[LINK] Broadband for a Broad Land

[Tom Worthington]

Frank O'Connor wrote:
> At 9:06 AM +1100 10/1/11, Tom Worthington wrote:
>> ... The technique I was introduced to is "Mentored and Collaborative
>> e-Learning: 
>> <http://www.ijcim.th.org/v15nSP4/P09SEARCC_ComputerProfessionalEducation.pdf>. 
> 
> Mmm .. That probably works fine for tertiary students ... but may have 
> some problems when applied to the other 90% (Primary, secondary and 
> other students not paying for, compulsorily required to do, and not 
> inordinately motivated by, their education).    :) ...

In looking at the design of classrooms, I noticed a similarity between 
what is now done with university students and the Montessori method for 
self-directed learning for young children:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/01/book-on-designing-classrooms.html>.

The trick, as with the Montessori method, is to put the tools needed
within reach of the students, so they have help when needed, without 
feeling someone is telling them what to do.

> ... An inordinate amount of material already exists online, in cheap digital 
> encyclopedias  ...

Having spent much of the last few years sifting though the Wikipedia, 
corporate, government and academic web sites looking for educational 
content, I can say this is not easy. The effort in selecting suitable 
material is expensive in terms of time. The Wikipedia, which has some 
excellent information, but I find myself having to make numerous 
corrections to it before it is usable.

> Surely some of the 40% of the education budget that goes to the supposedly productive bureaucrats 
> could be used to source and amalgamate this content (by the 
> bureaucracy). ...

No, to select material for teaching purposes you need people with some
idea of the field and some expertise in the process of collecting
information. The people most useful for this are librarians at 
educational institutions, as that is what they are trained to do.

> Teachers could them pick and choose what they wanted to 
> 'plug in' to their courseware for different purposes. ...

There are collections of information which teachers can use. These are
called "textbooks", which are not cheap to produce because of the effort
required.

> Access to vast libraries of content on their own servers accessible by a 
> user friendly, content management I suppose you'd call it, front end 
> isn't exactly rocket science ...

No, providing useful information is not "rocket science": it is a lot
harder than that.

I attend meetings with scientists at CSIRO who can do a detailed 
analysis of their specialist field, but can't explain it to a 
non-expert. It is challenging to translate what they say to something 
the general public (and students) can understand.

> ... LMS systems ... already flag poor performers is good, but how many primary or 
> secondary teachers have access to this application or facility? ...

Moodle is free open source and so is widely used in schools and
universities. Some state governments provide it centrally to schools, in
other cases individual schools have their own LMS. As an example, here 
are about a thousand references to Moodle in education in Australia: 
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=moodle++school+%22department+of+education%22+site%3Agov.au&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=http://www.google.com/search?q=moodle++school+%22department+of+education%22+site%3Agov.au>.
Here are 4,500 references to Moodle in NSW Schools: 
<http://www.google.com/search?q=moodle++site%3Aschools.nsw.edu.au>.

But the limitation is not so much with the LMS software but the training 
the teachers then need in how to work the software and how to 
incorporate it in their teaching.

Also what is lacking are incentives for providing generally useful 
materials. Teachers are paid to teach their own students. There are no 
bonuses for preparing material for use by others, which takes much more 
work. If this could be done it would produce a better result for the 
students and reduce costs overall.


-- 
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/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra