Time management and effective revolution

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:54:13 CST

by Harriet Wakelam.

G'day everyone

I've been thinking a lot about the so called 'digital revolution'
I've been thinking about my own technology use.
The way youth students use technology
The way the more mature age students use technology.

Projects we have run have all highlighted how little project management/time management and data management skills students have. In addition, I know how long and painful the journey has been for me to develop robust organised multi-tasking/multi-environment skills.

To me, the success or otherwise of the digital revolution will lie largely in the unglamorous stuff. Helping people to access and use the data they produce. For example, in my son's school in year 4 the children are not even taught to touch type. They are using powerpoint a LOT, and they are left to figure out file management strategies for themselves.

I think that we need to acknowledge these key scaffolding skills if we are to up the pace of the technology adoption and embedding in schools and VET.

Interested to hear your points of view.

Thinking about thinking

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:56:51 CST

by simon fenton - jones.

Every History has to come to an end. These ends can be symbolic or chronological, and it it is hard to see where the two coincide. Symbolically, our history of public education starts with the advent of schools for children, which prepared them for work in an industrializing world. It continued with the introduction of schools for mechanics and the rapid post war growth of universities.

Those days, of equipping people with skills for a specific role, like a cog for a machine, are well and truly gone. Whole industries spring up and pass fleetingly, so citizens must adapt far more readily. Institutions and their traditions, which once looked so useful, often look like anachronisms. Whole professions are made irrelevant by new media technologies which have put "the facts" in front of any person with a TV, computer, or phone connected to a digital network.

It seems that the fundamental difference comes down, not just to what one might think of a e-education, but what they may believe about e-governance. The inquiries of a government agency, by itself, becomes as irrelevant as teaching about an old profession, in isolation. Innovation and learning always springs up on the borders of some particular knowledge as an inquisitive mind creates an unthought-of analogy, and pursues its potential meaning. So why are government inquiries always run by a silo using, what are said by many, to be antiquated processes ?

Understanding and tracing the outcomes from spending on research and innovation is set to become far less about the direct benefits arising for a nation and region/cityand more about the ways in which each nation, region and city performs research as part of a wider network that contributes to global advances.

The challenge then, for every government sponsored inquiry, is to consider itself in its national and global contexts and introduce new routines, which can be inclusive of interested cosmopolitans.

As some unknown person working inside DEEWR said in their (team's?) submission to the latest Innovation inquiry. Consideration should be given to ways of improving community perceptions of and support for innovation and reforms in education, training and the workplace to reduce unnecessary duplication and inflexibility. Wouldn't you agree?

Why then. do you think it is, that all these inquiries duplicate one another; acting as if they had no relationship on one another? (please add any you might know of)

http://www.innovation.gov.au/innovationreview/Pages/home.aspx
http://www.nhhrc.org.au/internet/nhhrc/publishing.nsf/Content/submissions-1lp
http://thesource.gov.au/involve/ayf_discussion.asp
http://www.dbcde.gov.au/communications_for_business/funding_programs__and__support/national_broadband_network
http://www.agimo.gov.au/government/ict_review
http://www.australia2020.gov.au/about/index.cfm

We seem to have plenty of Principles.
But no one seems to want to implement them.

Australian Digital Education Revolution

Time management and effective revolution

Thinking about thinking