Speculations on reorganising schooling with the help of new technology

In America there is an academic pursuit called ‘Futuring’, and I have decided to conclude my lecture with some futuring of my own. I will present a scenario for a new way of organising schooling based on six assumptions:

1 The new technology applications that are already revolutionising the business world will soon be used to revolutionise many aspects of schooling.

2 The cost of the speed and power of new technology will continue to drop at a dramatic rate. (On the basis of Moore’s Law, computer power increases tenfold every ﬁ ve years.)

3 The speed and navigability of the web will continue to improve, and full colour video and still images will soon be available without any perceptible delay. Through the National Grid for Learning, schools will have unlimited access to the Internet, including a selected range of commercial sites, for a single annual subscription. LEAs or regional groups of LEAs will have their own local grids.

4 In addition to its educative purpose, the system of schooling has a legal duty of care in loco parentis for the nation’s children.

5 Schools have a socialising function that helps to prepare young people for adult life.

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6 Changes to the organisation of schools need to build upon current policy trends but they also need to have a revolutionary element. Considerable beneﬁ cial change would be possible immediately with existing technology.

By 2010 all young people and all teachers will have personal, laptop computers incorporating a keyboard suited to their hand size, full colour, DVD drive (Digital Versatile Disc), integral Internet, fax and telephone, and a suite of software tools. They will have at least 3 Gbytes of hard disc, 50 Mbytes of RAM and a Central Processing Unit operating at 1 Ghz (roughly 1,000,000,000 instructions per second).

There will be plenty of room for resources of personal choice including material down-loaded from the web and intelligent ‘biomorph’ pets (sons and daughters of Norns from the current cult game Creatures – see Sharples 1998). These machines, which are best imagined as a cross between present day handheld games machines, mobile telephones and electronic notebooks or organisers, will be lightweight, fully portable, battery or mains operated machines, transported between home and school in waterproof heavy-duty shoulder bags. Classrooms, libraries and study centres will

be designed around study carousels where six students will have access through a local area network (operating at 100 Mbits per second) to a wide range of resources (DVD and documents) and the Internet (with phone or cable connections operating at 100 Kbits per second), as well as to mains electricity.

All staff, students and their parents will have personal Internet addresses and their own websites, including password-protected areas. Every document, including students’ written work, will be produced in electronic form. Students will send their work to their teacher’s website as an attachment. Students and staff will automatically download their work to the central server on arrival each morning. All school information (e.g. the timetable, names of staff and students, organisational procedures) will be permanently accessible. Information on current assignments for each class, deadlines, resource lists, students’ assessment records, progress reports, etc. will be available, as will the diaries of all teachers including the head. This resource base for the whole school will be automatically backed-up once or twice a day as a protection against crashes (because technology then as now will not be crash-free!).

Technicians will be crucial to the school’s educative mission. They will, ideally, have specialist training which will include technical skills and people/support skills. Small schools will be able to call upon technician support from the LEA.

Teachers will organise their groups of around 30 students on the basis of agreed learning contracts and will normally work with groups of no more than ten at one time. The emphasis in these intensive teaching sessions will be on exploring areas of conceptual difﬁ culty. From the age of seven, young people will spend part of their time at school in the library or a study centre, where they will be able to work either independently, using self-study materials, or on a group task in one of the group study rooms. Below the age of seven, children will work with teaching assistants and teachers in a classroom base, and basic skills in new technology will be taught integrally with literacy and numeracy. By the age of seven they will be competent users of their own personal computer as well as being well advanced in literacy and numeracy skills.

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From the age of 14 young people will be able to work at home if they have written permission from both their parents and the school. Alternatively, they will work in supervised community study centres which may be based in community libraries and will be an extension of the current homework clubs. From both home and the study centres they will have access to a video-telephone advice line in the school library to assist with resource queries. Additionally, they will have telephone access to a national advice line for each subject which will be run along the lines of a call centre. The community study centres will be staffed by an experienced adult assisted by volunteers recruited from unemployed young people in the ﬁ rst instance. The national subject advice lines will be staffed by a mix of academic subject specialists and teachers.

Teachers will spend half their time on intensive teaching of small groups and half on the development of learning materials and/or continuing professional development activities. Some of this work will be co-ordinated by LEA support staff. All learning materials, including work sheets, PowerPoint displays and lesson plans, will be stored on the web and accessible to staff and students. Learning materials will be developed by teams of teachers, or downloaded from the National Grid for Learning and revised/reﬁ ned by them.

A full range of software tools will be available on each student’s mobile ‘computer’. Learning materials will be available to students in both electronic and paper-based form. Books and a wide range of paper-based materials will be available in the library and resource centres. Materials stored on the web will be easily downloaded to high- quality printers. Intelligent tutoring software, or more basic CAL material will be used alongside paper-based materials and will focus, in particular, upon:

• drill and practice games to teach basic skills, such as arithmetical calculations • interactive software and simulations to assist with the learning of difﬁ cult

concepts • simulations software and data-logging software to be used alongside experimental work in a science laboratory.

There are only three barriers to these developments happening immediately in schools. The ﬁ rst is cost of the available technology. Cost will reduce rapidly over

a short period of time but much will depend upon production decisions made by commercial producers. A laptop computer with the specifi cation included above would retail at the equivalent of around £200 to £300 in 2010. However, to stay in profi t producers have so far found it necessary to produce ever more powerful machines and sell them at leading-edge prices. Deals may need to be struck between commercial producers and governments on an international scale, for example to guarantee purchases, to an agreed value, of lightweight mobile computers within this range over a specifi ed number of years.

The second is resistance from those who may feel that schools run in this way would not be fulﬁ lling their duty of care in loco parentis and might fail to socialise young people to become good citizens in the future. In fact, there is nothing in these proposals that would remove young people from the direct supervision of adults, under

108 Challenges of policy and practice the age of 14, without their parents permission. In terms of socialisation, there is little

evidence that schools currently ﬁ nd it easy to cultivate qualities of independence, self- reliance and responsibility in the majority of young people. I suggest that the kind of school organisation I am describing would be more rather than less likely to give young people a good preparation to be responsible citizens in adult life.

The third is the barrier of ﬁ xed assumptions and settled tradition. This is a formidable barrier, but we must overcome it. The traditions of our education system were mostly inherited from the Victorians. They belong to the era of the great mill and the production line and were better suited to preparing young people for that world than they are for our own world. Today we need self-conﬁ dent, independent thinkers, whether team players or entrepreneurs, capable of acquiring a range of different skills and adapting to several jobs over a lifetime. Policy makers at the national and local levels have the power to make a difference in the way schools are organised. Those of us in higher education and schools, both teachers and researchers, need to work with policy-makers and business, parent and community partners to bring about these changes to learning practices and the culture of schools, teachers and schooling.

Universities will ﬁ nd a big change in their student intakes when schools all over the country are organised in this new way – which they undoubtedly will be at some point in the not-so-distant future. University students will arrive with a better level of basic skills. They will also have a wider range of abilities and much greater independence as learners, with more having taken the opportunity to pursue their studies at school to a higher level. Universities already need to revolutionise teaching methods along similar lines to those described here. It will make it much easier to do so if schools have already taken the lead.

Speculations on reorganising schooling with the help of new technology