Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:40a.m.
By Ludwig Wendzich
What does the future hold for schools? What do students want, as opposed to the IT companies who create the possible futures for schools, or the management teams who choose them?
My mum is currently at ULearn '09 where teachers from all over NZ meet in Christchurch and learn about the plans that IT companies have for NZ schools in the coming years. A couple of years ago I had the privilege of being able to speak at a similar conference about what students wanted from schools in the "21st Century."
At that opportunity I used an extended metaphor that was conjured up by a friend of mine; "Students want cake, stop giving us dry bread when we are so used to getting cake at home!" By that I simply meant that schools offer us textbooks, often black and white and mainly filled with text - when we are used to HD video, "next-generation" games, highly interactive forms of communication (from the simple SMS to Social Networks like Twitter and Facebook) and much more thrilling and engaging activities at home.
Unfortunately the outcome didn't result in much better or more highly engaged students. There was an increase in the amount of media used in class; we got to see a lot more videos, and Youtube started to make an appearance also, but most of these videos were just as stale as the textbooks and worse, some were trying too hard to be cool and failing miserably (even for the 1990s in which they were created!)
Not surprisingly the IT companies pushed the idea of an LMS and today the school of the future is a school that has an LMS. Apparently because students like Facebook they'll like some sort of website that let's them interact with students at their school or ask their teachers questions online or get their homework online or submit assignments online. The problem is that most of these systems are badly designed, technically and from a user experience standpoint, and yet schools are still obsessed with them.
This blog is meant to address what real life can learn from the world wide web which means it will sound odd that I am advocating schools to stop being obsessed with LMS systems.
They are not the future, they are an example of someone seeing one success, Facebook and Youtube, and trying to use it as a model for another purpose. Facebook and Youtube are not successful because they are online or have fancy designs with sprinkles of AJAX goodness, Facebook and Youtube are successful because they are good at what they do.
Schools, focus on teaching. IT companies who are building these learning management systems, stop copying and trying to be fancy. Find out what schools need to be successful at teaching and build that! Unfortunately I think you'll find yourself out of a job.
The cake that schools need to succeed are good teachers, not videos or web applications emulating other successful websites.