I am really hoping that discussions are frank and open about what is really happening and not just about pockets of excellence as David Jakes calls them. By that I refer to the fact that conferences can be places where we talk about best practice in a very public forum. I know that in the past I have come away from these events feeling like my institution is a long way behind in what we are doing in classrooms only to later learn that the presentation was describing an outlier and not what was mainstream in the school despite what had been portrayed in the presentation.

I am not saying that there is anything wrong with discussion of best practice. It is only through sharing these ideas that we all move forward. The point I am trying to make is that there are a lot of teachers out there that are working hard to try to move a fairly traditional, standards focussed school with busy teachers who say that they have little time to learn “new fangled Web 2.0 tools” to slowly come onboard with open-ended, inquiry based learning that encourages creativity, collaboration and communication over worksheets and benchmark testing. Many of these teachers share frustrations and stories over their PLN to a great collaborative and knowledgable group who they can trust and who understand how it is for them at their school. A much more public forum like a conference can be seen as a dangerous place to share these frustrations, especially when you may be wearing a name tag that identifies your employer! I think that this is one of the reasons why some teachers are beginning to find their own PLN via Twitter, Blog, email and others a more effective way to share and learn than the large conference event.

As someone who is putting many hours into the setting up of a conference, I really hope that we can highlight the journey more than the technology and share in an open and honest way the challenges that come from trying to change mindsets that have always valued memorisation and reguritation onto a test paper as the core fundamentals of good education.

Photo: Serious Conversation http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcazadi/2388418126/

This is not just my opinion, the two teachers I travelled with are both incredibly experienced teachers who are passionate about the effective use of IT for learning and they are also tutoring and doing things other than working with teachers because no school will pay them for their services.

In my case, I have a wife who is busy working so that I can donate my time to schools and the Education Bureau of Hong Kong who is very grateful. They have written to me recently to indicate that they appreciate my efforts with workshops of 20+ teachers very much but cannot pay me more than an hourly rate that is less than I could make tutoring 1:1. In normal circumstances I would say that I may not be well received by the teachers but every workshop is evaluated and all of them have the highest possible rating from the teachers. It is just that the community here seems to think that the workshops I am doing on integrating 21st Century Learning Skills across the Curriculum are about as important as a workshop on teaching badminton as an extra-curricular activity!

This is quite sad when you consider that I have just read Will Richardson’s excellent post What Do We Know About Our Kids’ Futures? Really.  It makes me wonder how we get the message to the community that ICT is not just an add-on or a activity like juggling that we may or may not choose to incorporate into our teaching but an essential skill that our kids must have if they expect to live, work and reach their full potential in a flattened world.

Is Hong Kong the only place left on the planet where even the government has not realised the imporatance of ICT in learning beyond publishing a couple of papers and giving meagre grants that only serve to maintain a very basic level of support for IT in schools?

Are there other places where consultants with Higher Degrees in the Pedagogically Sound use of ICT for learning and 25 years of classroom experience cannot find schools who are willing to invite them in to work with staff in spite of letters, emails, personal visits, etc. offering workshops even at no cost?

Hong Kong worries that it might be less competitive in the future given the way that cities like Shanghai are doing all that they can to take business away from the SAR. They would do well to consider the need to try to change their schools from the very traditional organisations with classes of 40 children sitting in rows and worshipping the holy texts that prepare them for a cram and regurgitate exam to the sort of schools that encourage creativity. A hard challenge indeed!