There was an excellent program on Australia’s Radio National this week titled Sex on the Net about child safety. In the style of this program it is a very sensible and thoughtful perspective and in 45 minutes goes into considerable depth. The link allows you to listen or download the audio and there is a transcript.

In short, the program says: there are serious issues at stake, there is no need to panic and the issues are complex. As usual, there are no simple answers and there is a lovely section in the program where a man who has been working for years in an educational program for children with one message – don’t give out your personal details, who realises that it is probably a useless approach.

It is a topic that school administrators and teachers need to know a lot about, and many of the ‘expert’ on this program said that they don’t really know what is happening.

I have always liked to describe school systems in terms of a natural ecosystem, where the various players play roles that they have worked out over time that allow them to ’survive’ in the system. The technologies of the classroom have evolved to support the needs of the players, like desks for students to write on, store books and stationery and keep the student in fixed in one place so that they can be easily managed! There are a thousand other components, human and material, in the system that have evolved to do the business of teaching in a particular way.

Regularly, over the last few decades at least, new ideas (and technologies) come along and challenge the balance in the ecosystem. Bright sparks in the ’70s in South Australia changed desks into tables that can more readily be placed in groups, moved and did not provide storage. The Open Space teaching model did a lot more than this little example. So to continue my little story, teachers had developed teaching methods that relied on students having immediate access to their work-books, stored in their sturdy desks. When tables came along, books were stored in book trays around the walls of the classroom. So the teachers had an organisational problem caused by the innovative tables. I’m not interested in whether having work-books on hand is a good thing or not, but am making the point that every innovation has lots of negative implications because it does not fit all the existing components in the school ecosystem. It is difficult to change one thing without changing lots of things.
So this is why I thoroughly agree with the point Bill made in a comment on my previous post that incremental change is unlikely to work in getting new technologies embedded in the school ecosystem. Change needs to be bold, as he points out Papert has been urging for a long time. New technologies, be they tables, ballpoint pens or internet access pose a threat to many existing activities. If they are introduced into the environment incrementally, a bit of equipment here, a bit of training there, they will be ‘nibbled to death by ducks’ (Garth Boomer). Radical change recognises that we are not introducing the new technologies to tweak the existing ecosystem but to change it in fundamental ways.

That’s another reason for sparing a thought for those planning the introduction of new technologies into classrooms. Radical requires courage and lots of confidence.

I don’t think it is blaming teachers to say that most have not had strong experience in teaching in an open style, or have a clear ideology towards this type of teaching. Why should they? They have been working in a system that has placed priority on other approaches to learning. They have not had technologies that allow remarkable access to information or efficient collaborative tools. I do not have strong experience in they openness that web 2.0 tools will encourage and allow (and I am a baby of the open space years and the open education revolution of the ’70s!).

I think we young radicals can take some heart, though, because the web 2.0 tools are in the main free, easy to use, only need an internet connection, available from home, and most of all, can be introduced subversively by individual teachers (who can get the filter blocks removed).

If you want a wonderful Web 2.0 working example to explore or show people, have a look at www.librarything.com – a great big book club where you show off your library, tag your readings, explore the million or more other book entries and converse with people in the hundreds of groups of like-minded readers. This is my tag cloud. Don’t laugh.

This is a Web 2.0 application that even the most elite elitist will appreciate, because there is a long tradition of people discussing books in a discussion group. The beauty of if is that I don’t have to mix with the people who loved The DaVinci Code, I can go off and form a group of people who like my kind of book.

This seem to me to be the way to persuade teachers and others that something new is happening with Web 2.0. Get them to look at a site like this, and they will Get IT.