I wait in excitement the day the first classroom in Singapore gets a multitouch screen. And I hope the first classroom will not be those upper-tier schools, but a school in a neighbourhood, in the weakest class, where students will become interested in learning again, and come to school with the daily expectation of being blown away by another powerful demonstration of technology not just to teach, but also to express.
I believe that technology empowers people to express and create, no matter the medium. I think of this interesting thought when schools become the temporary monopoly of high-brow technology in any community, where even ordinary folks would go to schools and interact with the tech. I know this is a bit far-fetched, and considering that interaction with tech – that’s for the library and for the community centres. Nonetheless – when that technology is democratised, when schoolkids and scribble on their own multitouch pad and rich people will be messing around with supercomputers…
With technology empowering the forms of expression with young people, the onus will be upon the teachers to teach and guide – that onus will never have been greater, because of the double-edged character of tech. I expect frequent abuses of the tech, then, teachers might have some master switch of some sort to incapacitate a student’s tech if the student is found to have committed wrongdoings. But I believe that the young kids will come round, and learn to use the tech in beneficial ways… or so I hope.
That means more lessons for teachers on how to use the tech creatively and expressively. Once again, tech is only the means to an end – the end, which is, to impart knowledge in a way that students will want to do so on their own, to find their own contexts and meaning in the knowledge that they have acquired. Some sort of an assessment – in the form of examinations will still be required, to assess the students’ capacity to internalise the knowledge, and maybe more interesting questions, for example, how to test falsifiability of concepts they have learnt (what to look out for if what they learn is wrong and how to confirm rightness/wrongness)…
Learning to learn – I think that’s the real way of learning. And I think that’s where teachers need to be trained as well… Not as pompous know-it-alls, but people with the passion to learn and the passion to teach that attitude – that philosophy…
