Australia should head-hunt Michael Gove

The word seems to be spreading

<quote>
*Comment* : Over in Blighty, there’s an outbreak of sanity that puts at risk
years of work by the computer industry to place itself at the centre of the
education budget.

If stories coming from the UK are accurate, the government has discovered
that the IT sector’s vision for computers in schools amount to little more
than an industry-wide subsidy that wouldn’t be tolerated if the recipient
were the phone business, cars, or televisions.

If any other industry said to governments “you must buy our products for
your students, and then you must make it a curriculum requirement that the
student learns how to use our products”, the laughter alone would put an end
to the proposal.

Try this statement: “To ensure that students are prepared for the world of
driving, each student must be provided with access to a motor vehicle
provided by the education department, taught how to use it within the
context of the entire school curriculum, and to ensure the currency of their
driving skills, educational vehicles should be no more than three years
old.”

The computer industry has somehow managed to insulate itself from reality,
creating a world in which, as the UK’s secretary of state for education,
Michael Gove puts it, children are “bored out of their minds being taught
how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers”.

Even better: the industry’s cozy little scam traps schools into the upgrade
cycle, so that today’s boring entry-level desktop application training is
locked onto the vendors’ product roadmap.

The smart, savvy and cynical can even play off different educational sectors
against each other.

When the federal government’s laptops-for-all program finally hit its
straps, delivering hundreds of thousands of machines instead of merely
hundreds, the metropolitan dailies started getting handed case studies about
expensive private schools dropping iPads into their students’ backpacks.

This wasn’t accident: it was marketing strategy, and brilliantly successful.
At no time do I recall a newspaper even hinting to the readers that “iPads
all the rage at Snob Convent” stories were placements, not scoops.

And now, a UK minister is busting the bubble and, horror of horrors, even
popping up open source tools into his mindset.

For too many years, IT has had an easy job when it comes to education.
Schools needed computers, because computers prove that they care about the
students’ future; the more and newer computers there are, the more the
school is seen to care.

The industry didn’t even need to do its own marketing, what with academics,
consultants, analysts and parent lobbies all yelling for more investment in
educational IT to “prepare our children for the future of work” – but not,
regrettably, teaching any student anything worthwhile about how computers
actually work, or how to step outside the strict boundaries of the desktop
office application.

Right now, at least in Australia, a genuine understanding of programming is
the preserve of nerd clubs: if you’re actually interested in programming,
you have to join the “kids with thick glasses” groups (excuse the
stereotype) and enter robot competitions. That’s good in itself – the groups
will be led by enthusiastic and informed teachers – but it means that a lot
of potential interest and talent is missed.

Gove wants students en masse to actually learn about the inside of the
machines, and – if I am reading the reports correctly – he wants to sweep
away England’s ICT curriculum entirely.

Of course, the industry isn’t going to starve. Vendors will still have their
teeth locked onto the public teat; even now, Plan Bs are being prepped to
make sure that Gove gets what he wants, without putting at risk the
dependency that keeps the dollars flowing.

But at least if students get something more useful than “how to share
Powerpoint over a videconference link”, it will be a start.
</quote>
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/0...mputer_ed/