Research Question Three

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Research Question Three

'What do you see as the key challenges related to the adoption of emerging technology across Australasian post-compulsory education during the next five years?

STATUS: Work on this question was completed at the July 11 meeting in Melbourne. We are no longer soliciting entries on this question.

• Protectionism. Security concerns too often go too far. Both policies and firewalls are severely limiting access to and hampering the utility of the Internet, the use of digital materials, and many benefits of social networking. Adding to this, the mind sets of central network planners and administrators is often at odd with the ever more user-centric nature of Internet applications and tools, limiting innovation.

• Teacher Capability. The technical skills of teachers are to often out of step with those of their students. Related issues are the capabilities of the staff supporting teachers, which suffer from the same problem, limiting the options available for training.

• Assessment. In a sort of chicken/egg syndrome, there is a persistent need to have solid data on the efficacy of new tools and approaches that often limits the experimentation required to gain those data in the first place.

• Poor Quality Broadband. Public policy and reliance on telcos for infrastructure and broadband services has failed to ensure sufficient resources to support the level of quality broadband penetration needed to remain competitive. Metering adds to this by discouraging network use: the more useful the network is, the more it is used, and the more expensive it becomes -- a cyclical process that ultimately discourages greater utility of the network because it adds unmanageable costs.

The items below are the raw data for this research question. They were generated by the Advisory Board and then ranked at the meeting in Melbourne July, 11, 2008. A visual record was captured. -- See the results.

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• Protectionism - Firewalls, copyrights, permissions, closed culture

• Tech over-saturation - Knowing when enough is enough, or when less is better than more.

• Time poor perception/reality' - How do we get people to think differently or act more efficiently to use technologies. How can we free up teacher time to facilitate the uptake.

• New technologies require more work from staff and students - time constraints to explore, innovate, adapt and adopt

• Competing demands and time poor academics

• Over-investment in administrative systems and corresponding under-investment in student learning tools - this is a systems-based expression of control and conservative response to perceive scarcity. This applies to development of tools for staff as well as the lack of development of tools/skills for students.

• Oppressive centralized control - constrains experimentation and innovation. Need to move from slowly evolving based on risk avoidance, to saltatory change based on opportunity capitalization (any colour as long as its black) This is a policy response to the first challenge. (How do you move the institution from considering itself as a castle with a moat and the draw bridge up to being the public commons.)

• Clash between institutional IT policies and emergent and rapid innovation

• Performance and support are not aligned with goals of cultural change and innovation - promotion, recognition, reward, are not awarded for open, innovative, student centered, creative teaching, learning and research.

• Security and access issues - systems staff often control access and this impacts on the use of available tools within the institution

• Attitude - teachers, managers, IT departments etc - protectionism/ conservatism

• Courage to innovate and take risks - time and space to try out new technologies

• ability to assess activities using new technologies - disconnect between learning activities and assessment tasks

• equity & access - how do institutions ensure that equity for the students is actually there! not the same degree of campus based life as perhaps in nth america. students needing to work (the change of who is a student), multiple campuses, presumption of pre knowledge and skills

• Ageing infrastructure and bandwidth unable to cope with any sort of ubiquitous computing

• Regional/ remote infrastructure (or lack of) and accessibility - bandwidth, hardware, internet access etc

• Volume Change' - to supply affordable quality connectivity for a high percentage of the populas in order to access the available technologies.

• 60% of Australian households are not connected - ABS 2007

• Professional development both for teachers and also for IT staff who need to maintain these systems without falling back to blocking everything because they know no other way

• Staff/Teacher Capability' - How to get teachers to see the value of the technology and how to educate them into using technological in a pedagogically sound way. How do they understand that technology can create a new pedagogy rather than adding to an old pedagogy. Reduce the gap between what students have available to them and how they learn with the pedagogies teachers want to use or have expertise and experience with. Students too?

• Risk Management' - Technology is shifting the locus of control from the teacher to the students which changes the nature of the relationship between the learner and the institution and our response to this is to ban not educate or be open. Concern around teacher performance in non expertise areas, and concern around operating in an environment that is yet to be challenged legally.

• Assessment - how do you identify individual student work? evidence of efficacy? align with the outcomes for a course for both assessment and graduate attributes.

• Cultural and linguistic diversity - our ability to embrace, and cater for our multicultural population

• Government underfunding of public education

• Policy lag 1. state departments of education running fliters and blocking sites on ground of child protection amongst other things. 2. bandwidth cost is unable to be managed -> possibly can be solved by packet shaping and negotiation of new ISP agreements