Thursday 15 May 2008

A future of education

Technology is definitely creeping into the classrooms, not just on the student's side, but also, I think, technology ought to eventually be more heavily utilised on the classroom side.

I once dreamed about 'digitial whiteboards', but coming to think about it, multitouch screens are becoming a reality, and just awaiting massive adoption by schools, I think. And at the end, it's about empowering the teachers to empower the students, through technology.

At the same time, there should be this process of evaluating the role of a teacher. In this era where information is so readily accessible and democratised, at least in the more developed countries, I think textbooks should eventually be done away with. Education boards should be more concerned about the quality and access to information, and not just continually sell propaganda wholesale to students. Most of what I knew in my secondary school with respect to economics have proven to be bullshit, and SS, or Social Studies, might as well be called, Stalinist Satire...

The syllabus of the humanities subjects are laughable and reflects a very outdated mode of thinking. Students are better off using Wikipedia as their source.

And the other thing is, I forsee subjects that are considered advanced now to be taught at lower and lower levels. It has to be. There is no other way. Like, quantum mechanics, the subject of Nobel Prizes five decades ago are now routinely taught at JC and Poly levels. And Information Literacy should be a subject taught in schools - information literacy - awareness of web 2.0 phenomena, and though might not be taught as an examinable subject, should still be imparted to students.

Teachers should really just teach students how to acquire and critique the knowledge that they know - to do stuff with what they know rather than just learning stuff - but to do cool stuff with what they know. This is the era where information is becoming super-abundant - we don't need to know that now, what we need to learn is how to make that information into knowledge effectively.


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