Learning without Frontiers

Although I am missing being at Learning Without Frontiers, after having had a tantalising taste of it during the Sunday Service (the free first day of the festival), I am following remotely via the Twitter stream (#lwf and #lwf11) and also watching some of the keynote speeches via the streaming media channel on the LWF main website. It is very high quality, both in audio and visual terms, and there is also a separate live stream for slides. It really is almost like being there in person. Congratulations must go to Graham Brown-Martin and his team for such a well organised and dynamic conference.

I was particularly impressed by the presentation from Sony UK managing director Ray Maguire, who seems to have monitored the pulse of the UK compulsory education sector. He made several important statements about the future of learning technology. Why can't we take the best teachers and the best lessons and broadcast/stream them to all interested schools? he asked. We have the technology. (Yes, and we did it over a decade ago during the Star Schools project I was involved in, in South Dakota). We need to encourage schools to let more kids create content and share it he counselled. And on the subject of institutional VLEs, although he didn't go as far as to claim they were outmoded, he did admit that they had been instigated before the advent of social media, and VLEs were premised on behaviour and practice of a decade ago. In his concluding statement, Maguire called for collaboration between Sony and schools to extend and enhance provision for education, particularly with games and other handheld technologies. Maguire also called for decisions to be made at government level and for an operational budget to be made available for wide implementation. We won't hold our collective breaths on that one, but guess there's no harm in asking, is there?

Learning without frontiers by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Wild west show

I learn a lot from taking part in international projects, and I am currently involved in several which are occupying my mind. By far the largest project I was involved in though, was a $90 million Star Schools Project in South Dakota - the Digital Dakota Network - in 2001-2003. It all started when I was invited in July 2000, all expenses paid, to make a trip across the pond as a guest of the then Governor of South Dakota, the Hon. Bill Janklow. I arrived in the small sleepy, state capital of Pierre (pronounced peer) and booked into the local Ramada Hotel. Pierre sits straddling the Missouri river, and is therefore in two time zones. When the bars shut east of the river, you walk over the bridge and into a bar on the west of the river, and get an extra hours drinking in (if you like that sort of thing, that is).

I was driven by my hosts to the Capitol building and ushered into the Governor's conclave where I gave a speech to a gathering of around 100 guests, many of whom were either working in the government or were school superintendents. My talk, about the current state of distance education, was well received because the entire Star Schools Project the state was about to embark upon was premised on distance learning. Every school in the state (and their libraries, colleges and universities too) were being cabled up with broadband, and equipped with full motion video conferencing, digital satellite reception - the whole nine yards. I later met up again with Bill Janklow over breakfast in Washington D.C. in April 2001. He was just about to go off to the White House to meet up with President George 'Dubya' Bush, but said he needed a few minutes with me to talk over a proposition. He offered me a job as his 'Digital Network' Ambassador, along with a house, schooling for my 3 kids and a job for my wife, if I would up sticks for two years and join him. It was a tempting offer, but I had to refuse due to a number of intractible issues. We compromised, and I later joined his team as the part-time lead evaluator for the project. Over the next two years I jetted back and forth across the Atlantic, gathering data, meeting and working with my team of researchers (pictured above), conducting interviews, collating data and generally trying to make sense of all that we were learning about this vast, sweeping, state-wide project. At the time the Digital Dakota Network was the largest distance education project of its kind, and we had a great opportunuty to discover how learning would be affected by the new technology. However, it was often the anecdotes rather than the hard data that were the most illuminating...

I heard one story that I would like to share here. It says a lot about the human condition, and a lot more about the impact of teachers on the young mind. In fact it follows on from yesterday's blog post. Janklow was a clever guy, and to cut costs, he enlisted the help of a number of residents of the state penitentiary, who he sent out in supervised road gangs to wire up the schools across the state. In one school, one of the convicts, dressed in the obligatory orange overalls, was up a step ladder, running cables through the ceiling of a classroom. A young lad walked in, saw the prisoner, and asked him. 'Mister, what did you do to be sent to prison?' The convict looked down as the little boy and with a straight face said: 'I didn't listen to my teacher...'

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Wild west show by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.