[LINK] Benefits of a digital economy enabled by the National

[Tom Worthington]

ARTHUR,Evan (Dr) wrote:
> Tom wrote: <<More work is needed on tools and skills for teachers to
> use the fibre Detail of one contribution to this issue is at:
> http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/DigitalEducationRevolution/DigitalStrategyforTeachers/Pages/Home.aspx

That is useful, but the "Digital Strategy for Teachers and School
Leaders" is only allocated $40M, or about 2% of the Digital Education 
Revolution funding. There are about 250,000 teachers in Australia, so 
that works out to $160 per teacher, which is not sufficient to have them 
trained in the use of computers for education.

My experience of untrained people trying to use computers for education
suggests that this will result in 90% of the funding ($2b), being wasted
on inefficient ICT and ineffective digital pedagogy.  A more realistic 
figure for training the teachers would be $2,500 each, or in total $500m.

As an example of the ways an education can help make ICT more efficient, 
the 203kbyte DEEWR PDF fact sheet for project could be instead provided 
as a web page. This would be easier to read and would also save 90% of 
the file space:
<http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/DigitalEducationRevolution/DigitalStrategyforTeachers/Documents/FactSheet.pdf>.

For those interested in digital pedagogy, registrations are still open
for the "2010 ACT MoodlePosium", at ANU in Canberra next week: 
<http://moodleposium.netspot.com.au/>.

This e-learning symposium concentrates on Higher Education, but there
will also be people from the vocational sector presenting. I am chairing
the Friday morning "Andragogy" session featuring Margaret Robson (CIT)
on "Engaging learners by incorporating critical thinking and reflection"
and Srinivas Chemboli (ANU) on "Contextualising learning outcomes and
course design in Moodle".

On Friday afternoon there will be a master-class session and I have
offered myself for public humiliation, with the design of my Green ICT
course being taken apart by an expert and having all its faults detailed
to the symposium, piece by piece. ;-)


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/