More on BSF...Spending or Investment? What do you Think?

In the long time I’ve spent working in the world of educational technology, it’s not often you find anyone with enough integrity to say what they really think. Sales and marketing practice tends to steamroller anything like the kind of informed, intelligent discussion which takes place in a formal academic setting or staff common room. So I was impressed to see the posting I've copied below, added to a news thread I started to the BSF Times article in an online community of BSF professionals.

It is one of the single most important statements made about educational technology I have seen in the last decade, and deserves as wide a readership as possible. The author, David Meredith, has ample experience in the business to back up what he says.

Having spent a dozen years or so selling 'cutting edge' ICT tools and systems into schools, being very successful in the job of telling schools what to do and how to do it, I felt so much a fraud that a year ago I chose to spend some time back in the classroom after 25 years. I have managed to visit around 40 schools in four LA areas as a Supply Teacher in that time, and the result of my Action Research is that I have not found a SINGLE school that shows ANY evidence of using technology to transform teaching and learning. Not a single one - and that includes a whole number of so-called Specialist Colleges. I think there are some good things going on, because I have been told so by some schools in the past - or are they as good at the sales patter as Neil's shiny-suited salesman?

I'm with Armando - in fact, I sold him one of the first VLE's (at almost £20,000 a year) some time ago. He bought the dream (I honestly believed my own patter). When it turned out the system didn't actually quite work I ensured he got a full refund. Who else is giving refunds? Where are the benefits? Where has the money gone? It is a depressing picture really.

I'd be more impressed by some of the current debates about education if they showed any understanding of the reality David describes here, because that is where all the "investment" has been going for over a decade.



Comments

[Janshs]

Hi John
very thought provoking http://h809-jm.blogspot.com/2010/02/ed-tech-transforming-teaching.html
Jan

[Joe]

Jan,
You might want to read some of my earlier posts, especially any on techno-zealots and "gurus", who have been exploiting the power of new technology very skilfully to publicise themselves, at the expense of teachers and children who are on the receiving end of their twaddle.

[Tom Burkard]

There's no doubt that Prof Wiliam has been the main driving force behind educational change over the last decade. The Gilbert Review reflects his influence. To me it's something of a mystery how he has been able to transform a common-sense idea like assessing pupils' learning and modifying instruction to suit their needs into some sort of revolutionary concept. Good teachers have always done this. It's a standard part of the Army's Methods of Instruction syllabus, and I expect that it's common to most commercial training programmes. Typically, the DCSF and its satellite quangos have served this up as "Assessment for Learning" (AfL), completely missing the point of the exercise. It is so complex that it has provided ample opportunities for software providers to sell packages which relieve teachers of whatever little responsibility they might have for their pupils' learning.

But perhaps the most depressing part of the so-called debate is the assumption that education serves to prepare children for the world of work, and to provide the skills that employers supposedly want. In 2003 Alison Wolf demolished this argument--other than basic literacy and numeracy skills, schools and post-16 education teach very few skills that are useful to employers. Even the contention that low-skill jobs are disappearing is a lie--the bulk of our immigrants perform jobs so menial that a good grasp of English isn't even essential.

Anthony Seldon's call to "remodel and refashion education" also fills me with horror. Education is already grossly over-managed. His late father, the influential free-market economist Arthur Seldon, would have been horrified. Fortunately, the natural meddling instinct of reformers and politicians may be thwarted after the next election; recently, I heard a very influential member of the Tory education team suggest that one of the first acts of a new administration would be mass sackings in the DCSF, and a bonfire of policies enacted under New Labour. With any luck, this will include AfL. Whether they are quite up to speed on ICT systems is another matter.