Here in Australia, broadband services have only just become affordable, and mobile technologies are steadily being taken up. Both of these technological/infrastructural developments in this country are having an impact on the ways we use Internet technologies here, culturally, in the home, politically, at school.

Also, I fully agree with the analogy you made that suggests the need for a complete turn around in the directions taken by education in the fields of eLearning, and I think that the clear interest at the grass routes in open content, blogs, wikis etc is forcing that very issue. Where as when eLearning was first introduced, it always struck me just how disproportionate the amount being spent was to the amount it was being used. Very early on it should have been very apparent that something was wrong with the direction, but noone was willing to talk about it.

This poor direction comes as no surprise given that educational organisations (in Australia) are typically quite large, publicly funded, bureaucratically overwhelmed, stooped in tradition, and drawing on human resources who are poorly equipped and lacking appropriate motivation and direction to take up new paradigms in teaching and learning. Basically, while technology in some aspects of the market place may move quickly, the time it takes for collectives, cultures and institutions to change to suite is remarkably, but not surprisingly slow by comparison.

Now that the seed money has been spent, much less public funding is available (in Australia) for eLearning, and educational organisations are starting to be pressured into supporting their own 'eLearning' projects. I fear that that seed money was misplaced and that the change seeds have not been adequately planted. I'm concerned that the current generation of managers and directors in our educational organisations have not seen the benefits, do not understand the changes still required, and are certainly not willing to look at the possibility that they are off course and have been since the very get go! They will retract to 'core business' and the continuing investments in the development of staff skills in ICTs will not be made. Organisations will remain with their proprietary operating and management systems… basically schools will remain schools – lock ups with very little connection to the outside world, and hardly ever reflecting real life!

There is still hope. The new wave of free and open source, social software etc, makes the new directions cheaper, and in the hands of the grass routes. Now if we can just find a way to motivate all those boomer teachers to take up the new ways and think less about their retirement…

I fully agree with you. To become really useful in school / university context ICT tools should be ubiquitous. This is actually why I have been interested in the educational use of simple mobile phones and other network devices.

However we must keep it clear in mind that technology is never value free, but reflects our values and dreams. Even ubiquitous technology is always designed by someone with some kind of picture of “our way of living”.

I love to make my trips with trains and bicycle and I am very happy that in many places where I travel there is ubiquitous technical infrastructure for this. We shouldn’t take it granted.

I also agree with you that we need simultaneous small steps (to the right direction development in all different sectors: teachers, parents, pupils, students, school administrators, politicians and technology designers. Both the pedagogy and the technology should be come ubiquitous. Maybe I’ll write another post about this matter.

Do you know this paper?
http://www.educationau.edu.au/papers/horseless_carriages_GW.pdf...
Gerry White describes four stages of ICT evolution and theories of learning.

Very interesting. Two years ago I wrote an article (in Dutch) about the history of e-learning (http://www.te-learning.nl/omzieninverwondering.pdf...). In my opinion the raise of Internet technology and the increasing critique on the current educational system lead to a lot of attention for e-learning. I used Gartner's hype cycle of emering technology to describe this history. In the first fase (overenthusiasm), technology was dominant and there were high expectations about the possibilities of e-learning. In the second fase (disillusionment) we realised that a lot of e-learning was about replacing current ways of learning (instead of improving current pedagogy). Financial issues (ROI) are dominant. In the third phase (gradual improvement) pedagogy will be dominant. E-learning will be used in a more social-constructivistic way. We still have not reached this phase.

It is also good to remember that the “power law”, with human related variables is not a Newton’s Law. With a group of people you can easily violate it.

Alan Kay Quote:

“Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!”

In nature, it is typical that power laws occur when we are in a transitory state from chaos to order. Liquid turning into gas, water freezing and magma turning into a rock: in these events all kinds of power laws occur.

Either we are getting a lot smarter as a complex system or I'm just hallucinating…