Playing catch-up with digital realities

The education revolution isn’t some desirable goal for the future; it’s been here creating confusion for most of this century. What is urgently needed is a coherent plan for dealing with its consequences. This means starting from scratch with the fundamental question - what would be a good education for Australian citizens in the information age?

Most of the amazing Internet skills of today’s students have been acquired - outside the classroom. In the absence of digital-based education, the net generation has been hugely successful in teaching themselves the skills they need for the workforce. (More than 70 per cent of Australians are now making their living out of thin air - producing something at the workplace that you can’t drop on your foot!)

Yet how much better would their skills be if they had trained teachers to guide them, to analyse their strengths and weaknesses and provide feedback? The digital natives might excel in messaging, mixing, mashing and moviemaking, but they are usually a little short on judgment, reflection and perspective - all essential qualities that can be encouraged by a good teacher, and fostered by a good education.

It will take much more than a few additional classes or courses for the education system to catch up to and accommodate the education revolution. It will demand of parents, politicians, policymakers, - and commentators in The Australian - that they abandon some of their cherished practices and rethink what education is for and just how the system will need to be transformed for the 21st century.

Now that students don’t have to gather together in the presence of a teacher to get their information, or to polish their digital literacy/numeracy skills, will there be the need for the same number of classrooms? And now that teachers no longer control knowledge - should they become experts in other fields? Should they be developing ground breaking educational software that forms a national resource base - that is the envy of the rest of the world? Should they become learning specialists?

Or maybe they could put their energies into professional development, designing resources for teachers - and creating new repertoires for the art of teaching. Only when we have a coherent plan for training our teachers for the digital realities, will we be able to manage - and make the most of - the education revolution that has been with us - since the Internet connected home computers.