INTERVIEW:
Question 1
What is the most interesting thing about distance training? What are the opportunities for
students who decide to study through the Net?
Answer
One of the things that we have found in British Columbia and in Canada generally is that
students who are remote from educational opportunities have a great advantage by being
able to be connected to the world wide web (WWW) and being able to receive educational
training and other opportunities that way. But we are finding that more and more students
in urban centers and in cities and big towns are also interested in those kinds of
training opportunities, primarily because it allows them to be flexible in terms of their
own education. It allows them the time to take courses when they want to. Many young
children, and older children these days, are working as well as going to school, and
taking their education through the world wide web is one way of being able to create that
kind of flexibility.
Question2
Don't you think that there is something lacking, never seeing other students and the
teachers?
Answer
One of the things that we have found in our experience of working with technology is that
you cannot simply put courses up on the WWW and hope that students will learn effectively
that way, they need interaction with teachers, with experts, with some of their peers. So
we have designed programs and courses in ways that allow that interaction to happen. The
technology is not going to do everything for us. We cannot allow ourselves to think that
if you simply provide this through the technology that people are going to learn. They are
not, they need the social interaction. And in many cases, if you look at a traditional
classroom where learners are working often in isolation, often in a one-way conversation
with the teacher, there is not that much interaction. In many cases, learners who are
working through the technology are getting more social interaction than they would be
otherwise.
Question3
Are you working on some training courses, in particular for young students?
Answer
Yes, one of the things that we are doing is working with parents of young children to
design what we call modules or small pieces of courses that can be put on the WWW and
accessed by children of ages 6, 7 or 8 years old. Obviously for young children one has to
design those educational courses differently and one has assume that there is going to be
an adult or a parent or a teacher that will help to guide them in the use of the
educational material.
Question 4
Do you think that working with these new technologies adds something to learning and
teaching, or is it a way to do the same things in an easier way?
Answer
I think if we try to use the technology to do more of the same only better, then we are
mistaken. That is not what the power of computer technology is about. We have to find ways
to take advantage of computing power. In many cases, one of the advantages is to try to
find new and relevant material at the moment that it is needed in the classroom. That is
something that is not simply reinventing what teachers are already doing, it is different
and more effective. In our experience we have found that young children are really quite
responsive to being able to find new and exciting information on the WWW that their
teachers would have a great deal of difficulty bringing into the classroom day after day.
Teachers simply don't have the time to do that. They don't have the time, necessarily,
even to go out on the WWW and find all of that information. So we have designed materials
and courses that will allow them to gain that access without going through the bother of
having to build it themselves.
Question 5
Do you think that it is easier for children and young students to learn to study through
these new technologies because they already use video games and other things like that
just for fun?
Answer
Children learn the technology really quickly. Parents and teachers are the ones who are
catching up or are trying to catch up. One of the problems that we have seen is that the
children catch on right away, they are able to work with the technology and to work
through the course material very quickly. But the parents and the teachers of the children
feel incompetent because they don't have all of the skills that the children have in the
use of the technology. Sometimes it scares them and sometimes it is used as an excuse for
not embracing the technology and using it within the classroom. That is something that we
have to overcome. One of the ways that we have tried to help overcome this is by having
teachers and students work together on learning new technologies, and often that helps to
break down the barriers that teachers perceive.
Question 6
From your research in working in this direction, what are the things teachers most
frequently want from your training courses?
Answer
Teachers generally want their jobs to be made easier. And in many cases that means they
want resources that are accessible and easy to use. If they happen to be on the WWW, they
want easy navigation, they don't want something that is going to slow down their planning
for teaching within the classroom. They also want courses and materials that are related
to the curriculum that they have to teach. They don't want to have to figure out how to do
that, necessarily. In our work, we have found it fairly clear that teachers don't want to
become designers of course material. They don't want to become textbook writers, nor do
they want to become writers for the WWW, and yet many people who try to implement the WWW
technologies in classrooms are saying: "look at what you can do, you can design all
of this material, you can make all of these things". But the reality is that the
teachers don't have the time to do that. Nor do many of them have the interest. They have
other parts of their lives that they want to get on with; they don't want to spend all of
their time doing that. So I think those are the most important things that we have found:
ease of use and easy access to materials and make sure that it makes my job easier.
Question 7
You are also working on teachers' network. You have a lot of teachers connected on the Net
in Canada.
Answer
Yes, we do. In British Columbia, which is a province of Canada, we have a long history of
connecting teachers to the Internet. Beginning in the 1980s and throughout the last 10
years we have had most of the teachers in British Columbia - close to 35,000 teachers -
connected at one time or another to the Internet. Probably about a third to a half of
those teachers are regular users of the Internet. They use e-mail to communicate regularly
within their schools and districts. They use the WWW to access resources, and increasingly
they want to find materials on the WWW. It has been a long process, not something that has
happened overnight. It has taken quite some time to get to this point. It is something
that has required constant training and retraining, because the WWW is a phenomenon of the
past 5 years, Internet e-mail has been around for 15 or 20 years. A lot of what has
happened is that we have had to go through this retraining process with a number of
teachers, learning the new technologies. For those that are new to the profession, we're
finding that even the schools of education are not teaching the kinds of skills - both
technical and pedagogical skills - that are necessary to work with these kinds of
resources. So it is a constant process that we have been going through in our experience
in connecting teachers. But it has been well worthwhile.
Question 8
Are you also working in self-training? I mean, without teachers' courses, for people who
want to just take courses on their own?
Answer
There are programs that are available. We do offer web-based courses for teachers who want
to do this themselves. But, by and large, we find that most teachers want to engage in a
program which is partly enabled by the technology and partly face-to-face. They really
want that kind of interaction. So we have designed a program which offers a two-week
course in the summer, face-to-face, where all of the teachers come together, and then
throughout the winter they are on-line, receiving course materials, going through
self-directed study, because they know best what skills they need and where they are at.
So we are using a lot of self-evaluation and self-directed approaches. But it is all
enabled through the technology.
Question 9
And particular in self-training, don't you think that it's very important to distinguish
between information on one side and knowledge on the other, because while the Internet can
give us a lot of information, it doesn't always seem to be knowledge.
Answer
Absolutely. The Internet full of information but lot of it is meaningless. And it is only
once you can connect that to your own personal reality that you can create meaning out of
it, and from that and working with others, you can gain knowledge. One of the things we
try to avoid is information overload for teachers. We do that by structuring the
information in ways that will help them to understand it better. And we have a network for
teachers that does just that: it tries to put aside all of the useless information, and
package the information in ways that will help teachers to understand it and use in
classrooms.
Question 10
How do you personalize the content of your courses? In different categories of teachers,
students, age?
Answer
A lot of what we do is based on the idea that you can start with some basic elements that
are common for all learners. For instance, if you want to learn about information
technology, the content is constant, what differs is how the content is presented to the
learner and how the learner works through the material. So we designed different kinds of
web interfaces for different kinds of learners. So if we are aiming at young children, the
interface will be quite simple. It will be very easy to navigate, not very many words,
very graphical in terms of its interface because young children and young adults are very
visually oriented. Many adult learner are still very text oriented, so we will change the
interface and make that very different. But the content will be quite similar from one
group to another.
Question 11
Do you think that with new technologies in the classroom it is easier to stimulate the
learner's curiosity, that it is easier with a computer in a classroom?
Answer
Computers definitely motivate children. They motivate them to find out about a number of
different things. But the problem is that one needs to have meaningful investigation
rather than meaningless investigation. It is very easy for computers to be placed in the
classroom and turned on, turned on to the Internet and nothing meaningful happen. Simply
having Internet access is not going to create a new learning situation. What is critically
important is that there is some direction from the teacher, some guidance and some
assistance that connects this to a learning experience that is meaningful within the
curriculum for children. Without that, their curiosity is wasted in some respects, because
they will not have learned anything through the process.
Question 12
And do you have any courses for children with physical problems or psychological problems?
Answer
We haven't approached that from a distance education point of view in our work. There are
other organizations within Canada which do that. Generally speaking, one of the things
that we do find in terms of the use of technology with children that are having learning
problems, disabilities and other kinds of things, is that it is a positive experience for
them to use the technology, because it gets them away from the tyranny of the classroom.
Often the tyranny of the classroom involves being compared to other children who are doing
better than they are. So rather than being an isolating experience, the technology really
helps them to grow and to learn and to understand things that they didn't before.
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