John Travers

Heard the great Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame today, and one of his notable principles is “accountability rather than gatekeeping”. In other words, rather than shutting the door, banning, restricting and controlling – make yourself, your use of the internet – accountable, and encourage this in others. He was largely referring to Wikipedia and online publishing.

However this principle is very appropriate for an issue that bedevils the use of the internet in SA schools, and probably in many other jurisdictions.

A constant complaint heard from ICT coordinators and principals is, “You can’t access that site because DECS [the Department] blocks (filters) internet access.” However, DECS gives control of the site blocking to the Administrator at school level, ie: the principal. It seems that many schools do not exercise that control, leaving the default setting in place. Requests can be made to the IT section for state-wide blocking to be removed, but this is a somewhat tedious process because of the inevitably conservative approach of these people.

So, gate-keeping is the general approach for the system and many schools. But it does not have to be so. Sue Toone is a principal with a different approach. She exercises a liberal approach, removing blocking when it is seen to be warranted. Staff have considerable powers to initiate the opening up of web sites because Sue believes that they are responsible people. They manage curriculum access to a wide range of resources for students as a matter of routing.

It is too easy to resort to victim behavior, blaming ‘the department’ for restrictions on web access when the power is fundamentally in the hands of the school. It means being accountable for one’s actions. But principals and and teachers and school councils are expected to be accountable, to act reasonably and to act in good faith. They manage this in relation to the purchase of books for the library, and are perfectly capable of doing this in relation to selecting web sites for access by students.

In a spot of recklessness a few months ago I subscribed to Technology Review, an apparently good quality US magazine. They had an article that looked very impressive on the one laptop per child initiative. The attraction of the magazine was not just its content, but that I could subscribe for a year for only $24US and get an exact copy online via the Zinio reader software.

Well, the content is very impressive, well over my head in terms of science, but beautifully presented and a great way, to keep up to date with innovation in technology across the broad range of science and technology.

But what about the facsimile experience? Zinio reader is very polished and presents the magazine in its exact paper format, down to the little subscription insert between pages. Navigation is either by mouse or cursor keys. The standard view is the two page spread [see image] where headlines and the general content can be read, and with one click, it zooms into wherever you click to the readable format. The trouble is that the magazine is in columns, and so you read the top of the left column , then jump down to see the lower part of the column, then jump up to see the top of column two, and so on. It is all a bit silly. A format that works well in a magazine or newspaper, where you eye readily does the ‘jumping’, is not effective on a computer screen – unless of course you can turn your laptop sideways and view the page in its ‘natural’ portrait format.

So I visited the Technology Review website, and lo and behold, the entire magazine content is there in regular web format, and I must say, I find it much easier to use. While the web format magazine lacks the cleanness and full screen display of the Zinio edition, it is a lot more ‘natural’ to the experienced web user. Navigation is simple, bookmarking is easy, and it connects naturally, that word again, to other web tools.

So my conclusion from this experience and from a short experiment with reading the New York Times in its print layout on a computer is that it is futile for web publishing to mimic print display. Each medium should stick to its own advantages.

I’m feeling slightly smug that twenty years ago when computers were mere babies in schools, I wrote a little column in an educational journal titled ‘Clayton’s Computer’. At the time everyone in Australia knew Clayton’s as the name of a non-alcoholic drink (’The drink you have when you are not having a drink.’) Readers understood ‘Clayton’ as a euphemism for pretending, or fakery. So the hero of my column was Clayton, a teacher who used computers extensively in his teaching, but at a quite shallow level, replicating traditional teaching with the aid of a computer, gaining a (fake) reputation as a trendy modern teacher using computers to enrich learning.
Sadly, the Claytons have multiplied in education systems all around the world in the years since then: sometimes cynically, but more often innocently as teachers and administrators strive to bolt new technologies onto traditional teaching practices, and find that very little changes.

Using a word processor to prepare a report has significant advantages over writing it by hand, but the task and the outcome are essentially the same, so any learning gains are small. But the cost of the computer is significant. We don’t get real gains in using computers in education until the power of the computer is used to move to a higher level of learning activity. And that’s hard to achieve because the whole system is determined to resist change. That’s what has fascinated me over the last twenty years – to contest between entrenched educational practice and the onrush of computing innovation that is changed just about every aspect of society – except for schools.