Lets stop talking to ourselves and get on out there

23-August-2005

[ ICT and learning ]
They got really excited when I showed them the South African education e-books project. They could not believe their was so much free materials available. Before they had felt totally constrained by an insufficient budget to buy materials from publishers.

A wee bit more on 'the new digital divide'...:

From Brian on the Abject Learning blog "My experience with students at UBC supports Jeff’s assertion — I recently gave two weblog workshops to two cohorts of Education students and was struck by the vast disparities in technical skills, web literacy and comfort with the approach."

Thank goodness for a bit of reality. I have offices in Wales and in the University of Bremen in Germany. I am the only blogger out of 60 employed in the Institute of Education and Technology in Bremen. In Wales I know of only one colleague with a blog - and that is Mike who has developed the software.

I also work for the JISC e-learning programme and of the people I know there IU think only Scott has a blog.

That does not play down the potential. Last week I gave a kind of impromptu workshop for a group education technologists from Chile. They started out wanting me to tell then how to produce learning materials. I said I did not think this was the question - it is a question of how we use ICT for learning - the pedagogy. I showed them a few sites and applications. They got really excited when I showed them the South African education e-books project. They could not believe their was so much free materials available. Before they had felt totally constrained by an insufficient budget to buy materials from publishers.

It was a little difficult with languages but we got by - but I was still not sure they had 'got it' until they went to go.

The 'leader' thanked me saying "Graham has shown us we do not need more software or systems but a paradigm shift in our thinking."

The problem with our ed-tech blogs is far to often we are talking to ourselves. We need to find new ways of getting out there and showing people what can be done.

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Graham Attwell; 23-August-2005 15:14:44;