I think Carol Moffatt s project is inspired, not because it links schools with audiographics, but because she has recognized that, to use it well, requires far more attention to the processes of learning and teaching, and, above all else, that it requires teachers who think like learners and plan learning not lessons. So, despite a bumbling Ministry and even more money being poured into the shaky QA rhetoric of seamless learning, there are some brilliant innovators and innovations, and also some unsung heroes like Lawrence Zwimpfer, ex Telecom, who supported lonely pioneers like Carol Moffatt and me when our own Ministry and Institutions were pouring money into solutions without bothering to diagnose the problems. The problem is, as Costa suggests, fairly sophisticated mental systems to cope with transforming the information overload into knowledge. The idea that the use of the technology encourages these skills to develop by some osmotic process is simply laughable. Yet teachers seem to believe it.
Cranial software needs to be shaped, modelled, mediated and nourished.
In fact there s every evidence of the use it or lose it syndrome, and every evidence that the most neglected area of the curriculum at any level, primary to tertiary, is the skills and strategies needed to learn to learn. The problem is not that this is nonsense, but that so many otherwise intelligent people, including many educators, actually believe it. Learning is a human process. I have never been more passionate about learning, and I am, caution and scepticism notwithstanding, passionate about the potential of technology to support learning. After 20 years in education I am totally unconvinced that we have an education system, or a teacher training system, that is capable of producing the sophisticated level of learning, or the confident, self-efficacious learners who will be able to exploit the learning potential of technology.