In addition to a low tech working environment I have also been concerned about the low tech school environment experienced by my daughter recently. At last she was given a project task to do. She and 2 others chose to find out the history of the Beatles. Their immediate reaction, encouraged by the teacher, was to get some books on the topic. Unfortunately the school library is not very big and doubles as the community library. So they needed to order relevant books through the inter-library service which would take 2 or 3 weeks.
Never mind. The Internet must be a rich source of information. So last Friday my daughter and one of her team mates spent an hour and a half trying to access a school computer. They trailed from one machine to another before finally deciding that perhaps it would be better to start a joint document about their project. But they didn't manage to find a single machine which could open the word processing program. I am flabbergasted that in this day and age in a country which regularly tops the IT use league, that this should happen.
The only reason that the group got anything done in the end was because I had gone into my own school library and borrowed three books for them to work from in the meantime. I also talked with a colleague who is the author of two books about the history of rock music in Denmark whether he would be willing to talk with the project group and of course he was. However my daughter is not used to thinking about research methods and thought this sounded a bit whacky as a source of information. Finally I posted on two Danish blogs asking if there was anybody out there who was a screaming Beatles fan and why they did it! No response so far.
I may have interfered far too much already. However I think that this is an unacceptable situation and I have contacted 4 key people in the school to ask them what is going to be done. The answer I got is that they replace machines as the budget allows and that they will soon have wireless internet access in the building. This doesn't address the book issue, nor the issue of students being able to produce electronic documents with relative ease. There is also an issue about research methods which is not being addressed but I didn't even mention that. One step at a time.
I think that it is deeply ironic that I am worrying about the fine detail of a Web 2.0 training course for teachers while my own daughter is not being offered even the basics in the standard state school.
