms of electronic education, have grown dissatisfied with trends toward commodification and corporatization, a paucity of critical thought, poor quality distance learning, and the growing exploitation of teaching labor. Online learning’s inherent democratic potential seems increasingly a chimera. Brave New Classrooms explores whether and to what extent its original promise can be recovered. It includes sixteen essays from educational practitioners, including some of the best-known theorists of Internet-based education.

We had felt for some time that there was a need for a study of the dark side of e-learning, as it were. The book in no way recommends the abandonment of e-learning, but it does suggest that we need to approach it in a better-informed, more aware and more sober manner. We concluded our introduction by stating:

High-quality public education can be obstructed or advanced by e-learning. […] it is up to us to engage critically with the technology and work to exploit its most promising potentialities.

As I’ve suggested in other entries on this blog, it’s not so much about the technology itself but about how it is used by people. We need to develop further pedagogical expertise in order to minimise the potential drawbacks of e-learning at the same time as we seek to fully exploit its advantages.

There’s a brief comment on the book on the Law Librarian Blog.

Tags: e-learning, pedagogy