I’m not a political animal but I do care about the next generation of children. It’s pretty hard not to when you’ve nearly got a cricket team of grandkids and one son still at school. So when I read Tom Raftery’s rant about the parlous state of ICT in Eire, I winced:
It was soul destroying to see such an enthusiastic educator being held up at every step by the bureaucratic nightmare that is the Department of Education…
The Irish government invested €25m in ICT for schools in 2001/2 and nothing since. Schools are left up to their own devices. Many schools are operating on machines with Windows 98 or worse.
Teachers who want to teach ICT in schools are given no training, no resources, no curriculum and no support. There is currently NO strategy in place around ICT in schools in Ireland.
My brother talks about this. He’s head of ICT at an English school. In the UK, government plans 3-5 years out. Unfortunately, the pace of change in IT is measured in weeks and months. We can do stuff today we couldn’t merely six months ago. In a couple of weeks I’m going to be part of a launch team on something that was done 10 years ago but at a cost of over £2 million. Our cost – nothing.
Schools management systems that a few years ago ran into £000’s are available as a subscribed service for peanuts. Many of the tools schools could benefit from are low cost services that run over browsers. I have huge sympathy for any child who cannot gain access to ICT. If we fail to teach children the right things, then we’re on the slide as a nation. Consultant and author Rowan Manahan has these terse words:
Last time I checked, the only natural resource we have in Ireland is bright young people. The SOLE reason that any corporation would drop a lump of foreign direct investment here – at the arse end of Europe with no land bridge to anywhere, a laughable health system, woefully inadequate communication infrastructures and HIDEOUSLY inadequate transport infrastructure – is because we can populate their cubicle farm with smart, confident, rounded young people. Every indicator I see tells me that we are fast losing our competitive edge in that arena
China and India are training professionals at a rate an order of magnitude above UK numbers. I know David Terrar has specific thoughts on this issue. But I can see it doesn’t take too many years of explosive growth in education and certain G7 countries start coming under pressure.
Living in Spain, I see ICT all around me. This is a nation of gadget nuts. Vodafone, Telefonica, Amena – telco operators whose shops are packed on a weekend. Services coming out of our ears. Broadband as a priority and government subsidised in the poorer regions. This is a country where the water was not potable less than 25 years ago. Massive water issues remain but at least most the country has a safe supply. Spain is a country determined to see its kids well educated and computer literate. It wants to be a world IT powerhouse. It demonstrates that through it’s leadership in XBRL for example.
If the big public money isn’t there and teachers are willing to make the best of what they’ve got, would the Irish government be prepared to fund a pilot project under the innovation banner? Seasoned social computing experts could be contracted to get as many schools as possible up on stuff like Wordpress, SocialText, Moodle e-Learning Centre, Flickr, Meebo – the list goes on of low cost or open source software that might run on some of the older kit Ireland’s schools use. What about Microsoft donating its clapped out XP boxes for the shiny Vista ones it needs? How many is that? I’m sure it’s not that simple but resource diversion combined with OSS might swing the debate. Get those Big 4 bean counters down to help out with the math and build a compelling case. They’re good at telling the rest of us how to cut cost.
Our children are learning about social computing anyway through MySpace or whatever the latest cool site is. It’s much better they be given an opportunity to learn how these tools can enrich their lives and restore the thirst for knowledge.
Technorati Tags: Big Four, education, ireland
