Focus Education
Surfing the clouds VIEW
PROFESSOR
Whether technology is good or bad for education, is an irrelevant question. We need to prepare a generation that will
probably live to be well over 100 years-old. To prepare them for a world that is utterly incomprehensible to us. Fifty years from today will be at least as different from today as fifty years ago was. In 1961, living rooms had radiograms, a large piece of furniture that had a record player and a valve radio built in. Te radio had to warm up for about a minute before it would play. Telephones and television were large and rare instruments. Computers were huge expensive machines in large buildings. Tere was no internet, it would have been an incomprehensible idea. In 2011, the radiogram has all but vanished. It has become tiny, almost invisible. It was everywhere and cost very little, and now people just have little media players. Now, that too has started to vanish. Te telephone is vanishing. Everyone has one everywhere. It can be as tiny and cheap as we like. Te 1960s radiogram is inside it, as is the TV. Te computer is vanishing. It can be as small and cheap as we like. Almost everyone has one, it’s inside the smart phone that has the radiogram and the telephone and the TV in it. You can’t tell anymore if a person is thinking aloud, or talking on the phone, or watching a film, playing a game, or surfing the Cloud (the internet). “Surfing the Cloud”. How long would it have taken to explain that phrase to a person in 1961? Fast forward to 2061. Te little device of the early 21st century that integrated all the gadgets of the 20th, will have vanished. It will be replaced by something as incomprehensible as the smart phone of today would have been in the 1960s. Perhaps it will be biological and at the nano-scale. Perhaps it will reside in every brain. So what will happen to examinations and education? Are we to put all children through a body scanner when they come to school? When you can’t tell if a person “knows” or is
Whether technology is good or bad for education is irrelevant, says Professor Sugata Mitra, whose ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiments, in Delhi, inspired the film Slumdog Millionaire
consulting the internet, we will have to change our definition of “knowing”. All education will have to change. Learners do not need to be prepared for 17 years to face the world, when what they need to know, they can find out in seconds. I once showed a group of little girls a picture from Google Earth of the Large Hadron Collider. “How long will it take you to find out what that is and what it’s for?” I asked. “Five seconds?” they said. Te State will continue to assess and examine. But it will need to assess three abilities in learners. Reading comprehension, the ability to search for and analyse information, and a rational system of belief will be the key skills of the future learner. Children will not sit in classrooms and listen to things that they can find out by themselves. Arithmetic and handwriting will be obsolete skills, just as swordplay and horse riding, vital life skills, once, are obsolete today. Teachers will need to change into admiring adults that pose some fundamental questions to learners. Ten she will watch as the children plunge into the Cloud. And she will step back as learning emerges.
Sugata Mitra is a professor at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University.
Rise to the challenge VIEW
Reading via new media is here to stay, says Rebecca Wright INTERN
As a recent product of the British education system, I feel not
entirely unqualified to say that the structure of our GCSEs, A levels and degrees do not encourage reading for pleasure. At degree level, the problem is compounded by the sheer volume of texts
www.firstelevenmagazine.co.uk
one has to read. My personal move away from reading for pleasure coincided with my use of social media, circa 2005. Tese websites did incorporate reading but not in the traditional forms that I found myself increasingly alienated from. New National Literacy Trust research, Setting the Baseline, highlights the popularity of these new forms of reading material and found that social networking and other new media were all the more likely to be read outside of the classroom than books. Tus, I feel that there are two challenges for literacy. Firstly, there
needs to be a move away from reading against a mark scheme; towards actively encouraging people to read for pleasure. Policy makers need to recognise the danger of polarising “traditional” forms of reading and make new reading materials available. Technology and the internet isn’t going to go away. Te ability to take ownership of what one reads is what will encourage more reading – and if we want a nation of readers – then there must be a significant amount of freedom for people to embrace the forms of literature that stimulate them.
Autumn 2011 FirstEleven 49
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