I dont believe there is ‘one-way’ to achieve the transformation in learning and teaching that new technologies can enable.
My grandaughter attends a lower middle class public primary school. Last year the school invested in, wait for it… electronic whiteboards for every class room. Most stayed in their plastic wraps till after a PD day was held mid-year. After the PD day my grandaughters teacher decided to try to use the technology as much as he could with his year ones and twos. He made wonderful progress and by the end of the first term of 07 had been able to utilise the whiteboard in almost all his teaching. It was and is awesome.I could never had contemplated, even after a good read of the literature, many of the applications the teacher and the students developed. All the other teachers have now unwrapped their whiteboards!! After the July break the school has decided to invest in him having a day a week to work with the other staff on ways to change their practice.
One small step…
I think the mix of requirements for a transformation of learning and teaching include: Whole of school and or whole of system leadership; champions at the school level; support; rewards; a portfolio of readily available teaching techniques and strategies that actually work; and good infrastructure.
Of all the investment in ICT and learning over the past decade the least effort has gone into teaching techniques and strategies that work. Why would an individual teacher or whole institution bother changing their practice unless there was at least some evidence that change works to enhance and enrich the learning experience?
Sorry for the sermon.
Educators know that change is afoot.My feeling is that if examples like the new Catholic school in Parramatta is a success there will be many others across all systems clamouring to join.

Thanks also for clarifying your remark about teachers. All you need is 50 or so innovative teachers and put them in one school. But of course our system doesn’t work that way. Keep the radicals diluted and under control. Leadership needs to come from the leaders but it isn’t happening.

It seems to me vanishingly unlikely that the radical change required will come from the government system with its focus on uniform standards and a strong conformist culture. Alice is running as fast as she can but the world is standing still. Individual radicals with sympathetic Principals can establish great niche environments but you have to move past that and scale it at some stage.

In Australia, to my surprise, one lead is being provided within the Catholic System. See 21st Century School . Now, that’s interesting but I can’t see the government system copying that.

America has Charter Schools and other such beasts that give some chance for a radical approach to be tried out. For instance Alan Kay has trialled his Squeak / Etoys software at Los Angeles Charter School for some years now.

your point 2 (”Most teachers do not have a strong experience in working in an open manner, and fewer are ideologically commited to this approach”) seems to blame the teachers for slow uptake but as wara points out the default block of the read/write web would indicate that the Department also is part of the problem

my view is that in general we use computers in a hopeless way in schools (mush ) – incremental change is fine I suppose if you are planning to still be there when you are 100, but there is a need for a big, bold vision with some real oomph – that vision does exist in various forms (eg. Paperts and alan kays ideas ) but has become so marginalised that most people would not even notice

btw I’ve written a paper on using blogs and wikis to enhance the teaching of game making, which I delivered at the Cairns ACEC conference last year

5. most of the social software tools in schools are blocked by default.

an interesting recent link relating to this is
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/06/just-facts-about-online-youth.html

http://napoleon.thepodcastnetwork.com/

There is obviously a great deal of interest in this problem. It seems that departmental officials feel that they must act in a quite conservative manner for fear of very damaging publicity for the school system as a whole. Obviously they have a point. If the Department ‘permits’ children to access bomb-making advice then all hell will break out in our enlightened media. But if a school has a reputation in its community for responsibility and it has an enlightened approach to use of new technology, and it has a process in place for managing filtering, supervision of students, and yet some kid does the wrong thing, then the school is in a much better position to manage the complaints than a large and relatively faceless bureaucracy.

I’m not suggesting that schools should take all the responsibility. But I think there is a major collision not far off when more teachers and principals and parents realise the amazing potential and power of Web 2.0 and the like, and they come up against people who are ignorant of these things, together with people who have a very conservative view of learning. The people who cannot tolerate Wikipedia, for example. And of course the issue really is not simple. Very few people support a complete lack of control of access to the web by school students.

So people like us need to support schools to take leadership in this issue, where they can, and develop processes to demonstrate that schools can manage it better than the department as a whole.

thanks

In my school blogger, wordpress and some other sites have been unblocked at my request. Yes, this helps.

One frustration here is that the default blocking of the read/write web categories by N2H2 slows the spread to those schools / teachers who are open but not yet committed. If you read the fine print rationale then the reason these sites are blocked is simply that Bess finds it too hard to differentiate the good from the bad. They are blocking the new big thing, web apps, simply because its too hard. Department sprouts brave new world rhetoric whilst behaving like head in the sand troglodytes. Hence my objection to your description of those who criticise this as displaying “victim mentality”.

On the other hand google images has been blocked following a bestiality scare. If there was more flexility in the software then web savvy teachers would be in a position to negotiate with admin for selective unblocking of such sites that are 99% clean and useful (for certain rooms, times of day etc.). But generally admins are not going to risk being sued in the current public climate, fueled by the media. “Risk free” mentality is a real problem IMO, it seems to have become dominant culturally

Psiphon is a disruptive technology which I expect will throw up some interesting challenges to this culture.