Who ever heard of
Nokia? Kenya has
How soon we forget in the digital age. Nokia was a pioneer in the spread of cell
phones only a few years ago. Now it has
nearly disappeared from the smartphone kiosks in the local shopping
centre. It fell behind in the iPhone
age.
But they haven't disappeared. In fact, Microsoft recently bought their
handset division and Nokia produces smartphones
using the Windows OS. And they
have been working on education projects in several African countries. They use Nokia phones that feed material
through a cellular connection that can be hooked up to a TV monitor. Only a few schools are in the project
initially, but the potential is great.
In countries where textbooks are expensive and scarce,
jumping over the age of hard copy print may open possibilities for much more
extensive access to learning resources.
In Kenya, many banking transactions are already carried out over
relatively inexpensive cell phones.
Digital is the
workhorse of education globalization
Textbook companies are trying to figure out where the future
lies. They have had monopoly positions
with schools and individual students having to purchase them. Prices have grown beyond any other aspect of
the book business. But that age is
coming to an end.
"Open resources" are the buzz. In British Columbia, the province has put
free, open source texts online for 15 first-year courses offered in multiple
post-secondary institutions. Tools that
make it easy to produce your own books are appearing online.
The big guys in the textbook business are turning to digital
products and projects to capture future profits. Pearson, in particular, is building a global
digital business that includes everything from tests to "analytics." Digital is making it possible to globally
"harmonize," presenting a challenge to maintaining the local and
national as central to the education process.
If there is hope, it is that open source offers a future where the
direction of education does not rest just with global corporations.
But Pearson is even trying to capture open source as a
market. The run their own
"open" educational resources, building on the work that teachers
contribute. And Pearson officials say
they "hear customer demand from teachers for us to help them make sense of
open educational resources."
Gates dreams on
Bill Gates has spent billions from his foundation on grants
to change education. He is now focused
on teacher evaluation and has decided
that teachers have to be involved in the process. He hardly needed to spend billions to find
that out.
Now he wants to bring "accountability" to higher
education. He wants to get students
through their programs faster by using technology and "competency-based
learning, according to a Washington Post story.
This is to come, in his dreams and everyone else's nightmare, with an
accountability system based on testing of post-secondary students.
Second-hand
distraction
Multi-tasking does not just affect the student doing it
during a class, but the students around them as well, according to a study by
McMaster researchers Faria Sana and Tina Weston.
The study was based on students attending a university
lecture and then completing a multiple-choice quiz. Half the students were asked to multi-task on
a number of activities and students were seated around them without
computers. They expected the
multi-takers to do less well in the test than those not multi-tasking, and that
was the result.
However, it turned out that the students surrounded by
multi-taskers also did poorly on the test.
They reported that they were not distracted, but the test results
indicated that they had been.
Classic essay topic no
longer works
A cartoon. First day
of school and the teacher gives a classic assignment: "Write about 'what I did last summer.'" Student says, "weren't you following me
on Twitter?"
Originally published in the Fall 2013 issue of Our Schools, Our Selves, the education journal of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
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