Key Papers

Outcomes Reporting and Accountable Schooling

MODERN TIMES AND AUSTRALIAN CURRICULUM

Keynote address by Ken Boston, Director-General of Education and Training, Managing Director of TAFE, New South Wales, to the Curriculum Corporation 6^th National Conference, 6-7 May, 1999.

In the first decade of this century, reformers with new ideas transformed public education in Australia. As we approach the new century, the same vision and commitment is needed, argues Ken Boston, if the integration of school curriculum and digital technology is to work in our favour.

At the start of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes, the prophet Solomon exclaims:

Our eyes can never see enough to be satisfied; our ears can never hear enough. What has happened before will happen again. What has been done before will be done again. There is nothing new in the whole world.

In Seattle not long ago, I heard the prophet Bill Gates proclaim a new and different faith: the global digital nervous system offering us the telos of the nations of the earth merged in a universal republic of cyberspace.

Is, as Solomon might have us believe, the current engagement between education and technology simply a dissonant cascade of systems, software and products which in qualitative terms will take us nowhere?

Or does it offer Australian education the hope of an alternative approach which will profoundly transform teaching and learning?

The digital challenge
In the Australian school education sector, no single State or Territory has by itself the cultural, technical or economic power to trade in the global environment of digital technology, and at the same time maintain an Australian identity to its educational products (including curriculum knowledge and delivery).

Even my casual conversations with the Australian representatives of publishing multinationals confirm that the upfront costs of digital and online content design and delivery make global-I repeat, not state, not national but global-economies of scale inevitable. In the words of one Australian-based editor, the Australian contribution to the global international digital nervous system presently is to substitute wombats for chipmunks.

Now, we don't seem able to get our act together on all this. We are thrashing about, obsessed with the complexities and the scope of the opportunities, but not seeing our way through strategically or structurally. Confusion, uncertainty and obfuscation characterise our use of the language of digital and online futures.

Despite the much-heralded convergence of technologies, it is still necessary to distinguish the devices and the processes involved in digital and online curriculum and learning, flexible delivery, hypertext and virtual learning. The OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation 1998 background paper, New Developments in Educational Software and Multimedia, puts the dilemma clearly:

The explosion in the number of different delivery platforms now available raises the problem of which one to choose. Perhaps the answer lies in the functionality and applications of these different delivery platforms, from digital TV and multi-media PCs to set-top boxes, network terminals, hand-held devices etc. The pressure is there to use them all and integrate several for educational purposes.

Like a child at Christmas, which present to open first?

It is alarming that questions-which have generated six major reports sponsored by the Commonwealth Government since 1995; which are about a technology which will be a cornerstone of global education delivery within not the next decade, but the next eighteen months; about which most of the Australian States and Territories have produced at least one additional major report; and which preoccupy public and private providers and consume billions of dollars of public and private funds-are so far from being answered, so far from closure.

The provision of quality educational content on the Internet and in other forms of multimedia is advancing steadily, but not to the extent of the potential made possible by the increasing power of the technologies themselves.

The OECD paper goes on to say that:

The OECD member countries and the European Union have made available considerable funds for the purpose of wiring up nations, including the provision of IT equipment and Internet connections in libraries, schools, colleges and universities. Far too little attention has been given to what learners and teachers would actually want to do with this technology and the kind of content the digital pipes would be filled with.

Australian content in educational software and through the Internet is still relatively sparse, and small beer on the international stage.

The utopian possibilities presented by digital technology, and particularly by the Internet for the processes of teaching and learning, are easy to grasp. Indeed it is this aspect of digital delivery which most promises to transform the traditional conventions of school curriculum.

Many teachers and other educators would know the work of Seymour Papert and Sherry Turkle of the MIT Media Lab which explores the possibilities of digitally based learning for fostering modes of learning and styles of cognition often discouraged by conventional school teaching.

In Australia, the work of Illana Snyder, Bill Green, Chris Bigum and others on the use of online and CD-ROM technology in literacy teaching and learning complements and advances this American work. Individual Australian schools are pioneering classroom-based applications of digital teaching and learning, which exemplify and take forward the educational possibilities signalled by researchers.

Amongst the cyber-educationists' list of claims are that:

multi-media accommodates multiple intelligences;
children could be taught to think using procedural logic, like a computer;
through simulation in virtual environments the theatrical possibilities open to human identity will be endless and that children will inhabit their own electronic worlds.

Others warn of (or promise):

the demise or transformation of the book and the library;
or the great threat of intense commercial pressures on children's willingness to delay gratification in order to learn.

Some, such as Seymour Papert, assert that learning and pleasure are becoming so identified that the discipline of school will be redundant.

To turn to the past
It seems to me that Australia in this decade, characterised as it is by the contrast between the rate of accretion of online capability, the even slower development of national content, and the cyber-utopian visions or hallucinations presented to us by both the experts and the hucksters, resembles Australia in the 1880s and 1890s.

The historian Helen Irving's recent book To Constitute a Nation documents the popularity of Utopian fiction at the time, here and abroad:

… every social reformer who fancied him or herself as a theorist seemed to want to write a Utopia. And many people, in turn, wanted to read them. Indeed, the last two decades of the nineteenth century formed the great era of Utopian writing, with the combined visionary energies of the Enlightenment, socialism, liberalism and technological advances producing an extraordinary social optimism. Writing Utopias was a type of adjunct to the emerging activity of political blueprint writing and forward planning, which were to become central features of politics in the following century.

This period of optimism and imagination expressed itself in the innovative social legislation which distinguished Australia at the turn of the century and seeded the 'practical arrangements' of Federation, the creation of the nation. It also nourished the debate and promoted extraordinarily intense discourse about public education, and fostered the circulation of new educational ideas and visions.

Both New South Wales and Victoria turned their education systems upside down in the first decade of the new century-with a view towards creating a 'national' system and a new Australian citizen. Reformist administrators such as Alfred Williams in South Australia, J D Storey in Queensland and Cyril Jackson in Western Australia led equivalent transformations in the government school systems in their States.

For Peter Board, the Director of Education in New South Wales from 1904 to 1922, the purpose of this education system was to create 'the soul of the nation' and to allow this Australian citizen to enter into the global order. In Board's view:

… the sum total of results produced by all teachers on all children is that which determines the character, the outlook, the tastes, the spiritual standards of the community and the nation.

Figures such as Peter Board and Frank Tate, the Director of Education in Victoria, absorbed educational innovation on the basis of their travels in Great Britain, the United States and Europe and were, as well as being excellent public servants, public intellectuals of a sort.

In 1923, at the second imperial conference on education in London, Frank Tate speculated on the role of technology in education in a paper titled The Cinematograph as a Factor in Education. He warned:

…that as British folk they ought to view with very great concern indeed the fact that millions of people throughout the Empire, who attended picture shows, were daily watching programmes which were prepared in America. The cinematograph, by reason of the fact that it was such a potent instrument for conveying instruction in an easy and fascinating way, might be made the means of the most insidious propaganda.

Both Board and Tate were Australian state public servants, but driven by national and global outlooks which were still, in the 1920s, filtered through a British imperial perspective. Tate's ambivalent fascination with the new educational technology presages some current themes in Australian discussions about children and cyberculture.

Anticipating contemporary debates about Australian content in multimedia, Tate spoke in a context where the Australian film industry, which had led the world at the beginning of the century, was virtually defunct, laid low by the triumph of the American studios, where it would remain until its revival in the 1970s.

Despite his doubts about the ubiquity of American culture, the teacher in Tate admitted to the imperial conference that:

… a use could be made of the cinema in education for giving a great deal of desirable information, in a very popular way, and it might be regarded as a kind of educational recreation. … He thought they would admit that a good many children in less favourable places than Australia might perhaps have some difficulty in connecting with a curly line on a painted canvas the idea of a river. If, however, they had the opportunity of seeing the development of the river, from the first little trickling stream right down to the stage at which it begins to pass through little towns and half a hundred bridges to the broad estuary frequented by sea going ships, they got very valuable instruction.

Tate's lesson and reflection on the use of film to teach geography resembles modern discussions on the educational uses of the Internet and CD-ROM.

In New South Wales and Victoria, Board and Tate translated the heady ideas from the turn-of-the century global ethers into public educational provision to the everlasting benefit of this nation: child-centred primary curriculum, free public secondary schools, technical and further education, and the use of modern technologies in teaching.

Back to the future
The big question to me is whether we might anticipate, in 1999, that the late twentieth century reinvention of utopian fantasy will, in its turn, conjure up a new form of nation, citizen and accompanying curriculum practice founded on a national digital curriculum for a new century?

In a 1997 article ('2007: How different will it be?', EQ Australia Summer 1997), I speculated whether a utopian or dystopian future would best describe future schools. I enumerated the well known virtues of the Internet for teaching and learning: the currency and potential infinity of Internet-delivered information, the pleasure and potential universality of its access.

I cautioned that the revolution in learning promised by the Internet would have a long lead time; that we faced a massive job in training and development; that there is a world of difference between the technology being available to all and being able or wanting to use it for productive ends; that it is not simply a matter of money but also of motivation, and that the Internet at most would complement rather than replace the moral and intellectual authority of the teacher.

This remains my general position.

But since then the impact of the Internet on many young people's recreational and private lives has advanced by leaps and bounds. Those of you familiar with the domestic habits, rather than the school behaviour, of young people with home computers will recognise Margaret Wertheim's interpersonal utopia in The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace.

She notes that:

… the very essence of cyberspace is relational: it is a set of relationships between hardware nodes on the one hand, and on the other hand between software entities such as websites and Telenet sites … cyberspace can serve as a metaphor for community, because human communities also are bound together by networks of relationships; the kinship networks of our families, the social networks of our friends, and the professional networks of our work associates.

In a similar vein, in the Sydney Daily Telegraph of 28 April, education columnist, Maralyn Parker, wrote that:

… any house that has the rousing mix of teenagers and a connection to the Internet is surely experiencing fundamental changes … ICQ (I seek you) is the way teenagers have found to communicate with each other, but also with just about anyone else who is online at the same time.

Young people are busily prefiguring Margaret Wertheim's Utopia now, but not at school, at home. Schools need to connect with this phenomenon, and enlarge it so that it enhances the social and public spaces available for young people's expression.

Official and bureaucratic versions of educational cyber-utopia are becoming more work-a-day and familiar. Conventionally, they assume a stable national entity called Australia, albeit cris-crossed by stimulating global flows of knowledge and capital.

Visions reproduced in recent Commonwealth Government reports project a convenient, ultra-modern and equitable world where Australians live more comfortably and fully than they do now, everyone is included and trade in the global economy booms.

The recent report Towards an Australian Strategy for the Information Economy cautiously looks forward to a prosaic near future, an Australia where:

The processes for work, commerce, learning, education and training, social interaction and government are being transformed by communication and information technologies; in which all Australians are able to take part in the global information economy.

A subgenre of this cyber-utopian discourse promises the transformation of learning in schools.

The reforms in public education led by Frank Tate, Peter Board and others at the turn of this century were nourished by the energy of utopian thinking, the optimism of a new nation and a new century, a heady mixture of ideas drawn from Herbart, F W Parker, Dewey, S S Laurie and Froebel and from their own first-hand observation of schools in Europe, Britain, and the United States.

It is within our reach to ensure that the confluence of the new thinking about teaching and learning made possible by digital technologies, innovative experiments across the nation by teachers and schools, and the strong support of industry and governments will enable digital teaching and learning to be harnessed to reform Australian education so that it responds to the needs of our time and continent.

Nuts and bolts
Are we now, like the educators of the 1890s and first decades of the 1900s, ready to tackle the nuts and bolts of blending curriculum and technology, buoyed by our own utopian movement, made realistic in our expectations by the dour processes of policy deliberation, and rendered practical in our educational outlooks by the advice of the cyber-educationalists?

Of course we are. But let's get rid of the clutter.

State reports to the 1999 Curriculum Corporation conference, posted on the Internet, display a nationally mixed digital curriculum screen. All States and Territories are preoccupied by achieving some sort of consistency in their information technology platforms; with getting hardware and software into the hands of teachers; and with getting them trained and confident in the use of the technology. To varying degrees, they are also attempting to achieve consistency and integration of IT platforms on a whole-of-government basis.

This is critical foundation work, but what is actually conveyed educationally through the technology is a bit ragged. Audiences are poorly thought through, and educational functions are loosely conceived.

With the notable and welcome exception of the Discovering Democracy materials, there has been nothing resembling the nation-building textbooks and readers issued by departments under the administrations of Wilkins in New South Wales and later Board and Tate at the start of this century.

In contrast to the thrall in which many school children are held by the extremely powerful, homogenised and globally circulated commercial games technology, they barely notice the well meaning patter of the relatively few CD-ROMs and Australian educational websites.

The fascinating public debate on what constitutes an Australian television program-which followed from the 1998 High Court decision that Australia's international agreements must take precedence over considerations of Australian content-poses urgent challenges for the Australian curriculum community.

Several major multinational publishers with Australian operations now regard Australian content in their educational multimedia products as being solely a K-2 issue. Beyond that age, their consumers are regarded as belonging to a global childrens' culture.

Eighty years ago, Frank Tate and Peter Board would have been disappointed; had they lived now, in our context, as visionary educators they would have been exhilarated by the potential if not by our own current performance.

During 1999, the States, Territories and the Commonwealth have two opportunities to get it right, and to focus information technology on our national educational goals. The first is already underway.

The Ministers of education and training collectively, through their Ministerial councils, are considering a national educational action plan in response to the Commonwealth Government report, Towards an Australian Strategy for the Information Economy.

This must do much more than rebadge what is already happening at a state and territory level. It needs to reconfigure all the action at national level, so that it coherently provides goals to support the achievement of learning across the curriculum.

Second, and as significant for Australian schools, is the recent decision by the Conference of Education System Chief Executive Officers (CESCEO) to conduct a wide ranging consultation and to prepare a paper on the development and sharing of educational materials in the EdNA environment. This decision acknowledges the need to identify the scope for improving access to high quality education materials, and for reducing the cost of material production in an online multimedia environment. It envisages the possibility of EdNA online as a clearing house or market place for sharing or co-developing national content.

Some of you will know the paper, Flexible Learning for the Information Economy: A Framework for National Collaboration in Vocational Education and Training, a draft prepared by the EdNA VET advisory group for the Australian National Training Authority.

This paper describes three preconditions for national collaboration on digital delivery to take place in the VET sector. These are equally applicable to schools:

a shared national vision which complements but does not compete with the outlook of state systems;
a formal commitment by all States to the principle of national collaboration in agreed areas; and
a robust national network of committed and talented people in the schools sector.

Let me nail my colours to the mast: we now need a strategy for sharing curriculum materials and delivery by means of a national grid, based on a partnership between the Commonwealth, States and Territories to provide a national and globally competitive digital curriculum platform for all Australian schools.

This is as important to us nationally as was child-centred primary curriculum and free public secondary schools, almost ninety years ago-radical reforms then, but fundamental to education and society, and to the foundation of what our nation has become. It will take collective political will of the highest order, and the foresight and national patriotism of Parkes, Deakin, Barton, Braddon, Kingston, Griffith and Forrest.

The bench mark of a prophet is whether their foresight becomes history. When it comes to a choice between the Old Testament prophet and the new, I prefer the salvation offered by the latter.