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In a recent site blog
entry, a number of criticisms were made of the state of ILT (Information
and Learning Technology) and, while of the points most seem valid, I feel
that the causes are worth looking at.
Forward Thinking
In the UK, ILT (Information and Learning Technology) is catching up,
rather than dealing with 'forward thinking'. When Labour were elected
in 1997, they kept their pledge, I believe, to ensure that all British
schools were linked up to the internet. This means that the progress towards
e-learning in schools and colleges was, in many cases, not in place as
late as 1997. While the government's drive was very welcome, it showed
that there was already quite a lag between education and business, etc,
and things were to get worse.
As news that the government flagship site for e-learning at university
level (UKeU) is up
for sale comes out, suggests that there may be structural problems in
the thinking that lies behind the government ILT policy.
Sloppy Thinking
Many of the schemes have been grandiose in conception, but have suffered
from poor implementation. One idea a few years ago was to create 'ILT
Champions', who would be beacons shining in colleges and raise the profile
of ILT. Apart from the rather embarrassing name (rarely heard nowadays),
the idea was not a great success. Many of the so-called champions lacked
the IT skills necessary; in the rush to get things going, there was a
lot of activity rather than targeted work, which continues today. They
were also spread thinly.
Although there has been a vast investment in IT hardware, software has
fared badly in many institutions. There has been an emphasis on software,
like Hot Potatoes,
which is either free or available cheaply if a licence is required. One
problem with this software is that it is not database driven and results
are not stored. It also tends to create exercises that are very similar
in content and appearance, so things start to look predictable. VLEs (Virtual
Learning Environments) have also been promoted, with varying degrees of
success.
A major problem here, in my opinion, is the quality of training provided.
I have attended a number of ILT training courses that struck me as inadequate.
The Hot Potatoes course I was sent on consisted of a charge through all
six types of exercise the program can generate, without really concentrating
sufficiently to give the learners time to gain the confidence to use it
well. In fact, the others on my course all admitted that they didn't really
know how to use it at the end, and many other teachers in other places
have had similar experiences. It is a sad irony that the quality of training
given to teachers is often of a poor quality.
In many sites, there too few machines which have licences for programs
like Macromedia Dreamweaver, even though educational licences are not
that expensive (£50 per machine at present I believe). Also, updates
are often infrequent or non-existent, so after the rush of investment,
the schools and colleges are soon looking at dated software.
This policy, of spreading ILT Champions thin on the ground, giving teachers
and lecturers insufficient training and limited access to rapidly ageing
technology has, perhaps unsurprisingly, resulted in underachievement in
the implementation of ILT.
New Technologies
Becta (the British
Educational Communications and Technology Agency) recently published a
report
that lays out an ambitious plan to build libraries of educational resources
(LORs- Learning Object Repositories), reusable digital resources. Behind
the grandiose terminology, this basically means a collection of lesson
plans, mostly in Microsoft Office format, especially Word and PowerPoint,
with Hot Potatoes exercises, or at least that is what is currently available.
They are starting to target things like metadata to make them more easily
accessible in searches, though it is by no means certain that teachers
and lecturers are being trained thoroughly in this, so many of the objects
may continue not to have metadata.
What they are building is an exchange of worksheets on a national scale,
which in itself is a laudable aim, but the approach recommended is flawed.
The two key flaws in it that are likely to engender apathy are the aim
to take copyright from the creators, which is necessary if learning objects
are to be edited by other teachers, but loss of ownership will be unlikely
to make people very keen. They also want to avoid paying people for their
work, though admit that some financial incentive might be necessary.
With an approach like this, the LORs are unlikely to reach the heights
aimed for, and even if they did, there would be precious little in the
way of learning technology being developed. By not building teams, by
not bringing in people of sufficient expertise and by laying the burden
on overworked teachers whom they do not wish to pay, they are not laying
any foundations, let alone sound ones, for the development of genuinely
new IT ideas and methods, which is why an educational search in Hotscripts
does not display a great deal of new thinking in software terms.
Typing not Computing
All in all, the problems with ILT stem from the fact that much of the
work is simply typing, rather than computing, so the real power of the
computer is not being harnessed. A few years from now I may be able to
download a large selection of lesson plans and use them, as opposed to
the rather flimsy selection available on official sites at the moment,
but that is likely to be all, and even that is not certain. The growth
of LORs will be pressed to match that of internet sites, where there is
an explosion of sites, mostly set up as hobby sites by keen and dedicated
teachers, so I am far more likely to turn to Google for help than the
official systems being set up at the moment.
The real shame and waste is that the dedication shown on the internet
is not being harnessed by the education system here in the UK. One of
the core reasons, I believe, is the question of ownership- people are
prepared to work endlessly at something that is theirs, but not so willing
to work unpaid for something that isn't. It rather reminds me of the problems
of land ownership in the Soviet Union, where peasants worked far harder
when they owned the land.
In the area of English language learning, the construction of resource
banks is welcome, but there is an element of duplication because the internet
is already full of sites offering many similar resources. However, centralised
repositories based around the national ESOL curriculum will be more focused
and reflect its demands.
However, new technologies for learning are an area in ESL and ESOL that
are not really being developed. Concordancers,
which have shown their worth in the creation of dictionaries like COBUILD,
and are used by most lexicographers nowadays, are still not in common
use in education. The new insights gained have made little headway.
On the contrary, one of the consequences of ILT in English language learning
has been a resurgence of dated methodologies. Ellis
uses IT to offer video based lessons that do resemble the largely discredited
Direct Method, or Army Method, where rote learning of basic and sometimes
artificial formulas is meant to be a path to understanding the true complexities
of a language, though it does also feature situational lessons that are
more relevant to newcomers living in an English-speaking society.
Because IT lends itself well to such methods, as they can predict single
'correct' answers, normally by restricting choice to an excessive degree,
they can be made to work in an ILT environment. To a certain extent most
of us are guilty of this- the quizzes on this site can be criticised on
these same grounds.
Since the emergence of concordancers, however, there has not been a great
deal in the way of other applications of technology designed to aid comprehension
of language, tools to help students analyse language. This is a pity,
because there are many possibilities for language learning tools that
could be used in ILT for English language learning, but so far they are
thin on the ground. The student is currently spoiled for choice if they
want exercises and explanations, with the promise of more, but for the
internet generation, used to exploring, there is very little they can
use to navigate their way through English.
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