www.nickhodge.com

From World in their Hands, Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald Icon today:

But Dr Jan Fletcher, of the Child Study Centre at the Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Aus­tralia, is wary of vir­tual lives for chil­dren. “There is a danger that this online inter­ac­tion might be lim­it­ing the amount of social inter­ac­tion the child is actu­ally hav­ing,” she warns. “I want kids to talk to each other about what they’re inter­ested in, not about a world inven­ted by a toy company.

Hmmm, online inter­ac­tion takes many forms — and kids do talk to each other about what they are inter­ested in. Online, off­line, within and without borders.

It seems the world of “toys” and “inform­a­tion” joined together magic­ally means “edu­ca­tion”. What if inform­a­tion is actu­ally, well, fun? Gone are the book­ish days of read­ing an encyc­lo­pe­dia and wel­come to the world of instant information.

The crit­ical skill is inform­a­tion lit­er­acy.

As high­lighted by one of Australia’s lead­ing Social Net­work­ing thinkers in Edu­ca­tion, Mike Sey­fang, tech­no­logy in schools is already in schools. Mobile phones, the MSN Mes­sen­ger com­munit­ies, blogs, Myspace, Wiki­pe­dia: these tech­no­lo­gies are being used by stu­dents today.

One per­vas­ive tech­no­logy that hounds par­ents today is the use of MSN Live Mes­sen­ger. It’s the stand­ard tool for all kids today. Without Mes­sen­ger, kids are out­casts from their social net­works. They use it to gos­sip (like the tele­phone of pre­vi­ous eras) and to col­lab­or­ate on school pro­jects. And prob­ably bully, too. In all instances, col­lab­or­a­tion is king. Today, the abil­ity to col­lab­or­ate in work and life scen­arios is under­developed in K-12 (espe­cially at the pointy end of K-12) as the focus moves to indi­vidual achievement.

Unless you are stuck on a deser­ted island, your life is going to be col­lab­or­at­ive. Work, too. In a con­nec­ted world, this is amp­li­fied and pack­et­ised.

What is needed is policy and technology-frameworks to unlock the power of the net­works that exist. It might be Single-Sign-on (some­times referred to SSO), fire­walls and other pieces of tech­no­logy that cor­por­a­tions already use. Microsoft (my employer) eats its own dog­food: smart­cards, fire­walls, net­work secur­ity and the like.

How­ever, it is my con­ten­tion that the first hurdle isn’t the tech­no­logy: it’s enabling the pas­sion­ate teach­ers to engage in the learn­ing net­works. Remov­ing the block­ages of knee-jerk blanket restric­tions — as they do not work. Remem­ber, the inter­net was designed to deal with fail­ure and route around it. Cen­sor­ship is classed as a fail­ure, and there­fore is routed around.

I’d love to hear teacher stories.

Kevin Richard­son, Head­mas­ter of Immanuel Col­lege, on the Future of Learning.