Lord Puttnam of Queensgate will be opening the JISC conference 2008 in Birmingham with a keynote speech. Follow the highlights live here from 10.15am.
“It is a genuine privilege to be invited to speak here. It’s only a year ago that I was formally installed as chancellor of the Open University and I still feel a huge sens eof pride of being associated with the institution. In the past 50 years I’ve had distinct areas of interest but there has always been a distinct thread – the acquisition of knowledge and experience. Everything I have learnt has only reinforced my view that the future really is a race between education and catastrophe. I decided to throw my lot in with education. Previously I was at Sunderland which rejoiced in technology.
This morning I’d like to reflect on the impact of technology. The OU has stayed ahead of the curve. We pioneered e-learning yet despite this pioneering work can any of us really claim to be doing everything possible to transform standards of achievement? At the best, nothing like enough. Students today are facing a future more complex than anything we can prepare them for.
When I joined the film industry in 1971, 72 the vast majority of the workforce were permanent and only 10% were freelance. Now, that percentage has reversed in the film industry and it’s not dissimilar to what we are seeing in the workforce as a whole. The idea of a permanent job could be seen as a rarity and that’s the world into which we’re educating a new generation.
It is no good trying to solve problems with the same thinking that caused them. Yet much of the form and content of formal education remains unchanged – more in tune with the immediate past than the immediate future. We’re under-achieving in terms of our imagination about what the future of education might look like.
We’re now seeing people engaging in learning in vast online networks and taking on the role of teacher and responsibility for their learning… In our day teachers had to take on the role as the font of all knowledge. Now, teachers will encourage children to help the others solve problems. It’s a different dynamic.
What I believe we’ll see is an ever greater layering and depth to online research. The greater the depth we see the greater the reliance we’ll place on the information we find – breadth, depth, quality are all opened up, along with new forms of peer review. I believe that sites like Wikipedia will open up to new levels of quality and reliability.
I found myself at the end of last year getting information, printing it off and propping it up on my computer. I recalled that I had seen people using more than one screen. I now have two screens and it’s transformed my life. The subtext is that we’ve barely even begun to explore the potential of these technologies.
There are huge opportunities and challenges. It is often easier to have the vision than the stamina to fight against the institutional forces of inertia you come up against.
Example of House of Lords not having visual aids such as Powerpoint to help explain concepts during debates. I’ve been arguing to have some allowed into the Houses of Parliament. Hansard also considered utterly revolutionary a few years ago.
The UK has always been a highly creative and innovative nation. Too often we leave it to others to market our products overseas and never really understood the conditions under which it flourishes. While this government has at least attempted to address this, we are still behind nations such as Korea and Singapore. There is a relationship between infrastructure and innovation there that we have neglected. If we in the UK fail to achieve the kinds of transformation discussed here then we will relegate the concept of state-funded education to a secondary status and result in a tilting of the balance away from education and towards catastrophe.
Every hope we have for the future lies in education. And it’s also what the future of the planet depends on. It is only by building on the possibilities of technology can we assume that it is education and not catastrophe that triumphs.
0 Responses to “JISC conference keynote speech: Lord Puttnam”