Later in that year I finally got to meet up with a few colleagues at a meeting arranged by Graeme Deuchars at German Swiss International who did a great job of getting us all into a room but it was only a small group of mostly large international schools. There was no culture of regular meeting up and sharing in the majority of Hong Kong English Medium schools.

It was a long way from this when a group of us gathered at Kellett School last night for a session of sharing around the free and open source software Scratch, which the logo team at MIT are now making available to the Educational Community. Clive Dawes was our very able and gracious host but teachers from various schools attended to share and to learn.

Tonight we have a meeting for planning the 21st Century Learning conference set to happen next October in Hong Kong. At the same time, there is a Dartfish seminar at German Swiss International which is taking teachers through the use of video analysis for analysing and correcting sporting technique. We have just had a series of workshops here in Hong Kong by Jamie McKenzie which were well attended by regional schools.  Jamie plans to return in March of next year for another set of workshops.

What all of this says to me is that there is a wind of change blowing through the Hong Kong educational community surrounding the effective use of ICT for learning. It is a welcome breeze and one that looks to bring about a powerful change to the landscape here.

I for one, am looking forward to being a part of it.

Photo: Wind Farm by Zonifer Lloyd

It took me by suprise to read this blog post from Wes Fryer in Oaklahoma and realize that we are both reading the same comic on the same day.

I wonder if that provides anyone with ideas for global projects? I know that I can think of a few. Comments welcome.

Hong Kong , and probably the greater Asian region, seems to be in the grip of laptop programs at the moment. Surprisingly, this is not really spurred on by the emergence of the cheaper laptops on the market as the majority of schools are choosing the premium priced Macbooks as the laptop of choice. Can’t say that I am too surprised in this really as Apple still seem to be the only ones on the block with any idea that a 1:1 program involves more than just box dropping.  The PC vendors so far do not get the concept of kids and laptops. Surprising seeing that it was Toshiba who lead the way on 1:1 back in Australia in the late 80s.

The thing that most surprises me is the lack of “noise” in the HK education community associated with these initiatives. I am trying to be fair to the schools and the administrators when I say that I really hope that the programs are premised on all of the right goals and ideals. Any laptop program needs to be seen as the catalyst for the school to move from schooling model “A” to schooling model “B”. Sure, the change is not, and should not be expected to be, immediate but it needs to be acknowledged that this is the reason for the initiative and that it is where the school is heading. I have known of schools who have introduced laptops hoping that the school will be Schooling model “A + laptops”. All too often, schooling model “A”  was one that was content based and teacher directed and not really conducive to every student with a laptop all day every day. In many cases, this sort of program has resulted in a lot of frustration for teachers and students. In a number of celebrated cases, it has even lead to the school dropping the use of laptops in the school so that the school can return to doing schooling model “A” more effectively.

I know that many of the schools who are going 1:1 have a “walled garden” Learning Platform that allows for sharing between the schools in the Authority but not to the “outside world”. I am really hopeful that this has a lot of dialog on it from the schools to make up for the lack of blogging and general sharing of issues and ideas that is necessary for a program such as this. I know from my own experience, that the backward and forward discussion on a myriad of issues such as handling the kids who repeatedly put games on the machines, to insurance issues, to effective multimedia apps, to complaints from parents about teaching (or not teaching) typing, was fantastic and allowed for great, authentic exchange of ideas, documentation etc.

I for one, could not imagine having access to the tools to build a great Professional Learning Network around the area of Laptops in International schools in Aisa and not using them to share and reflect.

Professor Barry McGaw
Head of the National Curriculum Board and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute

Valerie Hannon
Director of Strategy for the UK Innovation Unit

Chris Wardlaw
Former Deputy Secretary of Education in Hong Kong

Michael Stevenson
Vice President of Global Education at Cisco Systems

Here is a direct link to the audio file of around 55 minutes duration.  I urge educators to have a listen as the comments are quite considered and telling.

I was glad to be given a link to a Cisco paper by Michael Stevenson, who by the way, makes some great

statements. In this paper, entitled “Equipping Every Learner for the 21st Century” it gives a telling chart on page 13 “Exhibit 4″. This chart shows the average Dutch Student’s Media Consumption over a 24 hour period. Guess what parts of the day, other than sleeping, are where it drops lowest? Yep! Good old traditional School time!

There appear to be some other good resources on the Cisco 21st Century Learning site.

I will look forward to checking them out in due course but for now, time to listen to the rest of the podcast.

Oh! If you are Aussie Expat and you like catching up with Education Issues from “back home” make sure you subscibe to ABC radio’s EdPod. Definitely worth listening to and always great questions from Aedy, a former English teacher and now well-researched journalist.

I could get funding to get the most obscure and unqualified people to come into the school to conduct workshops on “teaching English through poetry, dance or drama” but when it comes to running workshops on using ICT for learning English it is very difficult to get approval.

Having recently reflected a lot on the ideas of Christiansen in “Disrupting Class”, one can only hope that the message gets trough soon.
Well, we did get some blogs set up for classes and even managed to get some RSS feeds into Google Reader for the teachers. They could very quickly monitor the posts of their kids in one space which worked really well.
The issue that we had was with making it clear to the kids that they had to REFLECT on the posts of the kids in Adelaide prior to responding. Most were just writing a “Hello! I live in Hong Kong and I like your blog” style of post which does not go far. I am sure that we can move on from this with a bit of response from the Aussie kids which I am hopeful of. The scene is now set!
The good news is that I get to go back and do another day with the school on November 28th. Although I have some new topics to do then like working on setting up video subtitling using Dot Sub and even doing video dubbing of news broadcasts into English using something similar to Know the News, I am hopeful that we will get time to visit the blogs and get some real “global exchange” going.

Photo: IMG_1985 by Wootang01

The one thing that I would have asked as a question, had I had the opportunity amongst the many asking, is “how are you going to get the message to the Hong Kong schools where it needs to go?” I am almost glad that I did not get the opportunity as I probably would have been told something a little different to what I read in the next morning’s South China Morning Post which contained an article in the Education Section titled “Licensing Platform Opens”. It had a great one line explanation saying “Licensing enables educational works such as textbooks, worksheets, supplementary course materials and presentations to be shared freely and legally by students and educators.” Unfortunately, it also contained the sad statement “So far, no Hong Kong educational institutions have joined the initiative.”

Now there is a challenge for some Hong Kong schools to shift if ever there was one!

I recently attended the Microsoft TechEd 2008 conference in the HKCEC in Wan Chai where I sat in on a presentation to do with capturing innovation  in an organisation.

It struck me how relevant this presentation could be to education. Whilst part of the agenda of the talk was to convince attendees that MS Sharepoint server and its add ons would be the best for any enterprise, it was also a look at why companies need to innovative and why they should support and capture the dialogue about innovation.

The presentation clearly identified changes on the horizon and mentioned the digital lifestyles and workplaces that were becoming commonplace today. Once again, I could not help wishing that some regional educational leadership were present to hear this.

I know that it is a message that some of their parent community passes onto them but in this city where exams are as common as hot dinners for kids and rote learning tutors are treated like rock stars and adorn bus backs with huge trendy pics, it takes a courage not often displayed in HK Educational leadership to go against the trend.

I am fearful that the schools who do not encourge innovation and 21st century learning at least partially will really struggle when businesses screaming for creative innovators start to demand it of all schools. Interesting that the parents of kids here are not more demanding of the schools to embrace innovation and 21st Century Learning now.  I think a part of it is a bit of a smoke screen. I know a lot of schools who say that they have introduced the International Baccalaurette Programme due to its emphasis on globalisation and “inquiry-based learning”. Interesting that today’s South China Morning Post contained a report from parents who were dismayed at the amount of very structured content-based homework that their children were coming home with in preparation for the IB Diploma Assessments. Interesting too that the Regional Conference for the IBO in Beijing was a little light on for this style of presentation, especially directed at the diploma level course.

I really do not see the IB as the answer to ensure that schools become supportive of the use of tools that support innovation, collaboration, communicatoin, creativity etc as shown in this model of support for innovation.

It is cold comfort to note that I am not the only one saying the same thing about Schools putting WAY too much emphasis on exam results. Inserted below is an article from this morning’s education section of the South China Morning Post. Given that the ESF school system is reported as having 43 percent of its students from the local Hong Kong population, it is little wonder that there is a flow on effect to the ESF and other international schools about th fear and mistrust of the unknown digital world and the certainty of an exam system.

The excellent debate raging on the Brittanica Blog and begun by Steve Hargadon of the classroom 2.0 ning is also bringing the issues of trying to make a more relevant education system into focus. For me, a lot of dissenters are using the argument that the kids in front of them do not know how to use the tools appropriately. I couldn’t agree more! Problem is, if their K-12 teachers are not modelling the great eductional uses of the technology, how on earth are they going to know about them, especially in a media and marketing driven world. McDonalds is NOT going to show them Voicethread!

As always, interested in comments.

Images from the MIcrosoft Presentation are from this website.

Whilst I will not be able to attend the Launch event on the Saturday, I will certainly make time for the “Free Culture and Free Society” Lecture at HKU on Friday evening.

I look forward to seeing some Hong Kong Teachers there (or at least the ones back from mid-term break!)

If you really have not read or thought widely on why a teacher needs to be active in the field of Creative Commons, you might like to read this recent post, Our Kids as Criminals from Richardson.

I am inclined to agree with the sentiments and the ideas of the other comments here as I also do lots of notetaking on the PC during conferences but I am surprised that noone has yet turned the tables and asked if you let your kids connect to their social networks during your classroom presentations?
Now there is some food for thought!
Before you start saying that they may not be sharing the content of your presentation, just reflect if you are always sharing the content of the presentation that you are in.

Now, unfortunately, I did not get a reply to my post. I did, however, read the post of another reader Kerry J, whom, I thought, put down some good ideas about how we should all be teaching and learning today. I really love the idea of “to be pointed at a pre-recorded presentation to watch in advance of the day — then come prepared to actively discuss, debate and evaluate the concepts presented”. The only problem is that this seldom happens even though the technology enables it.

Like many things, it is where we need to be heading!

If you want to add a comment or a vote to whether you like the ablity of being able to use laptops during a conference presentation, you might like to access and complete the survey by Jason Zagami, a Queensland Lecturer in Education, available as a Google Spreadsheet here.