An Expat Educator in Asia

Sitting waiting for the Ferry from Macau to Hong Kong on quite a beautiful morning where the rising sun is an angry red due to the smoke in the air. The temperature is perfect. Don’t we all wish it would stay that way?

Reading Ewan McIntosh’s blog I came across the Meme: Passion Quilt Challenge. Whilst my early morning brain has not fully recalled what a meme is, the details on the blog are clear enough for me to respond.

What am I most passionate about students learning? I am trying hard not to make this sound clichéd but, as a teacher now isolated from any physical community of learners, I have really come to know the power of the collaborative network of learners on the blogosphere. I can’t help but believe that this community of networked learners will pay a huge part in the life of 21^st Century Learner/Workers. Picking up on Wes Fryers comments about Mark Prensky’s presentation Engage Me or Enrage Me: Educating Today’s Digital Native Learners, where he mentions how the power of technology and what we can do with it increases a billion fold in 30 years, I can only begin to imagine the access someone will have to information when the primary school students of today enter the workforce.

So, given this, what am I passionate about students learning today? It is how to use the technology that they have now and will have in the future to connect, collaborate and solve problems. I know that many of you might say that this is very broad and is “a given” anyway but sadly I have to say that at least in this part of the world it clearly is not. There are more and more schools investigating technology for learning and commencing with 1:1 programs but the prevailing learning is still very traditional and mostly book-based. As a result, the distinction between the book as the tool of learning and the computer, mobile phone and mp3 player as the tools of entertainment and socialization could not be more stark.

I had a long conversation with a parent yesterday who told me about how her children at a Hong Kong International school who hated using computers at school because the lessons on them were so boring! They were only learning how to use them to wordprocess, DTP, spreadsheet etc. I can’t believe that it was nearly 3 years ago that I left another Hong Kong International School who were forcing me to do the same thing to kids and we have not moved on yet! We have to start showing students how to use these tools for learning NOW! This is no longer an option but an imperative. We are already well and truly playing catch-up. Every time I see a young person using technology in Hong Kong it is for entertainment. Sure, there are a few highly publicized examples of kids doing well in a robotics competition or others doing some clever programming but I am yet to see the fabulous examples of kids connecting and collaborating on a global scale using Wikis or students in Hong Kong combining with those in other parts of the world to do the global pollution and environmental studies that we should be doing. Technology lessons with computers seem to still be distant from the rest of the curriculum. Given that we are now in 2008 and movements along these lines seem to have been mentioned way back before I commenced my masters studies in 1991, this to me seems unacceptable.

So, in a long winded way, that is what I am passionate about students learning. How whichever powerful networked tool that they have in their possession or can easily access at school can be used for learning.

Let’s get with the program!

Photo: Third graders work on a webquest by Extra Ketchup 

My five like-minded learners are:

Adrian Bruce of The Teacher’s Toolbox

Jeff Utecht (The Thinking Stick)

Chris Betcher

Jason de Nys

and

Clive Dawes at Kellett School

Filed under: Education in Hong Kong