What Legacy has eLearning History left us?

This is just a post to share my thoughts on how the past has shaped the present and how the lessons from the past can help us shape the future. Brown (1998) and Campbell (2004) give different and detailed histories of important events in New Zealand's eLearning history. You can see these mapped on to a timeline here (hopefully I'll be updating this regularly).

The various documents and publications charted on the timeline have had some impact on eLearning in schools. Two of the early documents (Department of Education, (1986), Ministry of Education (1990) have stressed the importance of teacher PD. As a result of these the ICT PD contracts were established and are still in use today. Whether or not the contracts are successful as models of PD is another question.

Arguably, the rapid evolution of technologies available makes the shelf-life of ICT policy decisions relatively short. However, as Brown (1998) appears to advocate, if policy is more directed towards improving teachers' ability to use ICT, with discernment, to improve learning, as opposed to having an "overly technocentric focus" (p. 6), the impact of technological evolution should be more mitigated. Teachers who know how and when ICT enhances learning and when it doesn't should be able to embrace new developments more effectively for learners. Unfortunately, our legacy of research and policy up to the time of Brown's article does seem to focus more on the technology itself. Perhaps the impact of this is that until recently, schools' ICT policies were preoccupied with student/computer ratios and basic infrastructure development (server upgrades and wireless installation etc.) Whilst these are important foci for schools, I believe they are often at the expense of teacher PD which can result in great deal of expensive equipment gathering dust. I'll do another post connected to this one once I've read the Selwyn (2008) article which will hopefully give me a perspective on the last 10 years between the present and the time of Brown's article.

References

Brown, M. E. (1998). The use of computers in New Zealand schools: A critical review. Computers in NZ Schools, 10(3), 3-9.

Campbell, N. (2004). The vintage years of e-learning in New Zealand schools. The Journal of Distance Education, 8(1), 17-24.

Department of Education, (1986). Potential Benefits of Electronic Communication Technologies for New Zealand.

Ministry of Education, (1990). Report of the Consultative Committee on Information Technology in the School Curriculum.

Selwyn, N. (2008). Business as usual? Exploring the continuing (in)significance of e-learning policy drives. Computers in New Zealand Schools, 20(3), 22-34.