Microsoft commonly quote that "By 2010 the amount of digital information in the world is set to double every 72 hours."
Blogging has now become mainstream with virtually all business having a blog with their website, and social networking means that pretty much everybody has at least 2 or 3 profiles.
Teaching the Skills for the Digital World
The skills that we will need to cope with the mass of digital information are very different from the skills that anyone older than current school age will have been taught. Traditional education centres around teaching information, and the student learns that information, and carries it around in their head. Over time, recall of the precise detail of the information weakens, but the student still "knows" enough about it to go and refresh their knowledge through google, the web, or even still books.
In the future, the skills required will be centred around retreiving & gathering information rather than learning it. And most importantly, about filtering information.
A google search on a general subject matter such as "Gordon Brown" currently returns about 15 million matches. If we follow the logic we will soon have 30m matches, and then 60m.....etc etc.
So how do we know which ones are right and which ones are wrong, which are fact and which are fiction, which are opinion and which are source documents.
When you can carry around the whole internet in your pocket, accessing it all in a second off your phone, or ipod or ultra portable laptop you don't need to be able to remember vast quantities of facts and dates.
ICT; A Destination or a Vehicle
Our mainstream schools currently teach ICT as a module, a specific subject taught in a classroom, learning word processing, spreadsheets, a bit of access, a bit of basic code, and if you are very lucky, photo and video editing etc. Fundamentally, ICT lessons are not that different to those taught 15 or even 20 years ago.
ICT needs to disappear from the curriculum as a seperate subject, and just be taken into every lesson in the same way that "writing" is. Be viewed as a tool rather than a subject matter. We teach our children how to hold pencils, and how to form their letters, how to read from left to right. We now need to extend that approach to digital skills.
- Will future educators teach children how to touchtype?(will they even need to be able to type?),
- How to form searches?
- How to skim read vast quanties of data and extract the one relevant bit?
- How will the examination process work, what use in the digital world is an qualification about recalling information?
Incorporating Technology into Schools
A quick tour around BETT 2009 will show anyone that the use of technology is the permanent way forward. The Magic White boards that were so innovative only a few years ago have evolved and developed to the stage where we're on third generation
There are hand held keypads for interactive teaching, for voting, for multiple choice. There is the £100 open source laptop encouraging the practise of a laptop per student as standard.
Digital content and ICT make up three quarters of the categories of the BETT awards.
A School in Edinburgh is piloting the use of the apple itouch, with each student being given an itouch for the use of communicating, teachers notes are downloaded at the end of a session, USB sticks are given out with further resources and learning material on.
The possibilities really are endless, and continually expanding further. One thing is certain, the debate on education in the digital future is just starting.
