The Virtual Classroom Online Education & Learning.

Virtual means it doesn't really exist

In 1995 I was involved with a project to test the feasibility of creating a "Virtual Classroom" or e-school. The basic idea was to send a group of children home with laptops and for a group of teachers to sit in a room and teach these kids remotely. It was an unmitigated failure and so what did the government advisers suggest?.... We should expand this model to other parts of the country.

Pretty soon there were schools in the UK with 300+ kids in an auditorium with laptops being taught by a team of 3 or 4 "switched on teachers". Result another complete failure. The point is that these experiments have already been carried out and so the rationale is, that it may be possible to actually do this, if we tweak it a little here and there.

If we think about this in a more everyday context. Would you prefer a real holiday or a virtual holiday?

Why Would The Government Want To Close Down Schools?

The idea here is quite simple. Costs. Schools are expensive.

If the government can sell of the school buildings. it will save on staff salaries and running costs. In the UK the local councils have been selling of the school playing fields, for many years. This alone is a major contributing factor, to the massive rise in obesity amongst UK school children. It's a natural progression for many politicians to move to the next step of.'If we give all the school children their own laptop. we can send them home to work'. Leaving us free to sell off the school buildings, saving us millions of pounds. When the children fail? We can blame the parents. Brilliant sounds like a plan?.

There have been numerous examples of past failures, to improve business efficiency, and cut down on capital finance, by selling off office buildings, and sending staff home with laptops. Rank Xerox tried to do it in the 1960's. they sent all their staff home with computers and sold off most of their buildings. Within a short time many of their employees began working later in the day and became more and more inefficient.

Eventually Rank Xerox had to buy new buildings, as their employees stated that they needed face time with each other, to make sense of what they were doing. More recently British Telecom BT in the UK, did the same thing but they had the bright idea to create hub buildings, around the outskirts of London, for staff to get together when they needed too. Consequently many staff migrated to these hubs on a semi permanent basis.

This was not the desired outcome. Many staff felt cut-off at home and wanted to meet each other to discuss matters. Also they ended up either working much longer hours, or alternatively did very little work at all. Family life suffered.

We Are Not Machines

People need people not virtual classroom's and robots. Many staff need to know that they go to the office and they work, then they go home and they rest. With home working there is no distinction between work time and home time. It becomes blurred. If adults can't cope with it, why would we think that children could handle online education, not to mention how are the parents going to work if their kids are home all day? There is a problem with our current schooling system. It is not equipping our children for their future. The current system is outmoded and in need of radical changes but the Virtual classroom is not the answer. It can be argued that the most important thing that kids learn in school is how to get along with other people. As we have seen above the social context of the school is ignored at our peril

But We Do Use Tools

The software tools that dominate the world today are of course MICROSOFT and Google.com and these two do not look like they are going away, any time soon. No matter what APPLE or the OPEN SOURCE movement say, MICROSOFT still bestrides the world like a colossus controlling 95% of personal computers. Make sure you child is being instructed using these tools. Online education and the virtual classroom can work. It needs to handled very carefully. Sending children 'home' with a laptop is not going to do it. Not knowing how to use WINDOWS OFFICE & GOOGLE, is almost the modern day equivalent of 17th century illiteracy.

He is right of course, the system is outmoded and in need of an overhaul; completely. Most teachers would agree with this model. These ideas have been around since the 1970's (Stafford Beer) and maybe even earlier (I first heard this in 1984 without the animation of course) but no government has implemented the recommendations? I assume he has put he's argument together like this, so that It is much more accessible and immediate and made it ironically for the iPhone generation to understand.