The private sector have been employing the likes of Anderson Consulting to provide complex, integrated technology strategies for years. But, while they're producing the equivalent of three dimensional installation art, we in the public sector, by and large, still find ourselves confined to 'painting by numbers'. And, third, once we've gone beyond the speeding up of single functions into whole school connectivity, we've got to look at the necessary implications for classroom and school, management. And once we free ourselves from the mantra of small class sizes and instead look at embedding the technology, and start to seek out and acknowledge the most appropriate adult-pupil ratios, who knows what we might suddenly find to be possible. It's my belief that if we create the space and expertise to measure the outputs of what I'll call 'managed learning time' we could start to see a paradigm shift in the way we organise and structure the traditional concept of a 'school'.
Investment is needed to build new models of adult-pupil contact.
But more important even than that is the requirement on schools, or individual teachers, to adapt to the cultural implications that will arise from genuine connectivity. There's something of a paradox between the rhetoric attributed to teachers and the reality of their day to day lives. On the one hand, there's talk of reliance on the collegiality of the staff room and the understandable need to preserve it. But alongside that is the more complicated belief in 'team working'. In reality, I can think of few professions less based on team working.