Computer World New Zealand Article

Computer World NZ posted this article after attending my workshop given in Wellington, New Zealand. They just about got it right, only two minor errors. First, as I was introducing Will Richardson who greeted the Kiwi educators through Skype, I shared a story he tells about Wikipedia (crediting him)– in this report they left that part out. It is still makes a great point the way they tell it though. And secondly, Darren Kuropatwa (In Canada) was the math teacher, not a US math teacher. Let me know what you think of the article.

Complete Article Available here

3G phones put NZ ahead in education tech

Web
2.0, advanced technology for handheld digital communication and a
willingness to innovate in education places New Zealand at the forefront.

By Stephen Bell Wellington | Thursday, 29 March, 2007

New Zealand cellphone
calls may be expensive, but we are further into the third generation of
cellphone technology than many Western countries, including the US,
says Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, an educational technology specialist from
Virginia.Nussbaum-Beach was keynote speaker for the Tuanz education conference last week.

She says the confluence of Web 2.0,
advanced technology for handheld digital communication and a
willingness to innovate in education places New Zealand at the point of
a “perfect storm” for new uses of digital technology in education.

The internet, and particularly Web 2.0
tools such as wikis, blogs and social networks, has given this
generation of young people a new outlook on information and learning,
Nussbaum-Beach says. It will no longer be possible to teach them in
traditional ways that rely on the teacher as the font of all knowledge
and memorising as one of the chief elements of learning.

There is little point in committing a
huge number of facts to memory when they are immediately available,
with latest updates, in response to a simple web query.
Emphasis will, rather, be on the
creativity of the student; what they can achieve by combining and
interpreting information from different sources — including their
fellow students and other people accessible online.

She cites the case of a student who
uploaded his draft research paper to Wikipedia as an article, watched
while knowledgeable people corrected his mistakes and added further
information and pertinent references; then downloaded the result as the
final version. A conventional teacher would have said “do your own
work”, she says, but it’s hard to draw a firm ethical line between this
kind of interaction and the normal process of consulting authoritative
sources.

Web 2.0 will bring to the fore both an
increasing range of instruments, such as 3G cellphones, for using the
internet and a variety of software agents, tailored by the user to scan
the internet continuously for the latest information on a particular
subject. Agents will also take the form of “avatars”, representing the
users themselves, and relating to other avatars in virtual worlds such
as Second Life.

Skype is “an amazing tool for the
classroom” Nussbaum-Beach says, allowing a class to bring in an author
or expert to discuss their book or field of study with a class. She
demonstrated this at the conference, calling a mathematics teacher in
the US, who demonstrated how he interacted on problems in trigonometric
functions with his students, giving them the grounding for a study of
calculus.

The idea of a teacher being put out of
work by a computer may be passé, but teachers who fail to embrace the
opportunities offered by digital technology are likely be put out of
work by teachers who do, Nussbaum-Beach says.