Ewan MacIntosh, with Learning and Teaching Scotland, dovetailed (A WWW in the WWW) on one of my recent entries (Wikibooks), to describe a project that I have been hearing about for some time. A languages specialist and experienced school teacher, MacIntosh is the architect and Development Officer for the Modern Languages Virtual Environment. This project, apparently, is to be the model for a much larger service for Scottish teachers, Scottish Schools Digital Network, which will provide them with access to a wealth of content, that they can pick and choose, mix and remix, into learning resources and experiences for their students. Also integrated into this tool will be a community element where a variety of communication conduits will allow and even provoke communication and community formation between teachers with similar interests, teaching styles, and topics of teaching.
I was in Scotland this time last year, and was deeply impressed with what I saw in their educators, and especially in their conversations. I’ve commented on this before, that the educators in scotland (and other countries I’ve visited) talk about their profession with a confidence that we, in the U.S., seem to have forgotten. They recognize themselves as the instructional leaders of their classrooms and they act like leaders.
They, as the education experts, behind MacIntosh’s vision, are building something that goes square against the traditional model of instructional support materials, that of corporate designed and produced books, built to satisfy the lowest common denominator of instructional needs, and firmly seated in the education infrastructure.
Perhaps what impressed me the most about my work in Scotland was the realization of what a small country (this isn’t a geography lesson) of well educated effectively connected people can accomplish. What should have our textbook companies worried and working hard to design their own digital content services, is that once built and refined, what Ewan and his team are building can so very easily be replicated.
Look for exciting big changes in the next very few years — in those countries that are looking forward.
My 2p worth.
I think even Ewan would agree that it’s maybe a wee bit misleading to say that Modern Foreign Languages Environment (MFLE) will be *the* model for SSDN. MFLE is one of many projects aimed at bringing best practice to Scottish educationalists. Pilot projects help us find out what works and doesn’t work for our audience. SSDN is a massive intranet project with portal, VLE and communication tools and has been in development for several years now. The first techincal phases have concentrated on rolling out high-speed net access and content servers across the country. Different local authorities and will have control over what elements are available in their versions of the SSDN environment so there’ll be a multiplicity of models but all will make use of the networking, authentication, authorisation and content servces.
We’re tremendously excited by the potential opportunities as it should help even out the current ICT inequalities in Scotland. Ultimately teachers will be able to share their materials with their peers through the portal …you speak of confidence, David, but Scots in general are reticent about contributing in public, far more so Scottish women who make up about three quarters of the teaching profession (disclaimer: I’m a female geek). We’ve seen from previous European education portal projects that Scots usually contribute far less often to shared spaces than our continental European colleagues so there will be human challenges to at least rival the technical ones! There’s still a mountain of work to do re training staff to take advantage of what’s coming but there’s a lot to look forward to.
Now if only the future of our football team could be as bright 🙂